Length: 5 pages.

Updated 21 Oct:

Expand and refine the informal oral presentation you prepared, paying special attention to writing a paper that defends a non-obvious claim about one or more of the literary works we have studied.

Your paper should include a detailed analysis of alternative or opposing arguments. If your thesis is "Oedipus the King is a tragedy," you aren't going to find much opposing evidence, so "proving" that claim isn't much of an intellectual accomplishment.

You are welcome to use quality external resources (such as academic journal articles or books), but for this paper external sources are optional.

Follow MLA style when formatting your paper. Include a Works Cited list, even if the only work you are citing is the play you are analyzing.

If your thesis is "The play Machinal and the movie Dead Man Walking both offer convincing arguments against the death penalty," once again you are presenting a one-sided arugment.

You might instead say,

In Machnal, Sophie Treadwell creates a sympathetic portrait of a convicted murderer because she dehumanizes the victim. The script for Dead Man Walking, on the other hand, achieves the much more complicated task of emphasizing the suffering of the victims, while at the same time demanding sympathy for the criminal. Machinal minimizes the crime in order to evoke sympathy for the criminal, while Dead Man Walking dares the audience to see the fundamental humanity all but obscured by the arrogance and self-loathing of a horrific criminal. For this reason, Dead Man Walking delivers a more socially challenging message.

Make sure your thesis makes a claim about the literary representation of reality, rather than using convenient details from selected plays to support a belief that you already had before you entered the classroom.

For example, a thesis like "The death penalty is wrong, as seen in Machinal and Dead Man Walking" is set up to mine the literary works in order to make an argument about the death penalty. In such a case, you might substitute different plays, or cartoons, or comic books, or folksongs, and still have essentially the same paper -- with different details, but an identical conclusion. Such a paper wouldn't demonstrate your intellectual ability to engage with the literary works, even if it would demonstrate your committment to the issue you are examining.