Research Essay checklist

Research Essay checklist

Please remember to:

• Include, in whatever balance is appropriate, three components:  your ideas about the painting, your ideas about the poem, and your research
• Include quotations from both the poem and your sources—and any time you include a quotation, make sure it’s not its own sentence but is part of a sentence, even if all that exists outside the quotation is According to SoAndSo, “Blah blah blah blah blah” (123).
• Check the organization of your essay—write an outline of the draft you’re working on to see if you like the order of ideas
• Make sure you have a thesis statement, and make sure it fits the essay you’re writing
• Avoid over-generalizing, especially in your introduction—remember that you want to argue something specific, not some universal truth that would be impossible to discuss well in 4-5 pages
• Think back to the initial questions you came up with for the project—do you answer them, something like them, different questions altogether, or is your essay merely a report of research collected?
• Write an essay that interests you, that you’re proud of, and that upholds college regulations on academic integrity
• Use a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence any time you refer to someone else’s words or ideas
• Include a bibliographic entry in your Works Cited page for each source you quote from or refer to in your essay, and use easybib.com to help you format your citations—remember that the poem and painting should also be in your Works Cited page!
• Remove the annotations from your bibliographic entries that you wrote for the Annotated Bibliography
• Double-space your essay using the option in the paragraph menu, and indent the first line of each paragraph—and use a hanging indent on your Works Cited citations
• Proofread your essay, looking and listening for places where commas belong, for sentences that you might combine, for incorrect word, tense, or number choice, for sentence boundary errors, for illogical phrasing, and other errors
• Put titles of poems and paintings in quotation marks, books, magazines, journals, newspapers in italics
• Give your essay a title
• Upload your essay to our shared folder on Dropbox.com by the start of class on Wednesday.

Thank you—I look forward to reading your essays!

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IMPORTANT UPDATE for those working on “Mourning Picture”

It just came to my attention that the version of the poem “Mourning Picture” on the site we have been using is incomplete.  Since it’s so late in the semester, I will not fault you if you only use the first two stanzas as you write about the painting and poem in your essays.  However, the final stanza might be very helpful for you, so I want to offer you the chance to read the whole poem–look for it here.  If you want to talk to me about this correction and what it means for your essay, please get in touch with me either by talking to be before or after class or by e-mailing me, or by talking to me in my office during an appointment or my office hours.

I hope this new information helps!

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Brainstorm on comparisons for final exam essays

Comparisons for the final exam

• Compare As I Lay Dying with “A Rose for Emily”—what theme?
• Depictions of death:  Dead bodies, acceptance/denial of death:  “The Story of an Hour,” Trifles, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “Mourning Picture,” “Starry Night,” “Facing It”
• Point of view:  narrators
• Community:  AILD, “ARfE,” “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” Trifles
• Characterization:  any
• Ulterior motives/revenge: Addie’s revenge; other character’s motives for going to Jefferson; “TSoaH,” Trifles, “ARfE”
• Family: “WYPIWR” “TSoaH”
• Isolation/privacy
• Parent/child situations:  Trifles, “HLWE,” “Mourning picture”
• Journeys:  “WYPIWR,” “BICNSfD”
• Irony:
• Geography/setting:
• Poverty: Jackson Jackson, “The House on Mango Street”
• Communication techniques
• Alternative communication
• travel

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COMPARISON

The story “A Rose for Emily” will be good to compare because it is by the same author William Faulkner.

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comparison

the text that i am thinking to compare As I Lay Dying with  is A Rose for Emily which is also by William faulkner, for my final.

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As i lay dying ending.

I must say that the Bundrens are a crazy group. Darl proves that he really is a crazy person and go what he deserved. I cant believe Anse actually went and got married, he couldn’t even wait a month. I think MacGowan just had sex with Dewey Dell and gave her some sugar pills to trick her.

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Today’s presentation

Today’s presentation was excellent do anybody else think so?

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