Essay Prewriting

Final "Exam" Essay Prewriting

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PLEASE NOTE: This is not asking you for a rough draft!  I am not asking for a rough draft at all with this final "exam" essay!  This is simply a PREWRITE!!!!  That means a brainstorm, cluster, freewrite, Venn diagram, outline...whatever planning on paper that helps you BEFORE you start writing an actual paper with paragraphs and developed ideas.  That said, though, your prewriting should display concern and thought, representing a real effort to plan your paper's content ahead of time.  Consult AWR again if you need to for how to do various types of prewriting!

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Your final essay for the semester is a reaction to the essay "Guys vs. Men" by Dave Barry.  Using that essay, do another bit of character analysis of Gatsby, Tom, Nick, and/or other characters of The Great Gatsby in view of the assertions of the essay.  In addition to characters from the novel, you should also discuss Fitzgerald himself and evaluate him the same way you do his characters...is Fitzgerald a man or a guy?  

You could organize this paper several ways: perhaps you wish to discuss certain male characters one by one in order, comparing them to ideas in the textbook essay.  Perhaps you wish to take the sections of the essay "Guys Like Neat Stuff," etc one by one and stack certain characters of your choice up against those sections.  Maybe you have other ideas of how to organize your discussion.  Whatever you choose, make sure you have a consistent, coherent, flowing pattern of organization, and comment on characters of The Great Gatsby as well as its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in comparison to that reading.  Which characters are guys?  Which are men?  Are they both?  What do you personally think of real life people such as this, as well as these fictional characters?  How does Fitzgerald himself fit into this analysis?  

Obviously Tom, Gatsby, and Nick are prime candidates for discussion, but don't forget other characters, too...George Wilson, Meyer Wolfsheim, Dan Cody (even though you never really see him), Michaelis, Gatsby's father, Owl-Eyes, Klipspringer...minor characters can be included as well!

Take the discussion where you will, so long as you organize things in a flowing way, quote from the source essay, quote from the novel, AND have an overall thesis statement that your paper strives to prove/illustrate/discuss throughout.  Yes, in some ways this is a little similar to your "in class" essay as well as the stuff you wrote about the codes of males and females, but there you were tackling whether or not characters were admirable...here you are synthesizing your response to the last textbook reading and its humorous content with character analysis from the novel, as well as its author.  

The overall length of this paper when you write it should be about five pages, so plot out your content accordingly.

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