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Essay Instructions: A Christmas Carol (by Charles Dickens).
Topic: How does the novel create horror?
Discribe how the visual, images, sound effects, human cruelty, suspense..., came about in the novel.
Make sur eyou perfectly discribe the environment/atmosphere in the house.

Essay Instructions: The third essay will be on A Christmas Carol. This essay will be 8-9 pages long including the Works Cited page, or around 2000 words of textual analysis, and have a minimum of 6 secondary sources (in addition to the primary source), but no more than 12. No more than two of those sources can be Web sources (and those sources must be of credible academic value.

The third essay will be a literary research paper on A Christmas Carol. This essay will be 8-9 pages long including the Works Cited page, or around 2000 words of textual analysis, and have a minimum of 6 secondary sources (in addition to the primary source), but no more than 12. No more than two of those sources can be Web sources (and those sources must be of credible academic value). Do not use websites such as Wikipedia, Sparknotes, PinkMonkey, or any other site either in your essay or to help you write your essay; if I find out, you will receive an automatic zero for your essay. Any plagiarism will also result in a zero for your essay.

If needed, you can briefly introduce the novella and author and clearly state an argumentative thesis at the end of the first or second paragraph. Avoid referring to your own essay: "This essay will try to accomplish three things." Your audience for this paper is an educated person who is familiar with the general story but may not intimately familiar with it. To address this audience’s needs, you don’t need to give a line-by-line paraphrase or to summarize the entire story. However, using the introduction to contextualize the novella within the themes we have encountered this quarter could be one good approach to opening your analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of Dickens’ novella. As with Paper # 2, recall your "The Literary Research Paper" (pp. 2147-66 in the BIL) and "Critical Strategies" (pp. 2084-2105) reading assignments assigned earlier - I strongly recommend that you review them. Review the themes found in A Christmas Carol. You may write on any of the themes, characters, and/or symbols found in the story, as well as any critical approach (feminist, Marxist, Freudian, formalist, historical, biographical, and so forth).

As with paper # 2, your research question is the question that drives and guides your research. It is a question you have regarding the literary work on which you have chosen to write your research essay. When formulating your research question, you may want to review your class notes and the handout on “The Research Question.” Your research questions must be:

• Not be just a statement of fact or a summary of plot
• Not have an obvious answer
• Be sufficiently narrow (not TOO broad)

Do not title your essay "Essay #3" or “A Christmas Carol” or "Essay on A Christmas Carol." Give your title some thought. Have the title be meaningful.

Always use specific references and direct quotations to support your work, but as this is a short essay, do not cite passages in lengthy block quotations without a very good reason. I want to see that you can use sources judiciously, not merely that you can use sources. Integrate your quotes, don’t just plop them into a paragraph. It is OK if you disagree with your source; you do not have to quote only sources that agree with you. Avoid making general, unsupported statements that do not progress your line of reasoning.

Your sources do not have to deal with the novella directly, as long as the source can be used as data to help support your thesis. For example, if you are writing a paper analyzing the symbolism of the spirits in A Christmas Carol, while you will want to find articles where critics are discussing Dicken's symbolic use of spirits in A Christmas Carol, you may also find articles discussing the use of symbolism or use of ghosts in Victorian literature in general to be useful for your paper.

Your conclusion should do more than simply repeat what was said in the introduction. Give your conclusion some thought. Make sure you use the text of the play, citing specific passages to support your assertions - however, quotes should not make up more than 25% of your paper. Do not forget to fully develop the connections between your thesis, the points you are making and the cited material. Draw on evidence both from within the play and from your relevant secondary source(s) to develop your main point or thesis.



There are faxes for this order.

Essay Instructions: Read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” which is about 19th century London. Use Karl Marx’s classical sociological theory and assess how that writer would have discussed issues of social stratification and inequality described by Dickens.
Note, while your paper will focus on only one theorist (Karl Marx), you may mention other writers (ie. Weber and Durkheim). Your paper will be evaluated for how well it places “your” theorist into the broader social thought of their time.
The cited works should come out of "The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed)" by Robert C. Tucker, "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology" by H.H Gerth and C Wright Mills, and "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. In addition, I have included "The Dutchess of Sutherland and Slavery". You do not need to do independent library research for this paper.
An appropriate length is approximately 5 double-spaced pages (1250-1500 words).
As usual, your paper should include a clear Introduction, Body, Conclusion, and References. It should be addressed to the “naïve reader,” meaning that your terms should be carefully defined.
The Introduction
Introduce “A Christmas Carol” as one of the classics of Western Literature. Mention something about the social context in which Dickens wrote, and his concerns with the nature of modern capitalism (one paragraph).
Note that classical sociology also wrote about this “great transformation” and the oftentimes cruelty that went with it. Indeed, the emergence of this new type of society is at the heart of what Marx wrote about in most of his writings, what W

Essay Instructions: IF NEEDED, I CAN FAX THIS TO YOU AS WELL. I WANT AT LEAST 3 SOURCES AND THE REPORT A GOOD FOUR PAGES LONG (FIVE IF YOU WOULD LIKE) AND I ALSO NEED A WORKS CITED PAGE. I PREFER OPTION 1 OR 3, BUT WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU. I HAVE COPIED THE DOCUMENT THAT THE TEACHER GAVE US AS A GUIDELINE AND HAVE ALSO ATTACHED MY NOTE SHEET FROM A SPEAKER THAT CAME IN. I WOULD LIKE YOU TO USE THE SPEAKER AS ONE OF YOUR REFERENCES (POSSIBLEY, WHAT SHE THOUGHT MAKES A BEST SELLER).



THIS IS WHAT THE TEACHER GAVE US....

Paper on Skipping Christmas by John Grisham

The paper should be three pages to five pages long, and should use AT LEAST TWO SOURCES. Of course, ONE SOURCE WILL BE THE BOOK SKIPPING CHRISTMAS. Papers should be double-spaced with 1 ? -inch margins.

Option 1
You may approach the paper as a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Skipping Christmas in your own view as a reader, using a professional published critic as your second source. The critic?s comments do not need to be lengthy and you do not need to agree with the critic you use. If you do not agree with the critic, you should say why you do not agree?or if you agree, you should say on which points you agree. You may want to compare and contrast Skipping Christmas to other Grisham books or to other Christmas books with which you?re familiar, such as Dickens? A Christmas Carol. How are they similar and/or how are they different. Within the body of the paper, EXPLAIN WHY YOU THINK SKIPPING CHRISTMAS BECAME A BEST SELLER. A good reference could be the book The Making of a Best Seller: From Author to Reader by Arthur T Vanderbilt.

Option 2
You may also write your paper about the ?mythic journey? undertaken in Skipping Christmas, ANALYZING, as we have done in class, the steps the main characters took on the journey through December without Christmas and the ?elixir? or thing of value they brought back in the end. You may want to reference the book the The Writer?s Journey (2nd edition): Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler as your SECOND source for this paper, or you may see me for titles of books that deal with this theory.

Option 3
You also may combine these two approaches if you like, and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the book from your viewpoint and that of a critic and also analyze the stages of the journey undertaken by the main characters in the book.


All papers need:
You should use AT LEAST ONE DIRECT QUOTE and AT LEAST ONE PARAPHRASE from EACH OF YOUR SOURCES that help you illustrate the points you are making in your paper, and you should use appropriate citations within the text identifying the author and page number of the quote, such as (Grisham 23). We will talk more about that in class.

You should include a WORKS CITED page at the end listing your sources in MLA format. I have a handout I will distribute in class that illustrates MLA format, which is not difficult.


I will grade on these standards:

1) Unity
--Opens with a clear, specific topic sentence that lets the reader know the direction of the paper.
--Each paragraph develops a single idea and helps develop the themes presented in the paper as a whole.
2) Coherence
--Uses transitional phrases where appropriate for the flow of the paper, such as ?For example?? or ?On the other hand??
3) Development
--Develops the topic of the paper through both examples from the book and the other source and through a series of reasons.
4) Using Sources
--Quotes accurately
--Adds a parenthetical citation after each quotation.
--Includes a Works Cited page formatted using MLA style.
5) Overall:
--Develops topic fully
--Uses own voice and avoids clich?s.
6) Avoids common grammatical and proofreading errors including:
--Avoids misspellings
--Avoids sentence fragments
--Avoids comma splices
--Avoids run-on sentences


THIS IS A COPY OF NOTES FROM OUR SPEAKER.........

Jane Janke Johnson
Co-owner of Janke Books
July 8th, 2002
ENG352, Class session 2

Unsure what exactly makes a best seller on the market, but here are some of her ideas:
Power of Oprah (most influential on the power of books)
Author Reviews
Author Tours
Newspapers (i.e. sections in The Wall Street Journal and USA today)
Buying Power (i.e. Barnes and Noble can influence what you read by their store displays, etc.)
Next Series ? automatically a best seller because they are in a series
Public Radio (some do chapter readings to the audience)
However, some books are best-sellers before they even hit the market or
are available in stores ? doesn?t understand how that happens.

Her best selling book ? the Holy Bible

When asked, ?Other than who the author may be, based on your expertise and knowledge, what do you feel are the top 3 qualities/key components that make a book a ?best seller?
1. must be engaging
2. Well-written
3. Easy to read/has a nice flow

There are faxes for this order.