Final Essay Prompts
Spring 2022
Due: Thursday 5/27, midnight
Write a concise essay of 600-900 words (2-3 pages) in response to ONE of the prompts below.
Use this concise form for your introduction: Start with a question related to the essay’s main topic, and then answer the question in a statement that identifies titles and characters and gives the main idea or relationship between ideas that the essay will develop. This assertion shouldn’t elaborate or include examples as that is the task of your body paragraphs. That’s it—after the essay’s title, just two sentences for the introduction.
Body paragraphs: Establish the idea first before providing textual evidence, supporting examples, and developing ideas. Don’t plop quotations. Use signal phrases and provide meaningful contexts from the “text” (movie, short story, poem, myth, novel, etc.). There should be a clear “bridge” connecting the quotation to your own words. Make sure you have made a clear point that develops your essay’s main argument before moving on to the next paragraph.
Conclusion: Synthesize what you have written into a clear closing argument. Close with an insight, recommendation, or lesson—about plot, about character, about readers and audiences like yourself, about storytelling, about how we make meaning from stories—depending on the topic of your essay. I can see the conclusion being your longest paragraph because it would be the place to draw out comparisons, nuance differences, etc.
Include a Works Cited page.
Write the number of your chosen prompt next to your essay’s title.
Important skills to demonstrate:
* Sustain your essay’s focus by using “good repetition” of key concepts and arguments.
* Minimize passive voice in favor of active voice. Not is shown but shows; not is caused by but causes. Etc.
* Smooth, clear integration of quotations without plopping. Quote at least once from any text you reference, but cite both quotations and specific evidence.
* Employ a second paragraph to explain the purpose of the essay and to define key concepts.
* Analysis and interpretation instead of summary and descriiption.
* Don’t judge characters unless the point is to acknowledge a judgment.
*use option 3
3) Write an essay that explores an aspect of the monstrous in four texts, at least one from each unit but not including the Greek Myth. In the Greek myth, the monster is King Minos’s Minotaur, but what forms does it take in the other units, and how do characters deal with it? Use your essay’s second paragraph to frame the metaphor of the “monster” as it is expressed in the various texts. Is it a person with certain traits? Is it a facet of the personality? Is it a social phenomenon that people in relationship or community create together? Is it an indelible part of the universe? Use your second paragraph to define it, and then use the body of the essay to explain its causes and its effects. In the end of your essay, explain how any of the characters defeated or tamed the monster.
