The Basics

*4-5 pages, MLA formatted, plus a separate Work Cited page, also MLA formatted.

Draft due: Sunday of Week Four by 11 pm. See course calendar. *A strong draft will be full length and respond to the criteria described below. Drafts are of course works in progress, but should demonstrate full responsiveness to the class materials and a class week's worth of effort.*

Final version due: Sunday of Week Five by 11 p.m. See course calendar.

The Writing Task, Explained

The launch and trajectory of this assignment will sound familiar: your draft of Essay #2 will be a development and extension of your Response #2, and your final version of Essay #2 will be a further developed, revised, and polished version of your draft.

The essential task: you will put your skills of criticism and interpretation to work theorizing aboutthe film or story you wrote about for Response #2.You will develop an epiphany and/or transformation theory about one of the characters or about the viewers/readers (you have begun this already in your Response #2.)

This is a much more structured, academic-style essay than Essay #1. Narrative essays have a free-form quality, and this essay is not a narrative. The key piece to all this is your thesis statement, the "brain" that controls everything in the essay will be a strong thesis(your theory).

Your thesis will be an argument about:

1) What causes an epiphany/what the epiphany is for a character

2) What the resulting transformation of an epiphany is for a character

3) What one character's epiphany could or should have been (the failure to have an epiphany can be just as interesting to think about as a character actually having it)

4) Specifically what the transforming epiphany is for the viewers about a character, theme, issue, or situation

So the basic task here is to hone in on an idea you have about a character's epiphany/transformation (or the audience's or reader's epiphany/transformation).

Once you have a strong thesis in the works, you will follow the academic structure that this and next week's class materials will cover. Your essay will:

Begin with an introductory paragraph. Begin with a few lines that will capture your readers, move into a brief summary of the film to orient us (sort of a who, what, where, when, and make sure also in here to name the film, director, and give the year the movie came out), and then funnels down into a thesis. The thesis will state your theory about a character's epiphany.

The body paragraphs will be the place where you offer evidence for your thesis. Work from a list of evidence, using one piece per paragraph, talking about scenes, moments, and lines, continuously working to prove the point you are making in the thesis. Topic sentences (Such as, "One piece of evidence that supports the theory that Bill's epiphany is more important than Doug's is . . . OR "A second way we can see that Tina is driven to her epiphany by Bob's drinking is . . .) should start each body paragraph and are critically important to an academic essay.

Aim for paragraphs in the 1/3-2/3 of a page range in length (shorter paragraphs feel choppy/unfinished, longer get overwhelming). Use and discuss a main example and lines of dialogue/text in each body paragraph--this anchors your claim's support in the text. Close each body paragraph with your own sentence that wraps up the point of the paragraph.

The paper will close with a concluding paragraph that wraps up your paper's overall argument and points, and talks about why this all occurred to you and matters to you, and therefore is valuable to your readers.

Again, this is not a free-form essay by any means--please take this bold and italicized description of the essay's structure very seriously.

Tips:

*Watch your chosen movie again (even if you saw it before this class and watched it last week as well) or re-read the story and take notes. Like any good piece of writing, you will focus on particular scenes, moments, and lines that prove your point. You will especially need to re-watch the parts of the movie you want to land on in your paper. Notes will also make it easier for you to name actors, directors, and to quote key lines accurately, and accuracy is important in college writing!

*It is very important for you to remember that you are under no obligation to discuss everything about the film or story: you are only beholden to your own thesis, and to supporting that one idea.

*Keep in mind that as you write your paper the following areas are potentially rich in supportive evidence for your body paragraphs, since they are the places your idea about your thesis came from:

Themes of movie (issues/ideas the film is exploringpossibly psychological, political, moral)

Premise

Opening/starting point

Plot

Music

Cinematography/Filming quality and techniques (sudden cuts, close-ups, etc.)

Lighting, sets, and scenery

Character actions and facial expressions

Character speech

Character appearance

Ending/final scene or words

( I want to write about "The Farewell," directed by Lulu Wang)