Major Paper

English 3210

 

DIRECTIONS

 

  • Having read and annotated three (3) texts discussed this semester, explore a specific unifying theme in 700-800 words (5 ¶s in a mature font) by focusing on a particular motif that will be an adequate representative of the Old English era or the Middle English era: historical, religious, political, literary, etc. (do not present a generic social/societal commentary). Please reach out to me to have your topic approved before you write the paper.

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

  • Italicize, bold or underline the thesis statement.

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

  • The concluding paragraph will have one or two sentences.

  • No title page is necessary, but title your essay in an original manner (not the title of the text).

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

  • Consulting any outside sources or resources might result in forfeiting credit for this assignment.

  • Use present tense.

  • Do not use "you."

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

  • 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, course and word count in the upper left corner.

  • The mandatory rough draft must be submitted through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Rough Major Paper by the deadline for the final draft to earn credit.

  • To be eligible for credit, the completed assignment MUST meet all of the above conditions. If any requirement from the prompt is not met, the assignment will be ineligible for credit. 

  • Submit your final version through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Major Paper 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.

  • As always, if you have any questions, please utilize the D2L forum.