English 320 (Spring 2001)
Writing Assignment #2

Guidelines for the Assignment

Writing Assignment #2 is an optional assignment.  Your purpose in submitting it would be to improve your grade on Essay #1 (original draft and/or rewrite, if you did a rewrite).  I will take the highest of your grades (1, 2, or 3, as the case may be) and multiply it by 2 to obtain your overall score for the 50-point writing assignment component of your total points for the course.  

This time you may elect to write either an interpretive analysis of a story or to submit a piece of short fiction (either a complete short short story or some portion of a projected story.)  See the description of the options, below.

Interpretive Essay Topic Options

Most of you who decide to submit something for this optional assignment would be well-advised to do an interpretive essay.  After all, you have some experience in doing this, and you have some detailed feedback from me on your Essay #1.  If you write an essay, you ought to refresh your acquaintance with the criteria for evaluating essays.  These are important guides as you work your essay through successive drafts.  There is a succinct version and a detailed version of these criteria for your perusal.

As in Essay #1, you will not be writing narration.  So both plot summary and explication are out.  Instead you will be writing an analysis, which is a form of exposition/argument.  (Notice that here we have just used the term "exposition" not to refer to an element of plot, but to point to a mode of discourse.)  Your ultimate draft should therefore exhibit an organizational strategy that is governed by some logical scheme of classification.

You can take a look at an example of a student essay in critical analysis.  The essay featured was in fact produced in response to the assignment for Essay #1.  You should be able to learn a lot be studying the detailed discussion I've provided of the various moves the writer makes, and why they are effective.  My commentary, incidentally, is an example of explication (though in this case not of narrative, but of exposition/argument, since the object under examination is an essay, not a story).

The essay write for this assignment here should be longer than the answers you write under the time pressure of the examinations.  (You should aim for around 500 words, which is roughly equivalent to 2 single-spaced pages with 1-inch margins in 12-point font.  More is welcome, of course, provided that it is non-repetitive and on-point.)   This greater length is supposed to be in the service of greater detail and depth of analysis.  Accordingly, you will have several days to reflect on the issues involved and to compose your analysis.

For your interpretive essay, focus on one of the stories we have read since the Mid-Term Exam.  Suggested are the following, but you are welcome to choose another.

Focusing on that story, write an essay on one of the following options (One, Two or Three):

Topic Option One

Review what our editor's have said about point of view (pp. 20-26 and pp. 53-54.  Then work through our glossary articles on Point of View ("in a story" vs. "of a person"), on Omniscient, Objective, and Reliable Narration, and on First-Person Narration.  (You'll note that, at the end, this last also has something to say about selective omniscient narration.)  

Discuss how the author's choice of a particular point of view helps communicate a central theme of the tale.  Develop a clear argument to show how the narrator's point of view is essential to the audience's recognizing and understanding the theme.  Support your argument with specific observations and analysis.  Quote and document according to the guidelines in the chapter "Writing About Literature" at the back of our textbook.

Topic Option Two

Using the scheme explained in our Glossary of Critical Terms, classify the plot of one of the following stories in terms of the characterization of the protagonist.  (Along the way you might ask whether or not the story you are focusing on is an initiation story.)  Then explain how the story exploits plot-type it embodies in the service of its particular thematic ends.

Topic Option Three

In their parting shot on the subject of character and characterization, our editors are at pains to get novice readers to consider that, in short stories, character may be more fundamental than plot.  "The action of a story," they point out, usually grows out of the personality of its protagonist and the situation he or she faces.  As critic Phyllis Bottome observed, 'If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot.'"  Demonstrate some of the important ways in which character creates action, in the story you choose to focus on, and explain how what this causes us to notice is important to the story's overall reason for being.

The fiction option

Instead of an interpretive essay, you may if you wish submit a piece of short fiction with commentary.  The fiction may be either a complete short story (probably a short one, but there is no length restriction) or a portion of a projected short story together with a brief sketch of what else would eventually be added to complete the story.  The commentary should be at least a 200-word paragraph in which you explain the choices you had to make, in the fiction you are submitting, with respect to one or more of the technical issues at stake in some critical concept (or concepts) that our editors focused on in their commentary in Chapters 1 through 7.  (This commentary is to be found chiefly, but not exclusively, in the introductions to the chapters.  Other places are the concluding remarks, the questions following the stories, and pp. 11-12.)

Deadline

Your Writing Assignment #2 is due at 5:00 pm, Friday of Final Exam Week (December 14, 2001), under my office door in Denison 210.  It should be printed out single-spaced, with 1-inch margins, in 12-point type.  (That is:  this time, you are to submit your writing in hard copy, not electronically.  But you should definitely retain a digital or xerox copy in a safe place.)

Be sure to include the following information on what you submit:  (1) your name; (2) your section hour (the one you are officially enrolled in, even if you attend class with a different section); (3) your e-mail address.

Of course, you are encouraged to get your essay or story or story-segment in earlier, if at all possible.  This enables you to devote more time to other matters during Final Exam Week.

On our exams and in our essays, students are acting under Kansas State University's provisions regarding Academic Honesty and Plagiarism.  An important point in these provisions is that instructors may spell out what degree of collaboration is permitted among students on specific assignments.  For this essay assignment, you are positively encouraged to use the class Message Board to help each other in thinking through the facts and issues that are relevant to any of the questions on this prep sheet.  Your essay, though, should represent your own formulation, integration and evaluation of any ideas that others help you to.  You are the one who has the job of writing it.