Develop a thesis about your chosen selection that you can use (mostly) evidence from the story and some sources to support it. In other words, you do NOT merely summarize, or even just explain the story, but think deeply about a text through all of its parts (which you’ve already done in your analysis/prewriting discussion). Then you generate an arguable claim that becomes a thesis for a polished essay.

1. Write one of three character-focused approaches:

An exploration of a character’s worldview and its consequences.
An exploration of a character’s development from beginning to end.
An exploration of the nature and significance of a conflict between two or more characters.

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1. Analyze your initial response (which you did in a response discussion) think through the elements, (which you did in your analysis prewriting), and finally, pose motive questions, like

What element(s) or aspect(s) of this work might a casual reader misinterpret?
What interesting paradox(es), contradiction(s), or tension(s) do you see in the text?
What seemingly minor, insignificant, easily ignored elements or aspect(s) of this text might in fact have major significance?

1. Use research to generate, refine, or test a thesis (described in your text on 1892-1897). Remember, you are not writing a full research essay! Instead, use research to refine or test a thesis or to develop a thesis from biographical material or a topic of a critical essay (which you credit in your paper).
2. Another approach (not found in your text) is, to begin with a topic raised by the story—love, growing up, loneliness, or gender roles, for example. Sometimes these topics can come directly from critical theory—race, class, historical, or environmental issues, for example. Then consider what the story says about the topic (which can be considered a theme or sub-theme). In this approach, you next identify subtopics that have to do with the theme you’ve discovered.

For example, a theme like “Difficult war experiences isolate soldiers upon homecoming might have subtopics like war’s effect on intimate relationships, the effect on friend/family relationships, the effect on a soldier’s physical health, the effect on psychological health (this might have subtopics within it). Ideas like these can become the paragraph topics, just as, in your prewriting discussion, ideas like symbolism, setting, or characters became topics. In fact, the two approaches are often blended. For example, a paragraph describing the psychological effects of war might use evidence explaining the story’s symbols pertinent to war.

Thesis: The assertions you develop as answers to any of the above approaches are your working thesis.

Examples from some the topic areas above (more found in your text):

The consequences of X’s miserly behavior are extreme to reinforce a simplistic moral.
X’s development in the story is so minimal that he may be characterized as a flat character.
Overcoming the strained communication between X & Y is the true resolution in this story, not the characters’ homecoming.
Not understanding the full nature of a maid in Elizabethan English could cause readers to misunderstand the conflict in X.
More discussion of arguable thesis statements and their supporting claims and paragraph development is found in your text reading.

Samples: Here is the sample of a final essay on “Good Country People”–the earlier prewriting revised into a thesis-driven essay with source use. You can see in the text that several sentences from the prewriting were used. Your own prewriting, depending on the thesis you develop, maybe a good draft for your essay or only prewriting/pre-thinking for a very different paper. See MLA manuscript format guidelines in the Course Directions folder.

Your text has a fiction essay sample based on Raymond Carver’s Cathedral beginning on page 49. This sample does not have source use but has junctures where source use would have been possible, perhaps theory related to depression or alcoholism, biographical criticism related to Carver’s own alcoholism, or using literary criticism related to Raymond Carver’s depressive, alcoholic characters generally.

Notes about Research: All of the approaches above can be augmented with the source material (you are not writing a full source-based essay). Approaches 1-3 could use the literary scholarship and theoretical (from elements of critical theory), historical, or biographical sources. Approach 4 is also particularly suited to applied non-literary theory, like looking up the psychological stages of grief to apply to a character. You must use at least one source per essay and at least four sources overall for your finished anthology project, so it’s good to try to incorporate at least two sources per essay as you go.

Even if you wrote in your Weebly introduction that you appreciate a feminist approach to works, you might not find a feminist criticism for the work you’ve selected, which is fine. You can take a feminist approach to discover your thesis while incorporating available biographical or other research, or through applying a feminist critic’s theory (researching and applying the theory itself as one of your sources). Your literary theory preferences do not have to relate to the essay, however.

Follow the Conventions Writing about Literature

See text description of conventions regarding tenses, titles, and names (pages 1891-1892).
Include author’s full name, the title of the story in quotation marks, and the essay’s topic and thesis in the introduction.
Have clear topic sentences that relate to your thesis (often, related words and synonyms from your thesis will appear in body paragraphs—miserly in the thesis? Then perhaps, begrudging, ungenerous, hesitant, hoarding, etc. to explain evidence in the body of the essay).
Avoid use of I or You. Avoid reader-response comments like “This passage reminds me of when we would go to the beach as a family.”
Use page number after direct quotes or closely paraphrased passages using MLA in-text citations: “Quotation” (#). Try to use a variety of quotation introduction formats.
Do not try to cram all your thoughts into five paragraphs! Use an appropriate number of paragraphs for the topics you have. Correspondingly, avoid a formulaic three-point thesis. Instead try for a global thesis and as many paragraphs or topics as you need to support it. Writing an outline of supporting paragraph ideas (even if there are three) does not always require that they need to be listed in your thesis.
Include a brief conclusion, recapping your point(s) and/or developing the implications of your thesis idea.