Drama Research Paper

Objective

To examine a play in depth and with reference to existing critical takes on it.

Overview

We are spending the whole semester in active discussions of plays from ancient Greece to the present-day United States and many places in between. This assignment asks you to choose any play on our syllabus and explore it in greater depth. Make an argument about the play in which you interpret its meaning and assert its significance. Cite a minimum of two additional works either about the play or about a related topic.

Procedure

1. Choose one play from the syllabus that interests you and that you look forward to writing about.

2. Read at least two critical works on your chosen play or a related topic and take notes on their main points. Choose articles from the syllabus's list of "Supplemental Readings" and/or explore the library databases on your own. Peer-reviewed books and peer-reviewed journal articles will offer the best, most credible sources for this part of the assignment. Find ways to integrate quotations from them into a larger argument this all your own.

3. Formulate a thesis statement that interprets the play. Try to get beyond widely accepted interpretations and into more arguable territory. It is good, when possible, to challenge your readers' expectations.

4. Break your argument down into between two and four subtopics that are themselves arguable. Think about the arrangement of subtopics that is the most appropriate for the structure of your argument. Avoid a structure that lends itself too much to plot summary.

5. Write a draft of your argument. Go back and reconsider your thesis statement. Revise it.

6. Share a draft with peer editors on 29 November 2023.

7. Be sure to include a Works Cited List on the last page of the paper. This should include an entry for the chosen plan and for at least two critical works.

8. Be sure the paper is at least five pages long. Five pages is the absolute minimum length, and papers under five pages will lose some points.

9. Revise and proofread the paper over the weekend and turn in the final draft on 6 December 2023.

Writing Tips

I have based many of these tips on my comments to you on your previous papers.

1. Keep revising your thesis statement until you have one that is arguable and engaging. It is very common that one must revise the thesis after writing a draft of the argument, and this is a good part of the process. Since your thesis statement should directly address your chosen play, you should probably mention the name of the play in thesis itself.

2. Organize your paper around ideas in your thesis statement and be sure each part of your argument bears some clear relationship to this thesis statement. In other words, be explicit with your reader about how each subtopic contributes to the larger argument.

   Turn each subtopic into a unified paragraph with supporting evidence in the form of quotations. If a paragraph gets too long, break it down into two paragraphs, and make careful use of transitional phrases to keep the overall logic clear to the reader. Consider, too, why the first paragraph in the body of the paper comes first, why the second comes second, etc. If the paragraphs are interchangeable, then consider ways to make them less so.

3. Follow the MLA format when using quotations or paraphrases to support the argument:

   1. Use blended quotations for quotations of four lines or fewer and block quotations for quotations over four lines. Remember the punctuation rules for each type of quotation. If you have questions about this, ask me or look it up in a style manual such as the Little Seagull Handbook. See also the manuscript examples at https://style.mla.org/sample-papers/.

   2. Write a list of Works Cited at the end of the paper. The last name of the author comes first, then the title of the selection and the title of the larger work in which it appears, if applicable. Notice that you should italicize the names of most plays whenever you mention them, including in the list of Works Cited.

      Examples:

      Euripides.ÊThe Bacchae. Trans. Emily Wilson.ÊThe Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Modern Library, 2017, pp. 737-785.

      Kim, Jodi. "Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest." Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, nos. 1-2, 2014, pp. 215-232.

      Nottage, Lynn. Sweat. Theatre Communications Group, 2017.

      Orgel, Steven. "Macbeth and the Antic Round." Macbeth, Second Edition, edited by Robert Miola, W. W. Norton, 2014, pp. 255-269.

      Alphabetize works cited according to the author's last name. There are many other rules for MLA format for peculiar instances that will come up, but the above examples should serve as useful models for the vast majority of cases for this class. Again, do not hesitate to look these rules up in a style manual or credible online source.

4. Grammar points:

   1. Refer to events in a work of literature, including plays, in the present tense. This may sound strange at first, but it is the convention for discussing literature. Notice that we tend to follow this rule in class discussions, too.

   2. Avoid contractions in academic writing. Contractions produce a casual tone and academic work tends to be more formal. The same rule applies to business letters. So, replace they're with they are and replace don't with do not.

   3. A grammatically complete sentence has at least one subject and one verb. If it is missing a subject or a verb, it is a sentence fragment (unless it is a command, but papers do not normally use commands). Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   4. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it.

   5. It is acceptable, on occasion, to use the first-person singular pronoun—I, me, my. However, in many cases, doing so makes your sentence redundant. Everything in your paper is something that you have thought. Thus, writing "I think" at the start of sentence often adds nothing of value to that sentence.

   6. Semicolons (;)—These have two specific purposes. Most commonly, a semicolon replaces a period between sentences as a way to unite the two together (maybe this reinforces a sense of shared purpose or subject matter in these two sentences). In most cases, it is preferable to keep the period and maintain these sentences as two separate sentences. If the sentences on either side of the semicolon are grammatically incomplete, this makes usage of the semicolon incorrect. The less frequent use of the semicolon is as a "strong comma" in a complicated list.

      Example:

      On our trip, we visited New York; Topeka, Kansas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Needles, California; and Los Angeles.

      With this in mind, it is okay to use a semicolon, but do so infrequently.