• Title: Use the title to signal both the topic and your unique take on it. One way to do this is with a “Title: Subtitle” structure, where the subtitle defines the topic, whereas the title signals your particular take on that topic.
• Introduction: Use the the introduction to accomplish three vital tasks:
  • Orient the reader to your topic. Is the topic something the reader has heard of, so you only need to remind us about it? Or is the topic something abstruse, so you need to start by teaching us about it?
  • Voice a preliminary understanding of the topic. Often this will be an understanding drawn from class discussion or from the HW responses of your peers.
  • Assert your thesis claim as complicating or even overturning that preliminary understanding. What have you figured out from looking closely at the text in preparing to write this essay? What will this essay argue?
• Early Body ¶s: Use the first one or even two body ¶s to flesh out the preliminary understanding, thus making sure your reader is “up to speed.” Use quotation and paraphrase of key passages to illustrate the logic of that initial understanding of the topic.
• Later Body ¶s: Right at the start of the second or third body ¶, orchestrate a “turn” in our understanding of the topic. This turn might be sharp, or it might be subtle. It might be provoked by a recalcitrant piece of evidence. Or it might require a shift in perspective—from male to female, or from physical to spiritual. It might even be an insight from someone else’s HW post. Follow up on this turn with quotation and paraphrase as evidence for this new way of seeing the text.
• Conclusion: What have you accomplished? Beyond merely restating your thesis claim, what are the larger implications of your analysis? How does it change our understanding of the author or of the society that produced this work of art?

Sources allowed and not allowed: The purpose of this essay is to measure your skills as a reader and NOT as a researcher. Don’t turn to Google, Wikipedia or Chat-GPT for insight. Feel free to draw on class notes, HW posts, and scholars I assigned as reading. In the end, though, this is the sort of essay in which the real answers turn out to be hidden in the details of the primary source: read it, quote it, ponder it—and turn it into evidence.

Source citation: Use MLA style for source citation. This means parenthetical citations to signal the use of ideas or information and NOT just for citing quotations. Keep the parenthetic citation short: just a last name and page or line reference (in cases where the author is unknown, like Gilgamesh, give the title rather than the author, followed by a page or line ref). Then, in a list of Works Cited at the essay’s end, provide a list of the sources your cited, alphabetized by author last name—or title in the case of Gilgamesh.

I’d like to get a sense of your analytical process in drafting an essay using your written HW—as well as that of your peers—as a starting point. On a page following the list of Works Cited, paste in your original HW as well as any posts by peers that you referenced in the essay or which influenced your thinking.