Notes on the Essay

Please print these notes and use them to guide your essay writing during this week. Come into class tomorrow with a functioning introduction and body paragraph. You will have the period to begin your next body paragraph.

Below this post, you will find the essay topic choices.

THE INTRODUCTION:

The Hook

We spoke about leads/hooks, but here, in layman's terms, is the purpose for them:

1. You have an audience for anything you write, and you need to appeal to the person/people to get them interested or to make them value what you've written. The hook can is just that: what you are saying to get the reader involved in your piece.
   
   1. Logic (Logos)
      
      1. Appeal to their reason/logic by referring to facts, inference, details, and other evidence
         
         1. Suggestion: Perhaps, you can begin with a statistic or an unfamiliar fact. You can also create a metaphor. This appeals to their logic because you connected two things and inferred a commonality between them.
            

            
            

   2. Emotion (Pathos)
      
      1. Appeal to their emotions by calling upon feelings of empathy, sympathy, anger, fear
         
         1. Suggestion: Perhaps, you can begin with a personal anecdote or a related news story to tap into your readers hearts.
            
   3. Ethics (Ethos)
      
      1. Appeal to the readers' ethics by establishing yourself as competent, fair, and trustworthy author
         
         1. Suggestion: Perhaps, you can begin by making a stanch statement about your topic
            
            1. e.g., Everybody who must be at the school and begin the day at the same time—staff, faculty, and students—needs and deserves space to park.
               
               1. This shows that the writer is dedicated to fairness and equality.
                  
      2. This is reserved mostly for speeches and letters, not literary analysis.
         

         
         

   4. Most literary essays are arguments that rely on both logical and emotional appeals.
      
2. You must make sure to flesh out the hook to avoid problems in logic (e.g., false analogy, circular reasoning, overgeneralization, false cause, single cause) because one wrong move and it can ruin your essay.
   
3. You will refer back to this hook to tie all your points together. So, please make sure that your anecdote or metaphor has enough substance to relate to your thesis in several ways.
   

Thesis—so frequently misunderstood:

1. You have a something to say when you write an essay, and you need to figure out what that is. Frequently, teachers will give you, as I often do, a list of proposed topics. I tend not to limit you to this list, especially if you come to a literary/scholarly conclusion yourself. The thesis is simply this: a statement about what you are trying to enlighten the reader about.
   
2. An effective thesis should be all of the following:
   
   1. Restricted
      
      1. A good essay deals with a bite-size issue, not with issues that would require a lifetime to discuss intelligently or thoroughly.
         
         1. e.g.,
            

Poor	Better
The world is a terrible mess.	The United Nations should be given more peace-keeping powers.
Abigail has many problems.	Abigail is a product of a lack of supervision.
Bob Ewell is an evil man.	Bob Ewell is repressed by a society that doesn't respect him.

1. Unified
   
   1. The tight structure of your paper depends on its working to support a concise idea.
      
      1. e.g.,
         

Poor	Better
Detective stories are not a high form of literature, but people have always been fascinated by them, and many fine writers have experimented with them.	Detective stories appeal to the basic human desire for thrills.

1. Specific
   
   1. A satisfactorily restricted and unified thesis may be useless if the idea it commits you to is vague.
      
      1. e.g.,
         

Poor	Better
James Joyce's Ulysses is very good.	James Joyce's Ulysses helped create a new way for writers to deal with the unconscious.

The Body Paragraphs:

The Proof

The substance of each of your body paragraphs will be the explanations, summaries, paraphrases, specific details, and direct quotations you need to support and develop the more general statement you have made in your topic sentence.

1. These paragraphs can vary in number. You may need three or four to prove your thesis true, perhaps even six.
   
2. Each of these paragraphs must include:
   
   1. Topic Sentence that Supports the Thesis Statement
      
      1. How will the details of this paragraph contribute to your overall thesis?
         
   2. Quote/Specific Details:
      
      1. Introduce the quote
         
         1. Provide context for the reader
            
            1. In one particular scene,…
               
         2. Use a "signal phrase" to introduce the quote
            
            1. He proclaims, "…"
               
            2. She asserts, "…"
               
      2. Direct Quote
         
         1. Use a direct quote when an author writes in particularly powerful language and when such textual evidence enhances your paper's argument.
            
         2. Be precise. Do not use a quote from an outside source (secondary source) if it is not well written or if you can state the point more clearly in your own words. In that case, you might summarize or paraphrase the author's ideas. If you summarize or paraphrase, you must still cite the source to credit the author.
            
         3. Prose quotations longer than four lines should be set off in block quotes, indented 10 spaces from the left margin and double spaced, without quotation marks.
            
      3. Your Analysis/Interpretation of the Quote
         
         1. Explain and discuss how the quote is significant. Relate the quote to your purpose in your paper.
            
         2. Demonstrate that this quote serves to make a particular point in your argument.
            
         3. Connect this to your HOOK.
            
      4. Be sure to transition/connect this paragraph with the following paragraph. You can make this the last sentence of the first paragraph or the first sentence of the next paragraph.
         

The Conclusion:

"Hello" is not "goodbye."

Your conclusion will clearly state what you've proven.

1. The purpose of a conclusion is to show how you've proven your thesis.
   
2. The conclusion should not introduce a new topic that has not been touched on in your essay.
   
3. Your conclusion should include the following:
   
   1. Connect all your points, relating them back to the thesis.
      
   2. Clincher: try to end your paper with a connection back to that hook, which will in turn reinforce your argument. These paragraphs can vary in number. You may need three or four to prove your thesis true, perhaps even six.