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Hi English 85ers! Hope you are all having a good fourth week. This email contains a lot information that you should refer to while writing your papers-I recommend that you PRINT this and keep it handy.

I know that paper-writing is a source of anxiety for many of you; the thoughts below-along w/ anything else I give you-are meant to help you see more clearly what our expectations are for the paper and how you can meet them.

DEFINING YOUR TERMS

NOTE that on the essay prompts page, Mott has written "If you use a catchy abstraction such as 'myth of individualism' or even just plain 'individualism,' explain in a brief sentence or two how you are using it." Make sure that you have DEFINED YOUR TERMS in your paper. By this, we mean that if you think about a big concept like "social order," "community," "emotion," or even "femininity" and asked five different people how they defined it, you'd likely get five slightly different answers. In your paper, we need to know how that term is going to be defined in your paper-this should be stated upfront (in your introduction or at least first paragraph) and you should be consistent with this definition throughout your paper. Avoid using a dictionary to define your terms; it is better to use the text itself to craft definitions crucial to your argument. In other words, don't ask yourself what you and Webster's think the definition of morality, for example, should be-ask yourself how the text defines morality.

WHAT'S AT STAKE

We are NOT asking you to make a sweeping argument about society, culture, or history in general-such a project would be impossible in 4 pages and would also take you away from what should be your main focus-the novel at hand. The "so what" in your thesis statement should discuss why your idea is important to the novel as a whole. You should not, for example, make a broad argument about how women were treated in the 18th century; what you could do is make a specific argument about how this issue is addressed in Charlotte Temple and what kind of position the novel might be taking on this issue. As you look at the thesis statement handout, remember the window exercise from the first day of class-in literary analysis, we are tying together the "how" and the "what" as we think about the "so what?"

LECTURE AND THINKING OF TOPICS

As we have mentioned, if you choose to write on an idea addressed in lecture, you need to be careful to make sure your argument is NOT the same one advanced in lecture and that you don't use the exact same evidence. We are interested in your original ideas and interpretations on a text, not whether you can regurgitate what you heard and copied down. Many of you have expressed that it is difficult to think of ideas separate from those discussed in lecture. If that's the case for you, you might want to check out the Study Guides that Prof. Mott posts on the E-campus website-you will see the variety of themes that can be discussed there. Also, think about how the different prompts can relate to the different novels.

EXPLICATIONS - FEEDBACK AND PRACTICE

I hope Prof. Mott's lecture yesterday on pg. 7 of Turn of the Screw was helpful for all of you all to see how each word in a passage can have meaning. Please go to http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~melanieh/eng85fall03/week4exp.html for feedback on your extra credit explications, last week's in-class explications, and a passage for those of you who want to do extra practice on your own time. I have also posted some brief thoughts on how explication relates to paper-writing.

A FEW LAST WORDS

If you haven't already, I highly recommend that you see the writing tutors in 228 Covel Commons (call 310-206-1491 to make an appointment). Even if they haven't read or heard of the novel you're writing on, the tutors there are trained to help you at any stage in the writing process and to improve your own process.

Finally, I know that English 85 can be a challenging course for many of you and that literary analysis may feel like foreign ground. I really appreciate how hard you've all been working-keep it up, and PLEASE be sure to talk to me if you have specific concerns about the course or if you have suggestions as to how I can help you better understand the processes of explication or paper-writing.

Looking forward to seeing you Friday,
Melanie