œWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Research essay

Length of Paper: 5 to no more than 6 pages (not counting your Works Cited page, which will be the last page.)

  You are also required to cite from the primary source (the story or play) and to cite this work on your Works Cited page although the story/play/poetry citation does not count as an outsidesourceremember, you will need to have four outside sources.

 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?dream or reality?

****This is definitely NOT a biography of an authors life or works.  It is a critical analysis of one work.  This means that you will read the interpretations or analyses that others (critics, often English professors) have made about this work.  Some of their analyses will be totally new to you and others might be similar to what you have discovered on your own.  You need to find a way to organize your thoughts and their thoughts into a well-organized research paper. 

 You will need to cite from a minimum of four sources, not including our textbook or dictionaries and encyclopedias.  At least two of your sources must be from School Databases. You will also be expected to cite from a combination of books and magazine/journal articles, information from School Database (at least two). 

 Your assignment is absolutely not a biography of the life of an author.  You will be reading critical essays of literary analysis.  You will look at how people other than yourself (literary critics) have read/analyzed a specific story, or play by one author.  You will then explain your opinion on the various readings of the piece of literature and come to a consensus on the meaning of the literature.  You will agree with some critics; you will disagree with others.  Some of them will make you think about the literature in a new way.  You will come up with a thesis statement based on the total of your findings about that piece of literature.  Again, this will not be a listing of quotations.  All quotations chosen must work to explain the point (your thesis) that you want to make about the various readings of the piece of literature.  What you ultimately believe (your opinion) about the meaning of the piece of literature after reading the various views will be your thesis statement.

 You also are expected to have a Works Cited page.  Your Works Cited page will include all works you have cited in parentheses in the body of your paper. Your Works Cited page will be listed alphabetically according to authors last nameplease also consult the Works Cited handout, your Use of Quotations handout, your Incorporation of Quotations handout (all quotations must of course be incorporated into your sentences), and a good handbook or the Purdue Owl site (find link under Content).  

 You will follow the same rules of MLA style for parenthetical documentation (NAME 1) as you have done all semester long for paraphrases and for quotations. All quotations must have a source (author page) listed in parentheses.  If you have learned this information through your sources, you must cite the source.  You seriously jeopardize your grade by not citing sources, or by not citing sources correctly.  

 ****Direct, word-for-word Qs incorporated into a sentence are required.  Paraphrases are not to be used.  Two Qs, analyzed or explained, per body paragraph are expected.  You also need to use a minimum of one Q from the literature and one Q from one of your new research sources per body paragraph.

 While you may use one of the readings in our text as a starting point, you will be required to go far beyond your text in order to find the information that you will use to make and prove your point.  Please be as concrete as possible in trying to argue your point; be specific rather than general.  The sources you cite from our literature anthology do not count as one of your four required outside sources.

 You must have a thesis statement as is expected in every paperyou will be using the statements of analysis that you find in your research to make a point about the topic as well as a series of other related points in your subsequent paragraphs.  In other words, you will use the quotations and facts learned from the articles to make related points and you must react to the critical position or attitude (positively or negatively) in your paper.

!!!!!    !!!!!!   I HAVE PROVIDED TWO SOURCES THAT MUST BE USED !!!!!