Often students get off to a poor start in this course because they do not understand the expectations. I have given a list of explicit criteria for your essay assignments in this document but some further explanation may help.

First, this is both a reading and a writing course, and so you are expected to read the assignments. You may be asked to read as much as fifty pages a week. This takes time, but if you read just ten pages a day, you will be finished in five days and still have plenty of time to reread where necessary and to write your essay.

Sometimes a story, poem, or essay that you have read early in the semester will be relevant to a question asked later on. If you do not read the story, poem, or essay at the time it is assigned, then you will be doubling your work at some point. Your reading assignment for a particular week may then become seventy or eighty pages rather than just fifty.

As a rule, you should make use of every assigned reading selection in writing your essay. For example, if five stories are assigned, then when you write your essay, make use of all five of the stories by quoting or giving examples from each.

On the other hand, it is sometimes the case that it may not be appropriate for you to include every assigned author or selection for the week when writing your essay. The essay question should make it clear what you should do. The author or selection that you do not use in writing your essay may be the topic of a Discussion Board question for the week, or it may be needed to answer the essay question for a subsequent week. Read the essay question carefully and use your common sense. But the point I wish to emphasize is that you must do the reading.

But it is not enough to just do the reading. You must also demonstrate in your essay that you have read the assignment. You usually do this by making specific references to the historical writings, stories, poems or whatever, and by giving quotations from them. However, an essay that is simply a series of quotations, or a summary of the literary work peppered with quotations, does not constitute an acceptable response to an essay question.

What is also needed is some analysis of and commentary on the quotations and summaries to show how these provide evidence that help answer the question. In short, you have to explain to the reader (me) how the evidence you have cited supports the point you are trying to make about the story or poem you have read. I have tried to demonstrate how this is done in the model papers I have posted on my web site. There may not be models for your particular course, but models for other courses illustrate the same principles. Take a look at this example this one, and this one.

All that I have said thus far pertains to the content of your essays, but organization is equally important. Remember that your purpose in writing the essays is to show what you know about the reading you have done, but no matter how good your analysis may be, you have to present your ideas in a way that I can understand them. If your writing is all a muddle, you will not get proper credit for your insights.

So the third point to remember is that every essay must have explicit organization. This begins with the statement of a main idea that provides a focus. All the evidence you cite, and all the explanation you give of this evidence, must be related to the main idea. The main idea should be expressed in a single sentence that is placed at the end of your introduction. Often it is appropriate for this main idea sentence to provide a preview of the main topics you will cover in the essay. This is always a good thing to do since it lets me anticipate the organization of the essay as a whole.

Just as a main idea is important for the essay as a whole, in the same way a topic sentence is important for each paragraph. The topic sentence announces the topic of a paragraph and, everything in the paragraph should be related to this topic. Each time you change your topic, begin a new paragraph with a new topic sentence. Keep information together that belongs together. This is called paragraph unity.

Let me say a few words about the introduction to your essays. Some of the essay questions may ask you to define a literary or rhetorical term and to apply it to the reading. When this is the case, you should define the the term in the introduction. After giving the definition, you should end the introduction with your main idea sentence. In the body paragraphs, you will then apply your understanding of the literary or rhetorical term to an analysis of the reading assignment.

Just as each essay should have an introduction, so should it have a conclusion. You do not just stop when you have completed your discussion of the last literary work. Write a short concluding paragraph to signal to the reader that you have finished. A conclusion will generally refer to the main idea of your essay and briefly comment on how each story or poem illustrates this idea.

In addition to the content and organization of your essay, you also need to be attentive to the mechanics of punctuation and documentation. Where punctuation is concerned, you should study the corrections I make and then implement them on your subsequent papers. Use your grammar handbook when you don't understand. Your handbook will also help you with documentation, although I have provided specific models and explanations for the most commonly used sources you will need to document. Look at this page. If you take notice of my corrections and read the documents I point you to, you can quickly learn what to do. The Modern Languages Association style of documentation has its own logic that will become clear if you pay attention to it. Look at this web site.

The only real difficulties arise when you are citing Internet sources. Models are given for some of these in your grammar handbook and on the documentation pages I have prepared, but occasions will arise when it is unclear as to which model you should follow. Do the best you can keeping in mind the basic reason for documentation: You are trying to give the reader clear directions to the sources you have used so that he can also find them.

Repeated errors in punctuation and documentation result in lower and lower grades as the semester progresses.

Read. Analyze. Comment. Organize. Be correct in points of punctuation and documentation.