Fiction Paper

• Select one of the short stories from the syllabus.

• Having read and annotated it, focus on a specific theme in the story and explore it in 500-600 words (5 ¶s in a mature font).

• To support your thesis, choose a concept directly discussed or mentioned in the story.

• Make sure that your thesis adheres to one of the three options from the thesis handout (link). The first part of the thesis will be specific to the short story (something explicitly mentioned the short story) and the second part will go beyond the short story itself to show something more about life, humanity, etc., while broadening our understanding of the short story itself. Therefore, this paper is to analyze the short story while relating it to life. MANDATORY ESSAY ORGANIZATION (link).

• Italicize, bold or underline the thesis statement.

• The first part of each of the argument paragraphs will analyze the text, and the second part will relate that analysis to life nowadays (link).

• The introductory ¶ should have only two sentences, one of which will be the thesis statement.

• The paper cannot earn more than 60% without the required organization and thesis.

• No title page is necessary, but title your essay in an original manner and put your name on the paper as well in the upper left corner.

• This is to be your own, original work, without referring to any outside sources or commentaries, but this is not an "I" paper.

• Use present tense.

• Do not use "you."

• Shorten the introductory paragraph to two sentences, one of which will be your thesis statement.

• Please do not organize your paper based on the original organization of the short story.

• Do not focus on the literary devices used by the author (e.g., diction, tone, irony, symbolism, metaphor) but rather on the actual content.

• Include a brief heading with your name, assignment, date and course.

• Include the word count at the top of the paper.

• Submit your final draft through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Fiction by the due date.

• Detailed feedback about the submitted paper will be provided in D2L.

• The content of the paper will be graded based on its organization, thesis, paragraph structure, quality of arguments, analysis strength and lack of summary. Each type (not each occurrence) of major grammatical errors (e.g., run-on, pronoun-antecedent agreement, fragment, misplaced modifier, parallelism, verb form, subject-verb agreement, 3 x spelling errors) will equal a deduction of 10 points.

• You are encouraged to read the comments in turnitin.com within 7 days from the email notification. If the rather time consuming comments are not accessed within this time frame, no further detailed individual feedback in turnitin.com will be provided throughout the semester.

• As always, if you have any questions, please email me at cperkowski@gordonstate.edu.
  
  Texts from our textbook posted in D2L to choose from:
  Godfather Death
  Problems
  That Evening Sun

• The Imp of the Perverse
  The Day before the Revolution
  Emancipation: A Life Fable
  The Unexpected
  Circumstances after Cases
  The Welcome Table
  My Mother
  Good Country People
  Where I'm Coming From
  A Way You'll Never Be
  Welcome to the Monkey House
  The Raid
  What a Thought