Significant World Writers
Writing Assignments

"The freak in modern fiction is usually disturbing to us because he
keeps us from forgetting that we share in his state."
Flannery O'Connor's "The Teaching of Literature" (March, 1963)

path 2 groups / composition guidelines / short essay / term paper

General Composition Guidelines

• deliver a structured argument: these assignments will not resemble personal journal entries, blog-style writing, or stream-of-consciousness reflections. Essays should be tightly organized, with main points logically ordered. The whole should be framed by a creative, short introduction and an engaging conclusion (do not wrap up by summarizing your main points).
• evince creativity: writing within the humanities is all about effective, persuasive argumentation, and not at all about giving the instructor the easiest, most uncomplicated answer.
• pursue a narrowly argued thesis: your essays should move in a very specific direction. Do not attempt to touch on all tangentially related ideas.
• provide adequate evidence: use your own ideas, textual references (with MLA-style page citations), and--only when prompted--properly cited, relevant material from secondary sources. Whether I happen to agree with your thesis or not matters not at all--just insure that it is sufficiently supported and logically, persuasively rendered.
• demonstrate familiarity with the assigned titles: your essays should indicate intimate, comprehensive awareness of the literary and/or visual texts involved in your argument.
• evince polish: essays should show signs of careful revision.
• employ the same format: use a Times New Roman, 12-point font. Double-space your text and alter all four margins to 1". Please use MLA format for citations:
• Marchbanks' Pet Peeves
  • avoid references to yourself (no first-person singular pronouns); allow your claims to stand on their own
  • the titles of novels, plays, paintings, and films should be italicized; the titles of short stories, poems, and essays should be placed within quotation marks
  • always include the year of publication/release in parentheses following the first (and only first) mention of a given work's title
  • place the period following a quoted passage after the page citation in parentheses, not before the parentheses. By the same token, never place a comma at the end of a quoted passage unless the structure of the sentence demands one.
  • avoid such vague, non-descript adjectives as the following, since they add nothing specific to your claim: "interesting," "amazing," "incredible," "fascinating," etc.
  • when recounting events from a story, please use the present (not past) verb tense to bring the events to life; definitely do not switch back and forth, without good reason, between present and past verb tenses
  • spell correctly all names (characters, authors, artists, etc.). "O'Connor" has no "e" in it!
  • use "who" instead of "that" when referring to people
  • employ a hyphen between two adjectives working together as a single modifier of a noun

SHORT ESSAY RESPONSE

• your essay will respond to one of the prompts generated for the short storyassigned to your group. Please insure that everyone in your group responds to a different prompt:
• deliver a structured argument: essays should be tightly organized, with main points logically ordered. The whole should be framed by a creative, short introduction and a conclusion that does not merely summarize your main points.
• pursue a narrowly argued thesis: your essays should move in a very specific direction. Do not attempt to touch on every possible idea or piece of supporting evidence.
• evince creativity: these exercises are all about effective, persuasive argumentation, and not at all about giving me some "correct" answer you think I wish to hear.
• provide adequate evidence: use your own ideas and textual references, with appropriate line-number citations. Do not employ secondary sources or opinions. As concerns these essays, there is no such thing as an incorrect argument--only an insufficiently supported one.
• articulate your argument in 500-600 words and show signs of careful revision
• clarify prompt: please be sure to copy and paste the question to which you're responding at the head of your essay, just beneath your essay's title.
• DUE DATE: Saturday, Jan. 29 at midnight. Send a Word doc via email.

TERM PAPER

Audience: literary critics familiar with O'Connor's and Conrad's works
Purpose: to support a debatable thesis with close, creative analysis of the works in question
Voice: professional and formal (avoid 1st-person pronouns, contractions, colloquial speech, etc.)

Term papers should be 13-15 pages in length and follow MLA guidelines for formatting, in-text citation, and creating appropriate citation entries in a separate Works Cited page. Use a Times New Roman, 12 pt font with 1" margins top, bottom, right and left (1" is not the default margin in Word, so you'll need to change it.) Paper due via email at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Mar. 19.

Your paper should demonstrate awareness of many of the texts we have encountered this quarter, and intimate familiarity with a smaller number of works. Though you have the freedom to choose your topical focus and--to a large extent--your organizational strategy, please do insure that your paper in some way touches on:

• two fictions by Conrad (at least one novel)
• two fictions by O'Connor (avoid the short story tackled in your previous short essay)
• at least one letter and one essay by O'Connor, collected in the anthology
• two or more secondary sources: literary criticism, biographical or historical material, etc. (see below).

While the above formula requires you to engage a number of works in your paper (your may appropriate as many as you wish, actually), I strongly encourage you to focus your attention on no more than 2-3 works. Depth is more important than breadth.

You essentially have free reign of topic: just be sure to construct a narrow argument, supported closely by relevant detail. You may think the length provides you the freedom to ramble--think again. Every sentence should be packed with meaning, and each word used should be the most exact, powerful word possible given its context. Your claims should explode off the page.

Possible approaches might involve analyses of voice, characterization, metaphor, tone, theme, biography, gender, faith, aesthetics, sexuality, genre, or philosophy. You may also consider applying a particular critical/theoretical lens to the subject.

Be sure to incorporate--however briefly or extensively--at least two secondary sources; these sources can supplement or provide opposition for your argument, and may be threaded into your argument at any point in the essay. I encourage you to search the stacks and databases available through the Robert E. Kennedy Library. You may draw on journal articles, book chapters, introductions to your novels, or professional online resources. I have a few relevant biographies and critical texts in my office; you are quite welcome to drop by, grab a book, and plop yourself down either on the couch or at the desk in the hallway. Whatever sources you do use should be listed in your Works Cited page along with your primary texts.

Topics might include but are by no means limited to:

• an analysis of how narrative voice shapes tone, theme, or characterization
• an incisive look at the significance or "meaning" of a few "problem" passages or scenes
• a comparison of two similar yet, in some way, vitally different characters
• the argument that a seemingly unsympathetic voice/character actually deserves reconsideration, or that an apparently sympathetic voice/character needs to be challenged.
• a consideration of how form (prosody, diction, sentence length, etc.) informs and either reflects or deviates from content
• the claim that a given text effectively improves or worsens existing social conditions in a particular time period
• a close look at the historical or biographical conditions informing particular works
• the tracking of a particular motif, symbol, metaphor or other device across a work, paired with a specific argument concerning its significance

Winter Landscape (1909)
Wassily Kandinsky

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu