Final Exam

Essay 4: Final Exam

This assignment is worth 10% of your overall course grade. Your essay should be 3-4 double-spaced pages, formatted in MLA style.

The final exam asks you to review reading that we’ve done throughout the course then select three texts to analyze. You will write an essay that makes an argument about a connection between the three texts. The connection you discuss may be a connection regarding theme, characters, setting, or another aspect of the three texts. You will be brainstorming as a class about possible connections among the texts we’ve read in this course. Then, your paper will focus on one of the ideas from this discussion.

Criteria for selecting your texts:

  • select one poem, one short story, and one play (because it cannot be a play that has been a focus of an essay, the play must be Trifles)
  • each must be a text that was the focus of one of our discussions
  • you may not select a text about which you already wrote an essay

Your essay will be a comparison and contrast essay. Your essay must focus on the similarities and differences among the three texts.

 

The assignment does not ask you to use any sources other than our own discussions and the play itself. When you refer to your classmates’ ideas, you should cite them by giving them credit by name in your sentence. If you have used any other sources in developing your ideas, you will need to cite those sources in your essay, in addition to citing the play itself and the discussions. If you are unsure of what needs to be cited, first review the lecture on Writing about Literature Ethically.html then ask me any questions that you have.

Your essay should do the following:

  • focus on an idea of your choice that comes from the brainstorming discussion
  • focus on comparisons and contrasts among the three texts; the essay should not be 3 mini-essays but should support an argument that analyzes the similarities and differences
  • the essay does not need to present an equal number of similarities and differences (it is usually best to focus primarily on one or the other); the essay should spend approximately equal amounts of time on the three texts
  • develop a claim and support that claim with details from the texts
  • show how your ideas come from specific details and use page numbers to reference these details
  • include a Works Cited entry that gives all of the information about your edition; this is especially important if you are using an edition other than the one assigned for this course – your page numbers cited in your essay will need to match the page numbers in the edition listed in your Works Cited entry