Canterberry tales

You’ll write four essays during our course. This is your third. Your essay should address the topic you choose by using your ability to be critical and analytical, and by using your ability to interpret the story or poem. Your essay should be between 500 and 750 words in length with internal documentation.

2. Check out the possible topics for this paper and choose one. See the next few pages about possible topics.

3. Essay Three may be a group assignment if you wish. That is, more than one person may write the essay. (See notes below for group projects.)

4. The essay will be evaluated for how well you address the topic, clearly state a thesis, support your thesis statement, and explain your ideas and opinions. Ideas and content will be the focus of evaluation for the essays, but I will also point out egregious errors in mechanics, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

5. Internal documentation should be included in your essay (See Little,Brown Handbook, 49a), and you will be shown how to document each of the stories or poems you may choose to write about. Use plenty of quotations from the text to back up your assertions. And the Works Cited page for your essay can be omitted since I will assume you are quoting and paraphrasing from the story or poem as it appears in our textbook.

6. Some of these essays may ultimately be posted to the class web pages.

7. Remember to have a debatable thesis statement. That is, your thesis statement (the last sentence of your first paragraph is a good place for your thesis statement) should take a stance that is not obvious and with which other readers might conceivably disagree.

8. In your essay, please do not retell the story, summarize the events, or tell your reader what happened. Know that your audience has already read the story or poem and knows what it says literally.

9. Compose your essay in your word processor so that you can edit, revise, save alternate versions, spell check and so on.