Order instructions

• Absolutely follow Roberts’ guidelines for writing your essay, regardless of which literary element you choose to analyze;
• Include a thesisthat announces your reading of the text and forecasts your interpretation;
• Evaluate and analyze; don’t judge or offer opinions(this isn’t about how you feel about a piece, it’s about how you think it works and why). Avoid trite qualitative statements like “The author does a good job” of something. That doesn’t say anything, really, and it isn’t the point of the assignment. Instead, make observations that you connect to examples, such as “The author uses the color red to create a sense of foreboding…”;
• Provide an appropriately concise rhetorical contextthat helps your intended readers understand the issue or subject discussed in the text;
• Include quotations and examplesfrom the text and the two academic sources you’ve researched that support the claims you make in your analysis of the text. Your quotations should be cohesive; in other words, remember that whenever you use quotations, you are using them to support what YOU are saying. Don’t just plop them into your paragraphs—introduce them so they fit with the flow of your own thoughts and voice;
• Be written in academic voice(Avoid first person: me, I, our, we. Do not use second person: you, your);
• Always credit sources appropriately;
• Be grammatically correct. Your writing should follow the structure of Standard American Edited English (the parts of speech and their functions, their relationship to each other, word order in sentences, the parts of a sentence and how they are put together, e.g., subject, predicate, objects, etc.);
• Be mechanically correct. Your writing should follow the conventions of Standard American Edited English with regard to punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc.;
• Follow MLA formatting standardsfor the heading, pagination, internal documentation, and Works Cited. For explicit instructions on how to format your paper using MLA style as well as Works Cited entry samples, go the MLA Documentation Resources link on the Blackboard menu.

MLA Format

As noted above, your paper should use MLA format. If you don’t know exactly how to do this, go the MLA Documentation Resources link on the Blackboard menu and download the MLA Citations and Formatting Guide–there’s also a link to download it at the top of this assignment under the title. The basic formatting guidelines are as follows:

• Standard 8 ½ x 11 format with black ink
• Double-spaced, with 1” margins, 12 pt font (Times New Roman)
• Include an MLA-style heading on the first page
• Include your name and page number in the right-side header on each page after the first
• Include an MLA-style Works Cited page that appears at the end of the paper and is formatted correctly