Essay I (Fiction Essay) Instructions
In this first essay, you will be analyzing the short story “Little Girls in Bone Museums” by Sadie Bruce (see link below). The thesis, or main point, for the essay will be based on your careful analysis of the story. In other words, you’re going to make a claim about some part of the story’s meaning on a deeper level. For example, your claim could be what you think the theme (the author’s main point) of the story is or how the author addresses an important idea in the work. In order to support your claim, you can discuss how the author uses literary devices (such as characterization, setting, symbolism, or irony) in order to express the theme or an important idea in the work.
Link to short story and information for your Work Cited page if you quote the story in your essay:
Bruce, Sadie. “Little Girls in Bone Museums.” Fantasy & Science Fiction. March 2015. Pp 156-165.
https://sadiekie.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/11-bruce-girls-3-15.pdf
Formatting requirements:
Use standard MLA document formatting requirements: double-spaced, 12-pt font. See link below for more specifics or Google “OWL Purdue MLA documentation style” and click on the first link on left (MLA General Format) for a sample and detailed information.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_general_format.html
Length: 800 to 1,000 words, not including the Works Cited page
Due Date: End of Week Six (see syllabus for exact date).
Submission Directives: An electronic copy of your paper must be submitted through Blackboard in the Fiction Essay Drop Box (found in LU 6) before 11:55 pm on the paper’s due date.
Assignment Objectives: Your goal is to analyze or apply a critical strategy to a work and to develop and support a specific thesis. Your essay should be unified, developed, organized, and coherent, and should use sophisticated sentence style while meeting the demands of standard English. In other words, your objective is to support a thesis about the meaning of the work; therefore, you should NOT merely re-tell the entire plot (what happens in the story) or express your thoughts and feelings about the subject matter. For instance, when writing about Sadie Bruce’s story “Little Girls in Bone Museums,” you want to identify an important topic (such as beauty, societal expectations, recognition, or identity ) or theme (what point you think Bruce is making about a particular topic) and then analyze how Bruce uses literary devices such as setting, symbolism, characterization, or irony to address that topic or theme. If you spend too much time in your paper talking about how a topic relates to current issues in society or how you feel about the topic, you’ve moved away from literary analysis and the point of the paper: to analyze the work itself.
Grading Guidelines: Be sure to read the designated rubric carefully so that you have a clear idea of what criteria I will be using as I grade your essay.
Must Haves: In any good paper, you must have a clearly identifiable claim or thesis (usually found at the end of the first paragraph) and provide concrete, specific examples in the form of textual evidence as support. A good thesis statement is composed of the following elements:
TOPIC + CLAIM + POINTS OF SUPPORT
The topic would be the short story, the claim is whatever specific conclusion you’ve come to about what the author is trying to communication within the story, and the points of support are what you’ll discuss to support your claim. For example, if you’re using the formalist approach, the points of support would be the literary devices used by the author that you will analyze and discuss. You can also think of it this way: TOPIC + 2-3 LITERARY ELEMENTS + ANALYSIS. You could also focus on how one literary element is developed in different ways to support a particular thesis.
Example: In his work “Letters from an American Farmer,” Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur uses characterization, setting, and symbolism to express how a nurturing environment is essential to becoming a successful American.
The topic would be the author’s work, the literary elements are the devices you’ve chosen to discuss in order to support your claim, and the claim is whatever specific conclusion—based on careful analysis—that you’ve come to about the work. In order to support your claim, you’ll have to discuss how the author uses these literary devices, pulling directly from the work for textual support. In an essay with the thesis above, I would have to have three body paragraphs (the first about the use of characterization, the second about setting, and the third about symbolism) that all support my claim (or analysis) that Crevecoeur is expressing that the key component to becoming a successful American is a nurturing environment.
For this first essay, you should NOT use outside sources, only a quote or two from the shorty story, and your ideas and writing should be your own. You may want to submit your essay to one of the UPSWING online tutors (See the Student Page on the Savannah Teach website for link). For additional help, you can also use the writing help on the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University. (For the Purdue site, type “OWL,” “Purdue,” and “Writing about Literature” into Google). Again, be sure to follow all of the guidelines and suggestions discussed in your texts about writing a good, college-level essay.
Finally, your essay should have a title that is creative or includes your essay’s focus. For example, one might use a title like Feminism and Exploitation in John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums.” Your paper should have a clear introduction and thesis statement, body paragraphs supporting your thesis, detailed evidence and argument supporting each topic sentence, and a conclusion. Your paper should also have a Works Cited page if you incorporated any quotes into your paper. Use the MLA style (specifically, a selection from an anthology or selection from a collection of works). Remember that you need to put quotation marks around any exact words that you use from the text as evidence to support your claims.
*Important Note Regarding Acts of Academic Dishonesty and/or Plagiarism: The drop box where you submit your essays runs all papers submitted through plagiarism software. This means it will highlight any phrases and/or sentences taken directly from another source and give me access to that original source. This includes papers created by online services. I will also be using software that detects whether or not a piece of writing has been created by AI (Artificial Intelligence or Chatbot). Using AI-written passages and turning them in as your own, just like buying a paper or copying text from another source without citing it, is a clear example of academic dishonesty.
