English Composition 1

Essay Assignment 3

This page is organized into the following sections:

  1. Due Dates
  2. Essay 3: Analysis of a Short Story with Documented Sources
  3. Secondary Sources for Essay 3
  4. Using, Citing, and Documenting Sources
  5. Preparing the Works Cited Page
  6. Sample Essays
  7. Suggested Steps for Essay 3
  8. Things to Consider about this Assignment
  9. Helpful Web Pages

You can scroll down the page or can click on a link above to go to a specific section.

1. Due Dates

Wednesday, March 23: Draft of at least 800 words due for peer critique.
Wednesday, March 30: Revised Draft of at least 1250 words due.

2. Essay Assignment 3: Analysis of a Short Story with Documented Sources

Essay 3 is a interpretive and analytical essay with secondary sources on one of the short stories below. (Just click the links to access the stories.)

This assignment is similar to Essay Assignment 2 in that you will write an interpretation of a short story, but your essay must include information from at least two of the online secondary sources listed below. The story itself is referred to as your "primary source" and does not count as one of the secondary sources in your paper. Therefore, you need a minimum of three sources for this paper: the story itself and at least two secondary sources. All sources, including the story itself, must be properly cited and documented according to MLA standards, and a "Works Cited" page must be included as part of your essay. (See below for information about the sources for Essay 3 and about using, citing, and document your sources.)

Your essay needs to be written in a formal writing voice and needs at least five paragraphs, including an introduction with a clear thesis statement and a conclusion with a restatement of that thesis. The minimum required length for the revised draft is 1250 words.  

You can assume that your audience has read the short story that is the subject of your essay but has not studied or analyzed it. Your job is not to summarize the story but to help readers appreciate it and to understand its meaning. To help you go beyond a simple summary of the story, you should ask yourself what point the writer is trying to make. What is the author trying to tell us through the story? 

You might start by thinking of a possible theme conveyed in the story. "Theme" can be defined as the "main point" or, more specifically, the "comment about life" that an author conveys in a story (or other work of literature). With a possible theme in mind, you should then reread the story carefully, making notes on anything that seems to relate to the theme.

As you consider a possible thesis for your essay, it might be helpful if you come up with three or four important and related claims that you think you can support with specific evidence from the story. These claims could then be the bases for the different body paragraphs of your essay. From the claims, you could then formulate a one-sentence thesis statement.

Be an active reader. Read the story you are writing about several times. When you reread the story, you should have a pen or pencil in hand, making marginal notes to help you remember things you notice and to write down any questions that come to mind.

3. Secondary Sources For Essay 3

Important: Use only the secondary sources listed here!

For Essay 3, you must use information from at least two of the online secondary sources listed below to help you support and develop your interpretation. The story--your subject--is referred to as your primary source. The story must be listed on the "Works Cited" page, but the story does not count as one of the two required secondary sources.

All of the secondary sources for Essay 3 are from the databases of IVCC's Jacobs Library. If you are accessing the database sources from off campus, you will need to enter your login information.

The secondary sources that you use for your essay must be chosen from the sources listed below. Please do not use any secondary sources except those listed below.

Chopin's "Désirée's Baby"

  1. Arner, Robert D. "Pride and Prejudice: Kate Chopin's 'Désirée's Baby.'" (Gale Literature Criticism)
  2. "Désirée's Baby." Short Stories for Students, edited by Jennifer Smith (Gale Ebooks)
  3. Foy, Roslyn R. "Chopin's Desiree's Baby" (ProQuest)
  4. Mayer, Gary H. "A Matter of Behavior: A Semantic Analysis of Five Kate Chopin Stories." (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  5. Peel, Ellen. "Semiotic Subversion in 'Désirée's Baby'" (JSTOR)
  6. Pegues, Dagmar. "Fear and Desire: Regional Aesthetics and Colonial Desire in Kate Chopin's Portrayals of the Tragic Mulatta Stereotype: A Scholarly Journal. (ProQuest)
  7. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: 'Désirée's Baby.'" (Gale Literature Criticism) 

Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother'"

  1. Brand, Alice Glarden. "Mary Wilkins Freeman: Misanthropy as Propaganda." (JSTOR)
  2. Cutter, Martha J. "Frontiers of Language: Engendering Discourse in 'The Revolt of "Mother."'" (JSTOR)
  3. Fienberg, Lorne. "Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 'Soft Diurnal Commotion': Women's Work and Strategies of Containment." (JSTOR)
  4. Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. "Who's Who--And Why: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, an Autobiography." (Gale Literature Criticism) 
  5. McElrath, Jr., Joseph R. "The Artistry of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 'The Revolt.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  6. White, Brian. "'In the Humble Fashion of a Scripture Woman': The Bible as Besieging Tool in Freeman's 'The Revolt of "Mother."'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  7. Wilson, Kathleen and Marie Lazzari, eds. "The Revolt of 'Mother.'" (Gale Ebooks)    

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

  1. Bak, John S. "Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  2. Davison, Carol Margaret. "Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  3. Ford, Karen. "'The Yellow Wallpaper' and Women's Discourse." (JSTOR)
  4. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" (Gale Literature Criticism)
  5. Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  6. Johnson, Greg. "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))  
  7. Suess, Barbara A. "The Writing's on the Wall: Symbolic Orders in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (Academic Search Complete (EBSCOHost))
  8. Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentences: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" (JSTOR)
  9. Wilson, Kathleen. ed. "The Yellow Wallpaper." (Gale EBooks)

4. Using, Citing, and Documenting Sources

A major difference between this essay assignment and the earlier essay assignments in the course is the requirement that you use secondary sources to help you develop your essay. You will present your interpretation of one of the stories, and most of supporting material in your essay should be from the story itself, but the secondary sources will help you better understand the story and will also help you more effectively persuade readers to accept your interpretation. The material you use from sources should offer good insights into the story that are relevant to your interpretation. Do not use material from sources that only summarizes what happens in the story.

Whenever you use sources in your writing, you need to give proper credit to the sources and you need to be very careful to distinguish your own words and ideas from those you use from the sources. There is a specific way to do this, and there is an organization that has established one of the two most widely accepted standards for citing and documenting sources. This organization is the Modern Language Association, abbreviated MLA, and you need to make sure that you follow MLA conventions as you cite and document your sources in your essay.

The following course web pages provide information about using, citing, and documenting sources according to MLA standards:

5. Preparing the Works Cited Page

A "Works Cited" page that presents the publication information for the story and for your secondary sources is required for this essay, and the information on that page must follow the correct MLA format. "Preparing a Works Cited Page" is a useful resource for preparing a Works Cited page. Please look carefully at the resources and examples linked on "Preparing a Works Cited Page."

However, the correct MLA Works Cited information, in the correct format, is included with all of the secondary sources for your Essay 3. This means that you just need to copy and paste and check to make sure that everything looks good. After you click the link to one of the sources under "Secondary Sources for Essay 3," you will see "Cite," "Cite this Source," or something similar on the source page. Just mouse click, choose the MLA format, and copy and paste the information into your Works Cited page. There is one more important step, though. Look carefully to make sure everything is correct, including the indentation, the line spacing, and the italicizing. Referring to the examples linked on "Preparing a Works Cited Page" can help you with this.

The sample paragraph linked below also includes an example of a "Works Cited" page.

6. Sample Essay

The Paragraph with Sources on Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain" presents a paragraph on Hemingway's story that uses and cites material from the story and from two secondary sources according to MLA standards. The paragraph includes a Works Cited page. The page also presents a lot of important information concerning the use, citation, and documentation of sources.

7. Suggested Steps for Essay 3

After you decide which story will be the subject for your essay, you might think that your next step should be to read several of the secondary sources for the story. This might be a good approach for a longer essay requiring the use of many secondary sources, but it probably is not a good approach for this assignment.

Essay 3 does not require the use of much information from secondary sources. The minimum requirement is to use just one quotation from each of two different secondary sources, for a total of only two quotations from the sources. Of course, it would be a good idea to try to use more than just this minimum, but the great majority of quotations in your paper should be from the story itself, not from secondary sources.

Therefore, you could begin Essay 3 just as you began Essay 2, with some prewriting on the story and with the writing of a rough draft with quotations from the story but without any information at all from the secondary sources.

After you have written a draft of your essay, you could then read through some of the secondary sources to try to find information in the sources that would work well in your paper.

The strongest essays submitted for this assignment will have at least one quotation from a secondary source in each body paragraph, along with at least three or four quotations from the story in each body paragraph. There is no need to immerse yourself in the secondary sources from the beginning of this assignment. Instead, you could look for useful information in the secondary sources that will help you support and develop the ideas that you present in your essay only after you have completed a rough draft.     

8. Things to Consider about this Assignment

As you are writing and revising your essay, you should keep the following information in mind.

  1. As you are writing about a short story and are referring to what the storyteller says, you should not refer to what the "author" says but to what the narrator says. Do not confuse the author and the narrator.

  2. Your main source of supporting evidence should be the story itself, but you should use material from secondary sources to help you develop and support your ideas. The thesis statement and topic sentences should be your own. Be careful not to lose your own writing voice by bringing too much material from secondary sources into your essay.

  3. Your essay must demonstrate a good understanding of how to use, cite, and document material from sources.

  4. Do not guess how to prepare the "Works Cited" page. There are many resource provided to help you prepare the "Works Cited" page correctly. Of course, just ask if you have any questions.
    5.  
  5. As usual, read carefully the web pages linked from the Expectations for All Essays page and make sure that your essay follows the guidelines. After writing a draft, use the Revision Checklist page to help you identify ways to strengthen the draft as you are revising.

9. Helpful Web Pages

The web handouts linked below were also linked at the previous essay assignment page; they should be helpful as you are writing and revising your essay.

Of course, make sure to ask if you have any questions!

Copyright Randy Rambo, 2022.