Assignment:
Essay Topics and Instructions
• Formatting requirements: Use standard MLA document formatting requirements. Google "OWL Purdue MLA documentation style" and click on the first link for a sample and detailed information.
• Length: 500 to 1,000 words, not including the Works Cited page
• Assignment Objectives: Your goal is to apply a critical strategy to a work and to develop and support a specific thesis. Your essay should be unified, developed, organized, and coherent, and should use sophisticated sentence style while meeting the demands of standard English. I've given you specific topics to get you started thinking, along with plenty of handouts to help guide you.
Instructions: Choose ONE of the topics below on the poems that have been assigned over the last several weeks and write a double-spaced essay (500 to 1,000 words) supporting an interpretation of the poem. Use the sample essays in your Literature text, as well as the handouts as guides. You can choose a formalist approach or any of the contextual approaches but be sure to support your thesis with evidence from the poem itself. Also, be sure that you explain how that evidence fits your interpretation. You are trying to convince your reader that your way of approaching the poem is a reasonable one.
Here are some possible topics, although you can choose another way of approaching your poem if you'd like, as long as you can make a good case for your claims:
1) Examine Theodore Roethke's diction in "My Papa's Waltz." How and why does he use negative and positive connotations in his word choices to describe the young boy's experience?