Overview: pick 2 passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to analyze and make connections/claims about in one body paragraph and 2 other passages for the second body pargraph. The introduction and conclusion should tie in your analysis in both body pargraphs to a larger claim.
Specific Instructions: Do not begin the writing process with a thesis that you will use the text to prove. Instead, let your thesis emerge from your careful analysis of specific passages in your supporting paragraphs.
Step 1. Start with your supporting paragraphs. (I recommend that you write two supporting paragraphs, but you may include up to three.) For each supporting paragraph, choose at least two short passages from your Toni Morrison’s Beloved for analysis. This analysis should involve reading one passage in the light of another or reading multiple passages together. Begin each supporting paragraph with an inference or claim drawn from your passages: what do your passages together suggest that neither of them expresses by itself? Each of these inferences will be the topic sentence of its supporting paragraph. Following each inference/topic sentence, write approximately six to nine sentences of commentary in which you substantiate, explain, and develop your inference through detailed connections between your passages. Make sure that you have understood your passages clearly, that you discuss your passages together rather than merely one after the other, and that you show how you get from the details you discuss to what you think those details mean. You should quote as much of your passages as you need in your commentary (do not include the passages prior to your commentary; instead, draw on the details from the passages that you need in the body of your commentary). Incorporate quotations into your commentary as in-text quotations. Do not quote more than you comment on directly. The inference that you develop over the course of each supporting paragraph will be that paragraph’s main claim. Each supporting paragraph needs to be based on its own passages.
Step 2. You have developed and substantiated one claim in each of your supporting paragraphs. What do these claims have in common? What larger claim about your text do the claims in your supporting paragraphs suggest? This larger claim will be the thesis of your paper.
Step 3. Draft your thesis statement and the rest of your introduction. What problem or question in the text does your argument address? Start your paper by describing that problem or asking and explaining that question. Define the main terms or ideas to be discussed in the paper, not in general but as those terms or ideas are treated in your text. Then, towards the end of the introduction, state your thesis.
Step 4. Reread and revise your supporting paragraphs to make sure that they are clear and coherent in themselves and that they are consistent with what you say in your introduction.
Step 5. Write your conclusion. Your conclusion should (1) restate your thesis from the introduction, (2) explain how the main points from your supporting paragraphs provide support for your thesis, and (3) suggest an answer or resolution to the question or problem with which you started.
Step 6. Reread and revise the whole essay as many times as you are able prior to the due date.
Grading criteria
evidence that you have clearly comprehended your passages in their immediate contexts
substantiated and developed analysis of your passages in the supporting paragraphs, using specific connections between your passages
explanation of your reasoning: why your references to the text mean what you say they mean
logical connection between the claims developed in the supporting paragraphs and the larger thesis of the paper
coherence and completeness of the essay’s parts: introduction, supporting paragraphs, and conclusion
mechanics, format, and clarity of expression
