What Will This Essay Look Like and What Are the Requirements?

Fischer 1

Ethics and Citizen Vince

For this essay, you will select a character or two from our book and discuss his or her ethics (or lack thereof). One character is best, but certainly no more than two. Look at the character and decide if she or he is a static or dynamic character, a round or flat character, and does this character act as a foil to another character or vice-versa. After your brainstorming, you will develop a claim based on your discovery. This claim will be your thesis. It will drive your essay.

What will this essay look like and what are the requirements?

• Your essay needs to have five paragraphs: an introduction, three body paragraphs that support and your thesis with lots of details and examples, and a conclusion that reminds your readers of your thesis claim and its importance. This will take at least two very full pages in MLA format—likely more!
• You will need to have several pieces of textual evidence that support each of your topic sentence claims. Some will be references to larger passages while others will be actual quotes.
• You will need a works cited page for the book. We will do this together in class. At the same time, we will go over how to handle the paraphrases, summaries, and quotes you use as evidence.

What will my writing process look like?

• Free-write about your character and list those things that make him or her static, dynamic, round, flat, a foil . . . List the page numbers that contain the textual evidence.
• Develop a claim that will become your thesis.
• Develop an Audience Discovery document.
• Use the thesis to create a detailed writing plan.
• Draft your essay for workshop. (global—content)
• Comment on peer essays in workshop.
• Respond to peer comments.
• Revise using peer comments and your response.
• Another workshop. (semi-local—paragraph level)
• Another revision.
• Editing (local) workshop—read aloud to hear the essay; look at sentence level.
• Your own workshop—backwards read of the essay.

Some of these may take a couple of days to go over. That’s ok. We all are working together.

For additional details about the writing process, refer to your Writing Process Guide on the online syllabus documents page. Your calendar will provide due dates for each step. We will continue to work on grammar and punctuation details a little at a time in class as we work through the process together.