The Things They Carried

Assignment 2: Second Analytical Essay on Short Fiction

By Tuesday, February 21, 2017, submit your second analytical essay on short fiction to the W5 Assignment 2 Dropbox as a Microsoft Word file.

This week you will revise your Week 4 essay by incorporating ideas and arguments from the outside source you located for your W5: Assignment 1 discussion.

Retrieve the essay you submitted to W4: Assignment 2 along with the feedback that you received from your instructor. The next step is to revisit the short story and gather any passages from it that will add to your essay (unless your Week 4 essay already includes sufficient excerpts from the short story to substantiate your argument).

Open a new Word document and copy and paste only the introduction of the Week 4 essay into it. You may use this APA-formatted template. Review any feedback that you received about the introduction. Decide whether to revise the introduction based on the feedback from your instructor and/or new ideas you have had since you first wrote it. Then consider if the introduction will be strengthened by adding material from the source you found in the library or from the short story, such as quotes, paraphrase, and/or summary. Quoted material should not exceed 25% of the essay. Make any changes that you wish.

After that, or if you do not wish to revise the introduction, copy and paste the next paragraph to your new document and review it the same way you did the introduction. Do this with all paragraphs in the paper through the conclusion. As you work through this process, substantiate and reinforce (when necessary and appropriate) your argument at key junctures by including quotes, paraphrase, and summary, sandwiching this source material between signal phrases. You also have this Research Guide with links to useful information for fine tuning your paper.

Once you have copied, pasted, and revised all the essay’s paragraphs, use the spell-check tool in Microsoft Word to identify any misspellings. Make sure you have applied APA rules of style to source citations as well as the overall formatting of your essay. Include a title page and a References page? Use this APA Citation Helper as a convenient reference for properly citing resources.

This handout will help guide you with the details of formatting your essay using APA style. Read through the paper again to fine tune the flow and look for typos and glitches that spell check might have missed. Name your essay Lastname_FirstInitial_ENG1300_W5A2 and submit it to the W5 Assignment 2 Dropbox.