Writing Lessons

1. Writing Lessons In preparation for The Scarlet Letter essay

2. Format • Times New Roman • 12-font • one-inch margins • double-spaced with no extra spacing in between paragraphs With these requirements, every essay should be at least four complete pages – no less.

3. Works Cited or Bibliography • What is it? • Why include it?

4. Titles • Titles of the essays should be clever and indicative of thesis. The Scarlet Letter is the title of Hawthorne’s novel, NOT your essay.

5. Titles, cont. • Try this! Start with something clever that is related to your theme or thesis; after a colon, write out a brief identification of what you explore in the essay (include the title of the primary text.) • Blackness, Ugliness, and Poorness: Pecola’s illness in The Bluest Eye • A Crackerati’s Analysis of the Niggerati: Illumination of Zora Neale Hurston’s racial alignment in Dust Tracks on a Road • Men will be Boys: Emasculation and Irresponsibility in The Women of Brewster Place • Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: Exploring the dichotomy of idolization and fear in male/female relationships of Cane

6. Titles, cont. • Novel titles should be italicized when typed; • underlining is saved for handwritten work.

7. Word Choice • Forbidden Words • contractions, I (and all first person), and you • Weak Words • said, says, “this shows that”, “this means that”

8. Quotes • Integration: Don’t leave them naked!  • All quotes must be integrated via introduction, embedding, or tag

9. quotes • Introduce the quote by explaining who’s saying it or in what context: • Wilfred Owen says that the only prayer said for those who die in battle is the “rapid rattle of guns which spatter out their hasty orisons” (7). • When talking with Ralph, Simon suggests that “there is no beast” (9). • Jack views the rules as something unnecessary, specifically believing them to be “bullocks” (164). • When they could not determine the source of the noise, “the boys became afraid” (112). • As Simon explained, “maybe it’s us” (154).

10. quotes • Split the quotation. • “A fully articulated pastoral idea of America,” claims Leo Marx, “did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth century” (89). • For further help, see my student samples from previous years.

11. quotes • Proper punctuation of quotes • Typical quotes • The moral to be drawn from the novel is that one should “[b]e true” to himself, to others and to God (190). • According to some, dreams express "profound aspects of personality" (Foulkes 184), though others disagree. • If the punctuation is imperative to the quote, put it in the quotation marks. • Dimmesdale’s death imparts the warning that all must “Be true!” (190).

12. quotes • There is no need to put ellipses at the beginning or end of your quote to indicate that you are taking only a part of a line. That is understood. If, however, you cut out something that comes in the middle of a quote, you should use ellipses to indicate the cut, but put square brackets around them to indicate that you have done that, not the author.

13. Introductions • Rather than introduce your essay with a talk about how “many authors do this” or “Hawthorne is a brilliant author”, you should introduce it thematically. Think of a creative way to introduce the THEME of your paper. Don’t go overboard: if the thematic intro you come up with is too disconnected from the paper, it won’t work; if it doesn’t fit the rhetorical situation, you could turn the reader off.

14. introductions • In certain parts of England an amusing slang language is used. For the cockney Brits, a man’s better half might be referred to as “trouble and strife.” Of course the humor of that vernacular substitution is only part in its rhyme; the true comedy comes from the witty suggestion of the qualities his wife possesses. In his introduction to “Dave’s Neckliss,” Chesnutt asserts that these conjure stories provide a study of “the simple but intensely human inner life of slavery” (92). Central to this “intensely human inner life” is the romantic relationship between the adult black male and female, and it is this relationship, or the female component of it, that either sets the plot in motion or complicates the drama of seven of the ten tales, as they cause trouble and strife for their male counterparts.

15. introductions • An American adage “children are to be seen and not heard” annoys many children, for it limits their contributions to the society around them. Perhaps a child can be appreciated for her appearance, but the true value of the person is in what she has to say or, perhaps more importantly, what she does. In reading William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel, this adage could be rephrased as “Black women are to be seen and not heard”, for in every instance the black female characters are seen and not heard, or more particularly they are acted upon rather than acting themselves. They are passive characters whom are endowed with many lovely qualities, such as congeniality, grace, religious devotion, emotional dedication, and, not the least of all, physical beauty. What they lack, however, are a voice, a mind, and a command over their own experiences. This passivity weakens the characters and the effectiveness the sympathy created for them might have in the abolitionist cause.

16. introductions • Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Girls go to Mars to get more candy bars. Or do they go to Mars to find the boys, as according to the old saying, men are from Mars and women are from Venus? This saying is a metaphor for the commonly held belief that men and women are inherently different, and those differences are most poignantly observed in both communication styles and romantic relationships. Whereas opposites may attract, one does not often fully understand his opposite. This mystery can breed idolization, but its darker brother, ignorance, often breeds fear. Jean Toomer explores this complex web of opposition and its effects on male/female relationships in his heralded work Cane.

17. miscellaneous • When writing literary analysis, in WHAT tense do you speak? • That means that most quotes must be changed to present tense too! • Grammar • Modifier Errors