Download Assignment PDF Here
Overview
This final paper is a reflection and analysis that combines learning from your reading and research with learning from your experience in England.
Essay length and format:
Your paper should be 6 pages long (no more than 7). Double-spaced, 12-point readable font, 1-inch margins. Include name, page numbers, and a title.
When is the essay due?
July 12 by email (gibsona@duq.edu)
What should the paper do?
You should plan to pick a focus for your paper that is related to British literature from Austen to the end of the Victorian era (1901) as well as to your experience in England. Your goal is to write an essay in which you reflect upon how your reading and your travel experience in this class shaped or helped you to develop your understanding of your chosen topic/issue/idea. Perhaps this might be something that surprised you. Perhaps it might be about how your visit to a particular site helped you reimagine the meaning of certain texts you read before departing. Perhaps your experience in England changed your initial assumptions about the topic. You should aim to write about at least two texts in your paper and at least one learning experiences in England. This is a minimum requirement; I encourage you to write about more.
You might think of this as an article you could submit to an online magazine for an educated audience. Think about how you can incorporate a clear topical focus, a sense of your own intellectual development/personal reflection based on your learning in this class, and a way to root that reflection in analysis of some specific textual examples from your reading.
When picking your topic, issue, or textual focus, try to think about what has interested you. If you want to write about an experience in England in relation to your reading of one or more texts, make sure you do more than just summarize/describe what you did; make it clear to us why we should be interested. What point are you trying to get across? Try to narrow down your focus as much as possible so that, instead of writing a freewheeling journal piece, you produce a focused and concise essay that has a focus and a point to get across.
The nature of this assignment is personal; it is your own intellectual reflection based on your reading and travel. So unlike a “regular” final paper, feel free to abandon some of what you understand to be the constraining conventions of academic writing; you are free to be personal and reflective. However, certain conventions of writing do still apply.
- You need to make sure your essay is clearly organized, so that each paragraph serves a purpose, you have a flow to your sentences, and so that the whole essay “ties together.” Please proofread for grammar and spelling.
- You need to root some of your reflection in the texts we read for this class, offering and interpreting specific examples and occasional quotations and giving your reader a sense of what you take away from the text about the topic. While you don’t need to have a thesis, per se, you do need to be thinking about and with these texts (interpretation and analysis) rather than just summarizing what they say. Think about what they helped you understand that you might not have otherwise considered. Or think about how you want to shed new light on them based on your experiences.
It is more than acceptable to reiterate information you have already developed or discussed elsewhere in this class (e.g. journals, blog posts). That being said, DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. If you cite outside sources (other than the ones on our syllabus) or in other way make use of other people’s thoughts and knowledge, be sure to credit them appropriately. Please use MLA online or Purdue OWL if you are unsure about plagiarism and citation. If the only texts to which you refer are those on our syllabus, you do not need to provide a works cited list.
How will the essay be graded?
To grade your paper I will use the following questions, scored according to the following rubric:
5 = excellent
4 = very good
3 = good
2 = needs work
1 = poor
| 1. Does the essay clearly focus on a specific topic/have a central idea? | |
| 2. Is that focus sustained throughout the essay so the essay has a “through line”? | |
| 3. Are the ideas in the essay well developed? | |
| 4. Does the essay make substantial use of at least two texts and at least one learning experience, seamlessly integrating and analyzing examples from texts and study abroad experiences in ways that support the central idea of the essay? | |
| 5. Does the essay show thoughtful reflection upon and analysis of learning (texts, experiences) rather than merely summarizing/describing? | |
| 6. Is the essay well organized? Does each paragraph present and sustain an idea that supports the overall goal of the essay? | |
| 7. Is the essay clearly written? Is the writing free of grammatical errors and typos? Do the paragraphs transition smoothly from one idea to the next? | |
| 8. Does the essay demonstrate the writer’s thoughtful, personal, and creative engagement with an idea and reflection upon learning? | |
| 9. Does the essay do a good job of engaging its reader? | |
| 10. Does the essay properly cite (using parenthetical in-text citations) any textual examples offered? |
Student: _____________________
Total points out of 50: _________