As promised, I am sharing a written version of the information that I provided in class about how to organize your final essay. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about these guidelines.
How does one organize an essay about two different texts?
To begin, let me state the obvious: Before you begin to draft your essay, you MUST have a plan! It doesn’t matter whether your plan is a traditional outline or just a list of body paragraph ideas, but you need to sketch out the structure of your essay before you begin to write.
When I write a paper, I start by collecting the “textual evidence” that I want to use (all the quotations and examples from the text that address my question). Then I sort the evidence into different paragraphs, based on the idea that each piece of evidence illustrates or supports. Then I decide what order of paragraphs would be most effective. This means that before I begin writing my first draft I already know what idea each body paragraph will be exploring, what textual evidence I will be including in each body paragraph, and what order I will be presenting my ideas in.
For your final essays, you have two different possible paths for organizing your body paragraphs: The Sequential Option and The Alternating Option. I describe both below. The alternating option is slightly more challenging to execute. It works best when you discover that your texts are very closely aligned and that the ideas you have about one text hold true for the other text as well. Do not “mix and match.” Choose one of these structures, and stick with it! These examples each have three ideas. I just stopped at three because that was enough to make my point; I would imagine that you would have at least three ideas for each of the texts you’re writing about. By “ideas,” I mean claims about the text that respond to your over-arching question. Each of these ideas gets its own body paragraph. You will notice that in both options, only the introduction and conclusion discuss the two texts together in a single paragraph. Each body paragraph focuses on a single text.
The Sequential Option
1.Introduction: Lays out your question in relation to both Text A and Text B
2. Text A – Idea #1
3. Text A – Idea #2
4. Text A – Idea #3
5. Text B – Idea #1
6. Text B – Idea #2
7. Text B- Idea #3
8. Conclusion – Brings together Texts A and B, recaps the argument you have made in the body of your paper, and provides an answer to the “so what?” question. What are the implications of what you have shown us in this essay? What do we learn from it?
The Alternating Option
1.Introduction – Lays out your question in relation to both Text A and Text B
2. Text A – Idea #1
3. Text B – Idea #1
4. Text A – Idea #2
5. Text B – Idea #2
6. Text A – Idea #3
7. Text B- Idea #3
8. Conclusion – Brings together Texts A and B, recaps the argument you have made in the body of your paper, and provides an answer to the “so what?” question. What are the implications of what you have shown us in this essay? What do we learn from it?
