Notes on mini-essay 1

You can pick up your first mini-essay from me either in the Open Book Cafe (see hours below) or after lecture this afternoon.

The mini-essays were, on the whole, very strong; the mean grade was 89/100 (2.2/2.5) with a standard deviation of 5.5 (0.14). However, don't let the strength of your work here shove you onto laurels: in the past several years, the first full-length essays of the semester have averaged significantly lower, in the range of 83 or 82.

In order to make sure that the first essays this semester are different, here are a few general notes about weaknesses I noticed in the mini-essays that I would love to see the full-length essays avoid:

• Introductions should be as direct as possible. Broad statements about Shakespeare or his plays are only useful if (1) you are offering a completely new broad statement of your own devising, and (2) you are doing so at the beginning of a 500-page scholarly publication over the course of which you will prove your original and sweeping generalization.

  In a short essay (say, anything fewer than 10 pages long) it is best to begin with the striking, original observation that is specific to the text with which you are working. Ideally, this should be an observation that will be completely new to me. Examples:

  • The moon plays a central role in directing the lunatics in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (Lydia, 315)
  • Vision, simply the faculty of seeing with the eyes, determines what we perceive. However, it is the mind that determines how and why we register events the way we do (Sam, 307)
  • Theseus's speech to begin the denouement of A Midsummer Night's Dream--the beginning of the end, if you will--sets up another pair of contrasting ideas through his use of the word "strange" (Raechel, 315)
    

  The idea here is to swiftly establish the terms of your argument.
  

• Conclusions should bring all the components of your analysis together to make a new and thematically significant point. In other words, your conclusion should explain why all of your literary analysis was worth reading. Examples (these are key sentences from longer conclusions):
  • Like the rest of the play, the only purpose [Puck's] speech serves is to stir a sense of uneasiness and questioning into its audience (Nina, 307)
  • The "idle" theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not void of worth or usefulness in the sense that the theme is trivial and of no importance, but rather that an attempt to control the theme is a worthless and useless pursuit (Jordan, 307)
  • People want to love because it is so out of their control. People wan power so that they do not feel so controlled themselves. . . By pointing to their uselessness, their idleness, Shakespeare has shown us that love and power are actually very important (Shannon, 315)
  • Shakespeare believes, even at this point in time, that imagination is the portal into the human mind, and that by breaking down the barriers that surround the human mind one can discover truth in any idea, shape or image that connect directly with reality (Kenyatta, 317)
    
  
  
• Be as specific as possible throughout your essay. This is perhaps the most important point here. If you are explaining that one idea connects to another, explain how those ideas connect. If you are arguing that a certain interpretation is significant to our reading of the text, explain why it is significant. You can think of this like showing your work when you answer a math problem: I want to be able to see nearly all the steps of your thinking process, and I want you to hunt for nuances in the connections between ideas.
  

The notes above are the most significant things I have to say about your essays. Specific language, direct introductions and insightful conclusions will do more for your grade than all the proofreading in the world. Here, though, are a few minor things to proofread for:

• Mark line breaks when you quote verse with slashes and retain original capitalization, e.g. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more fair, and with a lower chance / Of precipitation in the late afternoon."
  
• When a quotation ends with a period or a comma, that period or comma should go inside the quotation mark. (This is different in Britain--if you read a lot of British fiction you'll see authors doing this in the exact opposite way.) Hence: Theseus refers to "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet," three people he would rather not invite over for tea.
• Don't spell out the act, scene, and line(s) to which you refer--using the standard shorthand (ACT.scene.line-line, e.g. V.i.3-7) is fine.
• Likewise, don't worry about spelling out the full titles of the plays unless the title is only one word (e.g. Macbeth and The Tempest)--I'm fine with MSND, H5, and MoV. If you do spell out the title, don't forget to underline or italicize it.