the conventions
- f-poetry poem?
5) Develop a main point, or a thesis statement, for your paper. This thesis should focus on how the poem by Rich or Mora that you chose compares with the ideas about what poetry is like in the poem you chose from “The Art of (Reading) Poetry.”
6) Develop supporting paragraphs that use analysis of specific quotations and details from the poem and explain those specific quotations and details. Review the lecture “The Essential Moves of Literary Analysis” within Topic 3: Writing about Literature. This lecture provides a paragraph structure that works well to keep your paragraphs focused and show how everything in the paragraph relates to your paragraph’s main claim.
Be sure to review the course materials we have studied about the conventions for writing about literature, and poetry specifically.
Successful essays will
- Introduce the two poems and the focus of the essay in the introduction.
- Employ a clear thesis statement that summarizes your interpretation
- Address an audience of reader that are familiar with the poems but unfamiliar with your interpretation of them (in other words, you need not summarize the poems).
- Follows the conventions for writing about poetry.
- Organize the paper and each paragraph effectively, given the purpose and audience.
- Foreground your ideas and interpretation as main points (topic sentences about the interpretation).
- Show your critical thinking about the poems by supporting your ideas and paragraphs with
- Textual evidence in the form of quotations from the poem to support interpretations, and
- Explication (explanation of your reasoning—how you understand and interpret the evidence).
- Use Standard Edited American English.
- Follow MLA formatting conventions.
