Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to expand your
understanding of a text (or texts) of Science Fiction literature and to build upon your
understanding of research methodologies.
Assignment: Write a thesis-driven essay on any
text(s) that we have covered in
class. Incorporate at least four secondary sources in your analysis of
these texts(s).
Ways to
Proceed: You may examine the text from the author's point of view
(biography), from a historical standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, or
from any other critical standpoint that strikes your fancy. Feel free to
be creative with this assignment. You are only limited in this assignment by the text(s) you choose
and by your own imagination.
Criteria
for Evaluation: Your research paper
should be typed, double-spaced, one inch margins (top, bottom, left, right),
twelve point font (Courier, Arial, etc.). It
should
be between 8-12 pages, including your Annotated Works Cited. I expect you to
use the MLA writing guide
that is provided for you on this web cite to format your essay. At the minimum, I expect you
to to have the First Page formatted like an MLA Document, to have a header
containing your last name and page number, to
have proper one inch margins, and to have an Annotated Works Cited page that lists the
texts that you used for this assignment.
An Annotated Works Cited is just like a Works Cited page
(i.e., it is a page that lists all of the works that you quoted, summarized, or
paraphrased in your essay; some people call this a Bibliography). However,
each
“Works
Cited” entry will have a brief annotation (note, summary, précis,
abstract) after each reference. This
annotation should be between 50 and 150 words in length.
It will describe in brief summary what you have read.
For example, if you were doing your essay on Hemingway’s “A Clean
Well-Lighted Place,” the last page of your essay should look something like
this:
(This
represents the top edge of the last page of your essay)
Smith
9
Annotated
Works Cited
Hemingway,
Ernest. “A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place.” A Pocketful of Prose.
Vol.
2. Ed. David Madden. Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
Hemingway short story in which two waiters, a young
one and an older one, discuss the last customer of the
evening, an old man. The young waiter hates the old
man to the point of being rude to him, notes that the
old man tried to kill himself the week before, and
wishes that the old man would go home.
The older
waiter suggests that sometimes one needs a clean,
well-lighted place to make sense of oneself. The old
man walks home with dignity; the young waiter goes home to his wife; and the older waiter goes to another
café where he notes that the place is clean, but is not
so well-lighted. The story comes to a
climax with the
older waiter saying the Lord’s Prayer with the word
nada in place of almost everything in the prayer. Then
the
older waiter stays up until dawn, when he can
finally fall asleep.
(This
represents the bottom edge of the last page of your essay)
The
preceding example of an
“Annotated Works Cited” page shows a Works Cited entry containing an
annotation with
153 words. It might be a little lengthy, but it is better to err on
the side of caution and be too wordy in such an instance than to be too brief
and risk not summarizing the story well enough. For this assignment, you
should plan on using as much outside research as you feel will be necessary to
develop your critical perspective adequately. Typically, I would expect
between two and four secondary sources (i.e., works other than the primary
sources written by the author that you are examining) for a project of this
length. I do not expect perfection
on this assignment. However, I DO expect that
“A” students will make a valiant effort at least TO STRIVE for
perfection. Your grade on this assignment depends as much on
your writing ability as it does on your effort. The better students in my
classes are, almost without exception, those students who seriously take to task
the prodigious effort of writing a quality essay. I am sure that those of
you who earnestly wish to succeed on this assignment
will do so. Good
luck on this assignment.
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