Major assignment 3 lecture seven formatting the essay
- 1. MAJOR ASSIGNMENT 3: RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF A SCHOLARLY ARTICLE Lecture Seven: Formatting the Essay
- 2. CONTENTS • In this lecture, you will find: • Instructions on how to make your essay conform to MLA format • Suggested formatting for the content of your essay • A doggo
- 3. A NOTE BEFORE WE START • You are not required to format the content of your essay the way I suggest in this lecture. While you SHOULD make your paper conform to MLA format, you don’t have to follow all of the suggestions in this lecture. You do you.
- 4. FIRST, MLA • MLA doesn’t just govern your citation style; it has to do with the format of the essay as well. MLA demands that your paper: • Be double-spaced • Be in 12-point Times New Roman font • Have a header in the upper-right corner of every page with your last name and a page number (e.g. Flathers 1—note the space between the last name and the page number) • In addition, you need a double-spaced heading in the upper-left corner of the first page only that includes the following information, in this order: • Your name • Your instructor’s name • The class name (in this case, ENGL 101) • The date you completed the assignment
- 5. SAMPLE FIRST PAGE This is an actual essay I wrote for a class in graduate school. I got a very good grade on it.
- 6. ON TO THE CONTENT • Now that we’ve got MLA out of the way, let’s talk about the content of the essay. • You’re being asked to include a lot of different elements in this essay, and that can become a little overwhelming if you don’t have a format to work from. Where, for example, do you include the required summary? Does that go in with the analysis, or does that happen before? Do you historicize the text first or summarize first? How do you tell the reader which text you’re analyzing? These are all good questions, all of which I asked myself as I was reading the prompt for the first time.
- 7. ON TO THE CONTENT (CONT’D) • I have to pause for a second, because I’m listening to it right now, to briefly state how much I freaking love “bury a friend” by Billie Eilish. That girl. • So: given all these elements, how do they all fit together? As someone who’s written many a long analysis essay, I can tell you that it is absolutely possible—many people do it—to integrate all these elements together, and if you want to do it that way, I encourage you to do that. If you don’t, however, may I suggest:
- 8. HEADINGS!
- 9. HEADINGS ARE MAGICAL • Including headings can be a great way to keep track of a lot of information. You’ll notice that most scholarly articles include them, in one form or another. I’ve even seen non-fiction writers use them, and fiction writers, occasionally—poets, even, sometimes. Headings are everywhere, and they want to help you organize your thoughts. • So, let’s go through the headings I, myself, would include in this essay and what each section would include.
- 10. CATTO BREAK! This is Toast, a stray my husband and I took in during the winter of 2016. He was deaf, and one time he literally slept on my face. Eventually, one of Toast’s many host families took him to the Humane Society, which led to his reunion with his family months after he had disappeared from their property.
- 11. INTRODUCTION • Under this heading, I would write my standard academic introduction, which includes how I first became interested in the topic at hand, why I think it’s important, and what the essay will cover. In the case of this essay, I might talk about how I chose the article I chose, why I think it (the text) is important or why I’m interested in it, and then I’d talk about how the reader can expect to find a summary in this essay, as well as information about the text and its context, and finally an analysis of its exigence, motivations, and aims. Really, that’s all an introduction ever really needs to do: tell the reader why something is important, and what they’ll encounter as they’re reading the essay.
- 12. HISTORICIZING THE TEXT • Since the reader will want context before the summary, so that the summary will be easier to understand, I’d include this section next. I would probably even just include some subheadings rather than writing out a paragraph. It might look something like this:
- 13. HISTORICIZING THE TEXT (CONT’D)
- 14. SUMMARIZING THE TEXT • In this section, I wouldn’t use subheadings, since the summary should be a little more fluid and it isn’t necessary to separate out the information. I’d just use the section heading “Summary” and go from there. • One thing you could do, if you were concerned about making sure all the elements were included, is to check them off the prompt as you go.
- 15. ANALYSIS • Then, I’d include a section called “Analysis” where I tackled the meat of the paper—the actual analysis part, as the heading would suggest. Here, I might use the subheadings “Exigence,” “Motivations,” and “Aims,” breaking down the analysis that way, so that neither you nor the reader gets confused. Because this essay should be something like 5 pages, each subheading in this section should be about a page (this is assuming the “Introduction” and “Historicizing the Text” sections are each about half a page and the “Summary” section is about a page). • In the analysis, you should refer to information from the summary and from the historicizing questions. You should also include quotes from the text to back up the claims you make about the exigence, motivations, and aims (see Lecture One for definitions of these terms and Lecture Eight for more information about the integration of quotes for textual analysis).
- 16. CONCLUSION • Finally, I’d include a conclusion section that does the following: • Talks about what you learned by conducting this analysis. In other words, what do you understand about rhetorical reading that you didn’t before? • Suggests what the wider implications are of what you learned. Remember how, in Murray’s essay, he talks about how his experience in the writing-process experiment suggested to him various things he should be doing in his teaching? That was a wider implication. What implications, then, does this analysis suggest about the way you read, or about your academic career, or about the careers of other students? Note: this conclusion is not asking you to summarize anything, but rather to extend your thinking out to the real world.
- 17. WHAT’S NEXT? • In the next essay, I’ll talk about the actual analysis process, and take you through how to use the text as evidence for analytical claims.