Essay 3 (clean draft) and Essay 4 (final paper)

Essay three is a clean draft--a completely new paper that revises and refines the ideas present in one of the first two essays. You will actually receive two grades on it. One grade will be the new grade that you receive on the original assignment (if it is higher than the original grade, then the new grade will replace the old one). The other grade, your grade on paper 3 proper, will be on revision alone: it will reflect how thoroughly you revised the old paper. The way to revise your paper three grade (meaning, the grade on the revised draft) is to do another global revision. And the easiest way to do that is to revise the other paper you didn't revise the first time (so, if you revised paper 1 the first time, this time do a global rewrite of paper 2).

The clean draft is the most extreme version of the global revision method described by Nancy Sommers. It consists in essentially writing a new paper on the same topic. While you can borrow phrases here or there or wordings that you find helpful, the basic idea is to start fresh, from a blank page. Instead of thinking about filling up space, you will think about what you were trying to convey in the first draft, and start from there. One good technique is to use active rewriting and prewriting: before you even sit down to begin the next draft proper, you want to have a good deal of test writing under your belt, in which you prefect and practice ideas and help to refine what is most important for your argument. Doing this helps you avoid including filler, low value introductory material, and other mostly unhelpful information that you could easily do without, and that simply hampers your paper. The official due date for paper 3 is Friday, November 6, but you are free to turn it in before that. If you are efficient, you might even be able to revise both papers within this time.

Practicing the prewriting, rewriting, and focusing skills in paper three will be one of the most useful strategies for our last paper. The final paper will be a more developed, somewhat longer paper that builds on all the skills we have practiced so far: focusing on a narrowly defined topic, locating and entering a conversation, and supporting a strong claim. For the last paper, we will be adding in an additional research requirement: 3 or more scholarly sources. The purpose of this added research will be to allow you to more fully develop the conversation you are joining, and to allow you to more authoritatively address your position within it.

In the first paper, we used research to locate and participate in a conversation. Professional scholars, however, usually add in another step at this point: after locating a conversation, they return to research to find additional perspectives and information that can help them master and speak authoritatively about the conversation. Such research does not simply provide you with additional information: it helps you more clearly understand the significance of the conversation and the value of your contribution to it.

For paper four, you might think of yourself as in a similar position to that of a journalist who is investigating a specialized issue and attempting to translate it into terms understandable by the general public. Talking to experts and reading their work will not only help you first grasp and understand the terms of the conversation, but it will allow you to clarify what you think is most important about the issue for your own readers, and to do so with authority. Comparing and contrasting the different scholarly views will let you clarify assumptions that one scholar relies on but that another one explicitly articulates more clearly. It allows you, in other words, to understand the important terms of the debate.

The final paper should be 6-8 pages long in Times New Roman, 12 point font with 1 inch margins. If you want to have a chance to submit an early draft for a grade and full comments, you will need to submit it by Monday, November 23. The final paper is due Tuesday, December 8th by midnight.

A helpful link for MLA

MLA is a very simple citation format that consists of a works cited list and in text citations. The rule of thumb is to only put works you directly reference in the works cited list, and to provide enough information in parenthesis in the text so the reader can find out what source you are referencing in that list. Here's a brief overview of the specifics courtesy of Purdue's Online Writing Lab. 

An interesting essay - in video form

Here's an interesting example of a close, detailed analysis, one discussing a medium (painting) and presented in a medium (a video) that we haven't discussed as much in class. But all of the insights are transferable, and finding them in a different context might help expand your sense of possibilities in your written work.