Length: approximately 5 pages, double-spaced
Score: 100 points (assessment grade… counts toward 70% of your final grade)
Per MLA: double-spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman
Must be submitted through Canvas (linked to Turnitin… do not use Turnitin.com)
Assignment: Write a 5-paragraph essay illustrating your understanding/comprehension of the novel, Lord of the Flies. Each paragraph should be approximately 3/4 of a page in length. If your essay requires an additional paragraph, that is fine.
ORGANIZATION:
1. INTRODUCTION
A Guide to Writing the Literary Analysis Essay (opening paragraph)
I. INTRODUCTION: the first paragraph in your essay. It begins creatively in order to catch your reader’s interest, provides essential background about the literary work, and prepares the reader for your thesis. The introduction must include the author and title of the work as well as an explanation of the theme to be discussed. Other essential background may include setting, an introduction of main characters, etc. The thesis is the last sentence in the opening paragraph. Because the thesis sometimes sounds tacked on, make special attempts to link it to the sentence that precedes it by building on a key word or idea.
A) Creative Opening/Hook: the beginning sentences of the introduction that catch the reader’s interest. Ways of beginning creatively include the following:
1) A startling fact or bit of information.
Example: Nearly two hundred citizens were arrested as witches during the Salem witch scare of 1692. Eventually nineteen were hanged, and another was pressed to death (Marks 65).
2) A snippet of dialogue between two characters.
Example: “‘It is another thing. You [Frederic Henry] cannot know about it unless you have it.’ ‘Well,’ I said. ‘If I ever get it I will tell you [priest].’” (Hemingway 72). With these words, the priest in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms sends the hero, Frederic, in search of the ambiguous “it” in his life.
3) A meaningful quotation (from the text you are analyzing or another source). Example: “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (3.1.57). This familiar statement expresses the young prince’s moral dilemma in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
4) A universal idea.
Example: The terrifying scenes a soldier experiences on the front probably follow him throughout his life—if he manages to survive the war.
5) A rich, vivid description of the setting.
Example: Sleepy Maycomb, like other Southern towns, suffers considerably during the Great Depression. Poverty reaches from the privileged families, like the Finches, to the Negroes and “white trash” Ewells, who live on the outskirts of town. Harper Lee paints a vivid picture of life in this humid Alabama town where tempers and bigotry explode into conflict.
