This morning, after I collect your Check, Please! worksheets for lesson four, I will return your drafts, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising your analyses on your laptops and tablets. Because next week is spring break, you will have two additional weeks to continue your revision work before you submit the assignment to Blackboard and publish it as a WordPress blog entry. The due date is Wednesday, March 6 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, March 8 (before class). Directions for submitting your analysis are included on your assignment sheet and on the Blackboard submission site.
As you continue to revise analysis, consider visiting the Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.
To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your literacy narrative, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, February 8.
Parethetical Citations for Your Analysis
In your analysis, you will include parenthetical citations for quotations and paraphrases. Since you are writing a textual analysis, I recommend quoting rather than paraphrasing because the writer’s particular word choices are vital to the text’s overall effect. If your subject is one of the unpaginated texts (“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” or “The Falling Man”), your parenthetical citations will include the abbreviation par. for paragraph, followed by the paragraph number. If your subject is one of the paginated texts (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Back Story,” or “The School”), your parenthetical citations will include the page number by itself.
Including the author’s last name as well would be redundant because you have established in your introduction that your essay focuses solely on a work by him or her. When you a writing a paper in which you cite multiple sources, you will need to include the author’s last name in the parenthetical citation to clarify which of your sources you are citing.
Here are some examples of how to use parenthetical citations in your analysis:
- The nonsense words “meimslsxp” and “lgpdmurct” underscore his utter lack of comprehension in French class (167).
- The line “‘like Aaron’s rod, with flowers’” alludes to Numbers 17.8 (par. 9).
- He notes that in contrast to the Falling Man, the others who jumped appeared “confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain” (par. 1).
- He employs the “One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . .” count to mark the seconds leading up to Joe Theismann’s career-ending injury (15).
- With the words, “[I]s death that which gives meaning to life?,” the story shifts from realism to surrealism (10).
Works Cited Entries for Your Analysis
At the end of your analysis, you will include an MLA-style work cited entry. Refer to the models below.
Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.
Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.
Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf.
Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009, pp. 15-23.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Note that the sample work cited entries above do not have a hanging indent (because of the limitations of the blog platform), but your MLA-style work cited entries in your Word and PDF files should have a hanging indent. See the entries in my sample papers and on the citations handout that I will distibute in class this morning.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Jane Lucas 