• Having read and annotated one of the texts listed below, explore a specific theme in 700-800 words (5 ¶s in a mature font) by focusing on a particular motif that will be an adequate representative of its time period: historical, religious, political, literary, etc., in relation to life nowadays.

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

• 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 text itself and the second part will go beyond the text itself to show something more about life, humanity, etc. MANDATORY ESSAY ORGANIZATION (link).

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

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• Here are some examples of concepts for this paper:

• Submit your final draft through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Paper 3 by the due date.

• 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.

• 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.

• As always, if you have any questions, please email me at cperkowski@gordonstate.edu.

The texts:

Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Cervantes, Don Quixote
Machiavelli, The Prince
Shakespeare, The Tempest