Week Twenty-Four Assignment

3/25-27/2008

1. Read and Respond:

& Read Acts 3-5 of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Write a one paragraph summary of each act and its characters. (Due April 1).

2. Vocabulary:

1. Perfunctory: Done routinely and with little interest or care.

2. Philistine: A person who is smugly indifferent or antagonistic to art and culture.

3. Precocious: Displaying or characterized by unusually early development or maturity, especially in intelligence.

4. Propriety: Conformity to prevailing customs and values.

5. Quid pro quo: Something given in return for something else or accepted as part of an exchange.

6. Quintessential: Being the best or most typical example of its kind.

7. Red herring: Something that draws attention away from the matter at hand.

8. Revel: To take great pleasure or delight in something.

9. Rhetoric: Language that is intended to persuade.

10. Scintillating: Lively and exceptionally intelligent; animated and brilliant.

3. Write:

Write an essay in which you discuss a character found in Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It. Your thesis should assert some significant point about his nature, his insight, his transformation, or his stubborn refusal to change. Remember that an A paper will delve below the surface and look for causation, development, or analysis, not a simple list of personality traits. Your essay should clearly indicate how we know about the character, not only what we know. (500 words; due April 3).

4. Magnum Opus:

& Huzzah! Research is fun! In April you will begin writing an eight page research paper. You may choose any topic that relates to your history class, your biology class, your Spanish class, your Latin class, or your English class. The thesis of your paper must assert a point that you will labor to prove in your essay by your own clever reasoning and brilliance, and by referring to the knowledge and wisdom of authors of books, articles, and websites.

& The final paper will be due on May 8, 2008. When we return from Easter break, I will give you an itemized assignment schedule for research, note-taking, rough draft, and such.

& Your first task, of course, is to choose a topic and carve out a thesis about which you will research, argue, and write. The topic, thesis, and a page of explanation will be due on March 27.

Research Paper Assignment

1. The Assignment: Your magnum opus will be an essay of 8-10 pages (size 10 or 12 font, double-spaced). You will be writing an argument to prove a thesis that asserts a point about any of your academic subjects.

In the text of the paper, you will refer to information that comes from at least five outside sources. At least two of these sources must be books; the others may be articles from on-line databases, articles from college or government sponsored websites, interviews with experts, documentaries, lectures—if you have other kinds of sources, see me to have them approved.

You may quote from your sources, but no more than 200 words of your paper may be quoted. The rest of the paper will be in your own words, paraphrasing, summarizing, and explaining the information you find in your research.

You will make an outline of at least five main categories with three levels of detail. Your outline will be done in correct, traditional outline form.

You will be taking notes on 3x5 or 4x6 index cards, following my very specific format—at least 30 note-cards in a box with dividers.

Your works cited page will comprise at least five sources, listed alphabetically by the first word, following correct MLA format. Your paper will be generously peppered with parenthetical citations (MLA style) to indicate the source of your information. You should expect to see an average of one citation per paragraph—three paragraphs per page (do your math here—that makes about 24 parenthetical citations in a typical paper).

2. The Calendar

April 1 Outline Due 15 points

April 8 List of Potential Sources Due 20 points

April 15 30 Note-cards Due 30 points

April 22

April 29 Rough Draft Due 35 points

May 8 Final Paper Due (No late papers will be accepted!) 100 points

__________

200 points

3. The Grade:

The entire project will be worth a total of 200 points—100 of these points will accrue as you complete the sections of the assignment; 100 points will result from the completed paper. Your paper will be graded on correctness of grammar, punctuation, and spelling; correctness of MLA works cited and parenthetical notes; structure of paragraphs (topic sentences and supporting information); intelligence of thesis; depth of research; uniqueness of argument; maturity of vocabulary and sentence construction.

No paper written in a hurry at the last minute is likely to earn an A: I am looking for significance and interest. Surprise and intrigue your reader, my dears—you may also surprise yourself!