Tuesday, March 25, 2014

SOME TIPS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Re: MLA--make sure you have the running header, heading, title, spacing, and margins properly done.  The advantage of a process paper is that another pair of eyes will check you on these basic formatting issue.

2.  Since you are using two sources, you need a Works Cited for this paper.  Do your best research in Perrine and the Purdue OWL for documentation guides; this is part of senior work responsibility vs. being told specifically how to do it.  One tricky component is the Project Gutenberg EText for Pygmalion.  Use the page numbers in the text I gave you--otherwise you would have to cross-check with the original (I'd left out some non-Pygmalion publication explanations).

3. On to content--be sure to respect the difference between a THEME and a THESIS.  The "theme" is a universal insight that could apply to multiple works of literature and specifically does NOT state details of plot, character, or other literary details.  But your "thesis" needs to be as rich, exact, and insightful as it can be in setting up the exact nature of the comparison/contrast you will be making.

4.  In that respect, you will find that the words similar and different (in any of their possible forms) lead to vague (or at least not precise) thesis claims.  Thus, your task is to write a thesis that does NOT use these words.

5.  Do not let quotations run away with your paper.  With drama, especially, it's tempting to quote too much.  Summarize/paraphrase non-essential elements of dialogue to shorten them, and keep the essential parts in quotation marks.

No comments:

Post a Comment