Due Date: Final draft due Aug 12. with final exam.

View General Draft Comments for Everyone In Advance.

Formal Prompt: Choose one or two assigned texts or authors and, focusing on a limited number of problems, connections, themes, or issues you find relevant, write a 5-7 page essay that is insightful and specific in its thesis, easy to follow in structure, and clear and consistent in style. Your essay must follow MLA* (Modern Language Association) style -- this means, among others things, that you must observe the following formatting rules:

observe proper margins
double space your text and quotations, and no extra spaces beyond that
number your essay's pages at top right
properly cite sources -- including those in an anthology
offer a separate "works cited" page, even if an anthology is the only text

*Every major should have the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th. edition. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: MLA, 2003.

Topic Suggestions--Others are Welcome

0. Study questions can sometimes be developed into paper topics.

1. Choose one romantic author and explore that author's treatment of nature, imagination, language, the power of poetry, or whichever romantic concerns you consider most appropriate.

2. Compare Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads to Peacock's "The Four Ages of Poetry." In what ways do they differ or agree on issues related to the value of poetry and the function of poets?

3. In his Autobiography, J.S. Mill deals with the influence of Benthamite principles on the formation of his character early in life. Explore the way Mill analyzes the inadequacies in his education and early reformist goals, and how he explains the transformation he underwent after his breakdown.

4. Tennyson's In Memoriam traces the speaker's attempt to deal with grief over a friend's death. Explore his poetic strategies in making this attempt. A few prominent ones might be the speaker's dramatization of his difficulties in finding language adequate to his emotional states and conveying a movement from near despair towards optimism and faith.

5. Explore one or more poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins in light of romantic poetics (expressive theory, the significance of nature, etc.). To what extent would you argue that Hopkins is, as some critics have called him, a "late romantic"? To what extent would you characterize him differently, and why?

Tips: The point of a college-level essay isn't to offer an exhaustive commentary about everything connected with the work or author chosen. Neither is it to make vague comments that have little or nothing to do with the specific language of the text or with issues directly connected to the text. Rather, the point is to examine your text/s in some detail on the specific issues or problems or themes you want to write about. What keeps readers interested? Well, the kind of paper in which the writer is clearly leading them to genuine insights based on a patient, well-structured analysis of particular passages (and flexible points of comparison, for comparative essays) in the chosen work/s. Your essay should make me want to go back and reread the book or poem you're writing about -- not necessarily out of mere admiration for it, but simply because you've made it an interesting proposition for me to do so, for whatever reasons you have explored.

Thesis Development: In the drafting stages of a deductive essay, the thesis in the first paragraph is often vague--more like a general topic than a specific argument. In a "deductive" essay, one states claims at the outset and then explores them; however, insights tend to develop inductively--i.e. what the writer wants to say emerges only gradually, and becomes sharpest towards the end of the paper. The most efficient way to sharpen an argument is to look over what you write in the middle and conclusion of your essay, tie it all together concisely into a few sentences that will serve as your thesis. That way, you turn an inductive rough draft into a deductive final draft, and avoid allowing initially rough or vague claims to force you down a path of thought you would rather abandon in favor of better insights and connections.

What am I going to do with rough drafts? If you give me a rough draft, I will read it carefully and offer substantive comments. I prepare continually and intensively for courses, which is how I can best help everyone. In general, I suspect that detailed grammar-markings do little more than encourage students to turn in hasty drafts so I can "fix" them. I'll help with substance and structure; editing for grammar and style is something you must do on your own, or it won't help much. What eventually makes a good writer is a patient reader with a fine eye for stylistic detail and the willingness to keep writing until real progress occurs. Still, I have prepared extensive study guides on style and grammar -- please see the guides on the syllabus page.

Research and "Works Cited": Purely optional--do it or don't do it as you see fit. The primary thing is to attend closely to the assigned texts. If you like to do outside reading and work with theoretical approaches, that's good, but this assignment is not not technically a research paper. Even if you don't incorporate any outside research, you still need to include a separate "Works Cited" page at the end of the essay--that is because you will, of course, be citing at least one of the assigned texts. Use MLA guidelines for citing sources.