About a Poem
For Essay 2, choose one of the two following options:
A] Select a poem from the Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/. Interpret the poem’s meaning and support your interpretation with evidence from the poem. Evidence should include literary elements and poetic devices, and could include focus on theme, tone, language, symbolism, and/or style.
B] Select a short story from Classic Short Stories https://www.classicshorts.com/. Analyze the story and develop an argument, focusing on setting, point of view, and/or character development.
No matter which option you choose, supporting evidence should include at least two strong secondary sources. This means you MUST DO RESEARCH in writing this assignment, and you must use proper MLA documentation that accurately gives credit to your sources. Your “Works Cited” page at the end of you essay should have 3 entries (the poem you selected for analysis and two secondary sources).
Note: the strength of your analysis will be based on your ideas and strength of evidence (including strength of secondary sources). A secondary source is one that discusses or analyzes your selected poem or story. Many academic journals contain articles that discuss poetry and short stories. You must locate your secondary sources from the online library database (including sites such as Literary Reference Center (EBSCO), Gale Literary Databases, Academic Search Complete, Gale Virtual Reference Library, or any other option listed in the lib guides for English 1102).
Secondary sources such as Shmoop, Cliff’s Notes, SparkNotes, enotes.com, bookrags.com, 123helpme.com, Wiki anything, and exampleessays.com are unacceptable.
Again, this is NOT a summary. Be sure you are “breaking down” the poem or story into its parts (literary elements and poetic devices) to either offer your interpretation of the selected poem’s meaning or make a claim about your selected short story.
Your essay must be 700-900 words, on topic, well-crafted, and well-organized. When I assess an essay, I consider: 1] strength of analysis or claim (which includes supporting evidence and sources), 2] ability to stay on topic, 3] overall development of main idea within the prescribed word count, 4] proper essay structure and organization (including an introduction with a thesis statement, body paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details, and a conclusion), 5] lack of redundancy, 6] sentence-level fluency (including grammar, mechanics, and transitions), and 7] proper MLA formatting (including elements such as 1-inch margins, double-spaced lines, 12 point Times New Roman font, header, title, proper page numbers with last name, in-text parenthetical citations and integration (with signal phrases and expansion), and works cited page). In your essay, you must include well-integrated quotations from your selected work of literature and include well-integrated quotations from the secondary sources. Even with the inclusion of secondary sources, your ideas should be the most prevalent in the paper – NOT your secondary sources.
