Paper instructions:

Summary-Reaction Essay: You will find a scholarly journal article regarding one of the works from the unit and complete a summary-reaction essay on this article. Write a complete summary of the article and us the author’s ideas in your reaction. You will want textual evidence from both the article and the work you chose to write on to prove whether or not you agree or disagree with the article. This should be a minimum of 6 well thought out and expanded paragraphs.

A few of you have e-mailed asking for more specific guidelines with regard to the three essays for this course. My tendency when I create assignments is to be as open and general as possible to allow you all the freedom to pursue whatever strikes you as important or interesting about a text. But perhaps in my effort to give you freedom, I didn’t give you enough information about my expectations. I hope I’ll clear up any questions below.

you will have a total of three papers to write this semester. Two of them are short, three page essays, and one is a longer, research paper, five to six pages. Each paper will undergo a two-step writing process. While the due dates for these papers are fixed (check the course calendar to remind yourself of these), the order in which you write them is not. You will write one paper on the short story, one on poetry, and one on the play Hamlet. One of these papers must be a research paper, and the other two will be shorter reaction/reflection papers. You may choose to do you research paper on poetry and do the shorter papers on the short story and Hamlet. (If you would prefer to get the research paper “out of the way,” for example, you could write it on the short story or poetry.) It is completely up to you to decide which of these genres (drama, poetry, short story) you would like to explore further for your research paper.

The two shorter essays should be approximately three pages in length. Please do not go too far under three pages or too far over three pages. Narrow (or broaden) your topic well enough to fit into this amount of space. Writing five pages will not earn you brownie points! You should approach these two short essays in the same way you would a journal entry. Indeed, you may even use a journal entry as a starting point for this. What I am looking for here is your connections with the text or texts. I want your response as a reader. Look for what intrigues you about a story, poem, character, setting, etc, and then write about it. You can look at symbolism, foreshadowing, historical importance, character development. You can use a pairing that is already in place (based on the Learning Modules I have created) or look at texts across modules, making your own pairing and writing a compare/contrast type of essay. Because this paper is relatively short, I do not expect any outside sources to be used for it, but if you would like to, you certainly may. Do not hesitate, however, to quote from the source text (short story, poem, or Hamlet) to support your reading. This will only strengthen your essay.

When it comes to the research essay, I’d like you to have the same process explained above as a starting point–find an element in the text that piques your interest–and then do some investigating. The research essay should be five to six pages in length and should incorporate two to three outside sources (in addition to the source text or texts). The best place to begin is with the library. You can go to your campus and get help from a librarian in person, or you can do this all virtually from your home (in your pajamas or bathing suit, poolside, if you wish!). I have linked to the library’s homepage in the Web Links tab , and it’s extremely user-friendly, so get searching! What I do not want you all to do is Google your short story/poem/Hamlet and then use whatever pops up as results for your essay. Some of what you’ll find will be absolutely fine, but much of it will be essays for you to purchase (which equals plagiarism), Wikipedia entries (not appropriate for college research papers, at least in my book), and random musings of people with unknown credentials. It’s much much better to start with the library because you know that the resources you find there will have been scrutinized. If you are unsure about the “validity” of your research/sources, please just ask me! It’s much easier to ask at the beginning of your research project than to be disappointed with a grade at the end.

If you are unsure what constitutes plagiarism, I have linked to Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) and their pages on the topic. Please skim through them to familiarize yourself with plagiarism and correctly citing sources.

*This paper is a research paper about Hamlet, the first two short story essays were already completed*