Essay Length:  3-5 pages

Drafts Due:  Before class on Wednesday, March 17th.  Place your draft in our shared ENG2150 Google Doc folder.  Be sure you have included your name plus “Textual Analysis Draft” in the name of the file.

Essays Due: Friday, March 26th (placed in your private Google Doc folder)

For this essay, you will be taking a deep dive into one of the texts we’ve read so far this semester.  To some extent, the approach you take will be determined by the text you choose, but in all cases, your job is to use this essay writing process to understand some aspect of your chosen text more deeply and fully and to communicate that understanding clearly to your reader.

Possible Texts:

Toni Morrison, “The Day and its Splendid Parts”

Gabrielle Hamilton, “Killing Dinner”

Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again”

Sam Anderson, “I Recommend Eating Chips”

David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”

Michael Pollan, “Power Steer”

Process:

Step One – Select your text.  Which of these texts grabbed your attention most fully or stuck with you most persistently after reading it?  Which text do you still not fully understand? Which text could you happily spend more time with?  Use these questions to determine the text you will write about!

Step Two – Reread and Annotate.  Use this re-reading as an opportunity to identify those elements of the texts that seem to you to be the most import.   That might mean zeroing in on the argument that the author seems to be making (for Foster Wallace and Pollan),  it might mean marking passages that illuminate deeper issues or relationships (in the first-person narrations).  You will be coming back to your annotations as you craft your analysis, so be sure to highlight any text that you may want to quote in your essay!  Also use these marginal notes to start naming what you are noticing in the text, describing it in your own words, and jotting down your own questions, comments, and reactions to what you are reading.

Step Three – Determine your Focus. Now that you have re-read the text, you are ready to decide on the question your paper will be focusing on.  (I am a believer in focusing on a question at this stage, rather than a thesis.)  Your question may address an author’s rhetorical strategies (through a question like “What rhetorical techniques does David Foster Wallace use to get us to think more deeply about cooking and eating lobster?”); it may delve deeply into the content of a text (through a question like, “What does Chang-Rae Lee’s essay reveal about the complicated relationship between mother and son?”); or it may focus on argumentation (as in “What does Pollan reveal about the health implications of eating factory-farmed beef?”) Make sure your question is not a yes/no question.  It should be open-ended and one that you can answer through close engagement with the text.

Step Four – Make a Plan.  Do not begin writing your essay without some kind of plan.  Your plan may look like a traditional outline.  It might be a list of your body paragraphs, spelling out the topic or main idea of each one.  It might be an idea map that places your question at the center and imagines all your ideas as growing out of that central question.  You should be referring back to your annotations here.  Use the passages you’ve marked and the ideas you’ve generated in the margins as the skeleton for the essay.  This way, your ideas will grow directly out of the text.  This tends to be a better strategy than coming up with ideas and then looking for “evidence” in the text to back them up!  If you are stuck, try doing some freewriting in response to your question to unlock your creativity and get a better sense of what it is that you really think.

Step Five – Write a Draft.  Use your plan to write your draft.  Sometimes it’s easier to start with the body paragraphs, then go back and write your conclusion once you have figured out what it is you have to say.  As you write, remember that your task here involves close reading and analysis.  This means that every body paragraph will probably include one or more quotations from the text.  Each time you include a quotation, be sure that you provide some lead-in or introduction to the quotation and then offer some analysis of the quotation itself,  explaining just what it is that you want the reader to notice about the quotation and connecting the quotation to the idea that you are exploring in that paragraph.

Step Six – Revision.  During this stage of the process, you will be integrating the feedback you have gotten from your peers and your professor and reworking your essay in order to express your ideas more clearly and effectively.  Don’t be afraid to let go of any material in the paper that is taking the reader away from your focus, and make sure that your revised paper incorporates and highlights any new ideas that you developed during the process of writing your first draft.  You will probably want to rewrite your introduction completely, so that it spells out more clearly exactly where this essay is headed.

Step Seven – Proofreading and Submission.  Just as you did for the Personal Narrative, you will be submitting your finished essay to me by placing it in the Google Docs folder that you created for this purpose.  Be sure to give the file a name that includes your name, ENG2150, and Textual Analysis.  Once you have placed the document in the folder, consider the paper submitted.  Do NOT go back into the file and make any changes, even AFTER I have read and commented on the essay.  If you decide that you want to rewrite the paper after I have “returned” it to you, make a copy of the file, identify it as a REWRITE, and use that new file to work on your revisions.