Presentation and Format
Essays and drafts must be typed, double spaced, stapled together, with pages numbered.
Use margins of one inch on all sides; use 12-point type, and no Chicago font for a regular essay. Include at the top right corner: your name, the course number, and the instructor's name.
You may use the backs of previously used paper for drafts; final version may be printed on both sides of the sheet.
Essays must have a title, though they don't have to have a cover sheet. Your title should not be the title of the work you are studying. For example, "Death of a Salesman" is not an acceptable title for an essay on Death of a Salesman. Titles should give an idea of what you have to say in your essay, inform or excite the reader, intrigue or guide readers about what they will read. Titles can help set the tone or expectations; indicate themes; or point to ideas. Titles can be a powerful element in the essay. Essays need to match up to the title, so change the title if your essay ends up veering, or centering in a new direction.
References should follow the format for MLA style as explained in the MLA Handbook or your Bedford Handbook. When you refer to an assigned text we are using in class, such as Death of a Salesman, just use the title of the work or shortened title and page number as in (Salesman, p. 25). In scene journals, when discussing the assigned scene, references after quotes are not necessary, but if you quote from other passages, provide page number, or act, scene, and line.
Use the parenthetical style within the paper, and at the end provide a complete bibliography of works cited with full information about author, title, place of publication, date, and inclusive page numbers. Follow MLA guidelines for citing sources. If you wish, you may also provide a list of works consulted that you may have used, but did not quote from directly.
Written work should be neatly presented. In any written exercise, neatness, readability, clarity, accuracy, and expressiveness will be important. Take time to edit and proofread your work for spelling, grammar, style, and content. Grammar errors and stylistic infelicities will be noted, and you will be asked to learn the correct rules, using your handbook. To gain writing proficiency, you need to have mastered a style that is correct as well as, most importantly, lucid and well-developed.
All work is to be done under provisions of the Oberlin College Honor Code: I will assume that all work is your own unless otherwise indicated (as in the case of group work such as scene presentations).
Quality of work
The goals of the essays are to explore and discuss a well-focused issue, topic, idea, or thesis about a single script in relation to performance interpretation. You need to acknowledge the difference between the scripted words and what they might "mean" or "do" when performed.
One objective for each essay will be to develop the idea or thesis through close analysis of particular passages. All interpretations should be based on one or more passages (long or short) , can help illustrate or show what you are referring to. All quotations should be analyzed or commented on. The essays should have a strong textual center, whether "the text" in question is a stage production, a video of a film or TV production, the script, or a scene performed in class.
All essays will be expected to develop interpretations, readings, or analysis. Descriptions, summaries, or plot rehearsals are to be used only for explanations. Your goal is not to tell your readers what they themselves can easily know about the work. Very little plot review is needed when the audience you are writing for -- in this case, the class (meaning classmates, teacher, and writing consultants) -- knows the work well. Sometimes one does need to set the scene, explain the given circumstances, call attention to the context of the passage being discussed, so summaries and descriptions are often useful. Such uses are to assist in developing a larger idea, interpretation, or analysis and are never the goal of a paragraph or the essay.
Essays should have as their goal to tell the reader something you find significant about the work you discuss, and the essay should make clear, perhaps most especially in the concluding section, how this topic is significant. What is the value or point of having shown us what you have pointed out and discussed? Indicate how your analysis, reading, or argument contributes to our understanding of themes, characters, props, performance possibilities, authorial intentions, history of productions and what they show, etc.
Good essays will show your engagement with the work in some detail, convey a sense of discovery, and present a coherent, well-integrated discussion. All paragraphs should function clearly to explain, illustrate, or develop ideas. The main point of each paragraph should be easily discerned from a thesis or central statement at some point in the paragraph, and all paragraphs should be tightly unified and form an integral whole. Paragraphs should relate clearly to each other and have a clear function in the larger paper -- to introduce, to move to a new point, to illustrate a point, to argue a claim in a particular way, to summarize, to move toward a large conclusion, or some other appropriate function. Think about what your paragraph does as much as what it is about. Ask of every paragraph: what is this paragraph saying by what it covers, how it is organized, where it is situated, and what is its function in my essay?
The conclusion should not be a bare summary of what has come before any more than the introduction should just baldly state what you are going to do in the following pages. Some guidelines to what lies ahead can be useful in the introduction just as some review of major ideas can be helpful in the conclusion. Both entities should have larger goals, however, for which summaries and reviews are only contributory strategies. Conclusions can show the greater significance of the exercise just performed; move to a new level of understanding; integrate or draw together major threads to arrive at a synthesis, or conclusion not yet reached, stated, or possible until the end of essay.
Introductions need not state the entire thesis of the essay, although many good essays can begin this way. If the essay explores a problem, you not reach a conclusion until the investigation is complete. For such an essay, the introduction appropriately lays out the issue, articulates the problem or question.
Grades and comments
The first essay will not bear the grade I place in my gradebook in pencil. You may ask me what this tentative grade is, but this first tentative grade can figure in your final grade in different ways depending on your improvement over the semester, your consistency in other work, your efforts to develop as a writer in the course. The emphasis for you will be to make progress in the course from the written comments on the returned essay and from conferences with writing consultants and professor about the essay. The essay will be one step in a process of writing and learning, and the comments will be used to open up questions about objectives, goals, and levels of understanding, achievement that are expected, appropriate, or desirable. Judging the paper in terms of a grade will be less useful than considering the ways that you attain your goals, ways you express your ideas, and how well your readers understand your ideas and benefit from reading your work. You should use the comments to reconsider the effectiveness of your writing intellectually, stylistically. They are not final statements, nor is a grade a final judgment. Many comments are "conversational," responses to ideas and insights, and are not evaluative or corrective. Many comments are suggestions and questions to help you see where a reader has problems in understanding or poses alternatives that could be clearer, more concise, more articulate, or the like. Corrections will show how an alternative is more readable, grammatical, or helps advance your goals better. Consider carefully what is modeled in corrections, for they will be models for how you might solve or treat a particular problem.
A premium will be placed on: