English 1001—Great American Authors

Assignment Two
Points of Contention

Objective

To produce an argument about a work of literature using specific details from a chosen work as evidence.

Overview

In the first assignment, you had to write three to five pages addressing one quotation from a book. Now, you will need to write a longer paper in response to one of the following topics and covering more than just one quotation. In spite of the more general scope of this assignment, it will still be necessary to focus on particular scenes and quotations from the chosen book in order to make a strong case.

Topics

• Choose a moment of heroism in one of the assigned works, and use specific details from the work to explain what makes that a moment of heroism. In the process, explain how you are defining heroism or how the work in question defines heroism.

• Choose a scene in one of the assigned works in which an effort to be heroic fails, and explain the circumstances that have led to the failure of heroism in that scene. Again, explain how you are defining heroism or how the work in question defines heroism.

• Choose a conflict between two characters in a chosen work, and explain the nature of that conflict. Does the writer invite readers to take sides in this conflict? How do the characters ultimately resolve this conflict? What makes your chosen conflict important to our understanding of the overall story? Focus on a scene in which the conflict reaches a turning point of some kind.

• Examine two to three poems by Langston Hughes, and explain how, taken together, they complicate traditional arguments about race in the United States. Which of Hughes' techniques make his claims persuasive to you? Which traditional viewpoints does Hughes call into question?

• Choose an example from one of the assigned books of difference in gender expectations. Explain how different standards of behavior apply to men and women in the book in question and how the author conveys this discrepancy to readers.

• Choose your own topic for this assignment, but discuss it with me in advance.

Some Writing Tips (Also, review writing tips included with Assignment One)

1. Develop an arguable and interesting thesis statement that applies directly to your chosen character and the work in which he or she appears.

   Example:

   ARGUABLE THESIS (for a different assignment): William Faulkner depicts the community of Jefferson, Mississippi as a petty, prejudiced, na•ve entity, but also the sole determinant of truth in the lives of his characters.

   NOT AN ARGUABLE THESIS: Light in August is about a mulatto man who kills a woman and then dies to atone for his crime.

   ARGUABLE THESIS (again, for a different assignment): Langston Hughes uses humor repeatedly in his poetry in order to prevent his characters from appearing simply as victims of racial disparities in the United States.

   A THESIS THAT IS TOO GENERAL FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT: Communities often mistreat individuals who live in them.

2. Organize your argument around this thesis statement. Think of between two and four sub-points and structure your argument around them.

   Example (for the above Faulkner thesis):

   1. The voice of the community adds commentary to the events it retells.
   2. The voice of the community makes mistakes and does not understand Joe Christmas.
   3. Even with mistakes, the voice of the community still determines what is "true" in the history of Jefferson.

3. Some grammatical tips:

   1. Italicize a word to signal that you are referring to a word out of context, such as when talking about Faulkner's use of the word smart. You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like je ne sais quoi.

   2. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it. Its and whose both deviate from the above rule about possessives.

   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. Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   4. Commas. These are tricky little bits of punctuation, and your best bet is to look them up in a style manual. All the same, there are two things I should mention.

      First, a comma is a very fragile, spindly, little thing, and it is not strong enough to string two grammatically complete sentences together all by itself. When you use a comma for this purpose, it is called a comma splice.

      Example:

      WRONG: I cannot wait for winter to be over, all of this snow is driving me crazy.

      See that poor little comma? It is just dying under the strain.

      CORRECT: I cannot wait for winter to be over; all of this snow is driving me crazy.

      ALSO CORRECT: I cannot wait for winter to be over. All of this snow is driving me crazy.

      Second, if the first word of your sentence is not the subject of the sentence, then it is a good idea to use a comma to separate the subject from whatever precedes it. If it only one word precedes the subject, then this rule is optional, but a whole phrase really does need a comma after it before you get on with the rest of the sentence.

      Example:

      WRONG: In the last days of May I fell into a well.

      CORRECT: In the last days of May, I fell into a well.

      OPTIONAL: Then an army of rescue workers pulled me back out.

      OR: Then, an army of rescue workers pulled me back out.

Grading Standards

In grading this assignment, I will use the following criteria. Late papers will lose points according to how late they are. Papers under five pages long will lose points as well. Consider five to be the absolute, bare minimum for this assignment, and aim for six pages.