Women and love: Reflection: Your Short Story and Writing Process
Women and love
Reflection: Your Short Story and Writing Process
In this discussion, post your thoughts on the short story you chose for your paper.
Address any areas of the story and/or the theme. Here you can begin a conversation about your story–and engage in conversations about other students’ choices.
You can also reflect on your writing process so far. For example, is anything changing about the way you write?
A Jury of Her Peers” | Susan Glaspell. http://americanliterature.com/author/susan-glaspel…(This is the story I selected for my paper)
Here are some more instructions for this paper:
Section 1. The Writing Process for Literature
READING, THINKING, AND PREWRITING FOR A LITERARY ANALYSIS PAPER
A grain of real knowledge, of genuine uncontrollable conviction, will outweigh a bushel of adroitness; and to produce persuasion there is one golden principle of rhetoric not put down in the books—to understand what you are talking about.
—John Seeley (1834-1895)
The prewriting stage of the literary analysis paper is critical to its success. From the very beginning, you should plan to spend some time on developing, drafting, and revising this paper. Be sure to look at your due date and plan your schedule to accommodate the time it will take to write an effective and well developed paper. It is important for you to schedule time to perform all your work on the paper as well as time to reflect upon it in between drafts and revisions. You will be working on your paper in the classroom, broken down into components, so you will have time to work on it prior to the due date. Your instructor does not expect you to write a paper as complex as a literary analysis the night before it is due. Neither should you.
Prewriting: If your instructor provides a specific topic for a paper, you can begin immediately. However, sometimes an instructor will give a broad assignment and require you to develop your own topic. Whether you have a specific topic or a broad one, be sure you bring in prewriting strategies. If you are given an open topic, practice some prewriting techniques, such as brainstorming, clustering, listing, and so forth, narrow the topic. If necessary, revisit prewriting techniques found in Drawer 1 of the Writer’s Toolbox.
Reading: It will be vitally important that you read both the short story and the topic for your paper very carefully before you begin to write a paper. You will be practicing some strategies for this type of close and careful reading during Week 1 of the course. Apply those strategies to your first assignment. If necessary, revisit strategies for critical reading found in Drawer 1 of the Writer’s Toolbox.
Once you have chosen your short story, review the topic of the paper again. Make sure you understand how you will use the evidence in the short story to support your idea. Then move into setting up the paper: identify the purpose and the audience.
Purpose and Audience
Establishing a working purpose and sense of audience for your literary analysis is crucial. Take time right at the beginning of your work to identify these two key components to your paper. You will want to remember that the reader of your paper has read the short story. Therefore, you do not have to provide a lot of summary. Instead, think about how your paper will help its reader understand the story in a particular way: a way that responds to the topic of the paper.
Key to Choosing an Effective Literary Analysis Topic: Keep it real!
Choose a topic that evolves out of the short story as a literary work so that it can be developed with evidence from the story, not just a personal preference based on your opinion or your anecdotal experience.
You will want to avoid putting in your opinion,with statements such as “This story reminds me of my own life.” If that is the case, consider what it reminds you of, say your first love or your first job. That underlying idea will help you to shape a thesis for your audience, who will want to be reading about the piece of literature, not your anecdotal evidence.
You may react very strongly to the literary work, but remember your audience: they have read the story and have a basic understanding of it. Your job is to write a paper that will transform their view of the story or help them to understand it further.
Once you have a topic, the steps below give you a functional framework to begin your task.
Create a statement that narrows the topic and purpose. Walk yourself through the following qualifying statement to shape your purpose of the main idea and the whole paper:
I want to demonstrate the theme of _____________________________.
Next, consider what you already know or need to know about the theme. The journalist’s questions are an excellent way to start the flow of ideas at this stage. Journalists ask and answer questions to generate ideas to get their writing started, such as who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Here are some sample questions. You may not use all of them, and your actual questions may change to fit your subject matter, but they’re a place to start.
What should the paper accomplish?
What do the characters do to demonstrate the theme?
Why is understanding this theme important to understanding the story?
Why does this theme need to be discussed?
Who cares about the theme in the story?
When does the theme reveal itself in the story?
How can the problem or issue raised by the theme be resolved?
The answers to these questions should help you narrow your purpose. Your main idea should be limited to a statement that evidence from the story can support. You should not have to bring in any outside evidence or justification at all, including your opinion.
Then start reading the story carefully, again, to find the answers to your questions. You want to understand all sides of the topic in order to be able to present compelling information to develop your point.
Once you have clarified your general purpose and developed a working viewpoint for your audience, begin crystallizing your main idea into a working thesis statement.
Please move to the next section on developing the thesis statement.
Answer preview to Women and love: Reflection: Your Short Story and Writing Process
APA
315 words
