Post at least 750 and not more than 1,000 words, not counting Works Cited. Use a standard left heading, with your name, the name of the course, the name of the instructor, and the date, and include your work count at the bottom of the heading. Give your essay a thoughtful title. Use a five paragraph structure, with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. In your introduction list the essays and the article you will be commenting on, with the authors’ full names and with the titles in quotation marks (not italics), in the order that you will summarize them. You are welcome to add some other creative touches to the introductory paragraph, but be sure to include the required information specified above. In each body paragraph, use at least three specific details, including at least two brief direct quotations, from the essays. In the first two body paragraphs, summarize and comment on two essays from Modules 2 or 3. If the topics of these essays differ from what you plan to write about for your own self-improvement project, comment on what you learned about using examples, including direct quotations, and documentation of them through in-text citations, signal phrases, and Works Cited pages. In the third body paragraph, summarize and comment on one article that you have found (NOT from Modules) that is relevant to the specific topic you have chosen for your own self-improvement project. Include at least two brief direct quotations from this source in this paragraph. In your conclusion, explain which source you found most helpful in planning your own self-improvement research essay, and then explain briefly what your plan for the project is. End with a Works Cited page, using alphabetical order by last names of authors (NOT the order in which the essays are summarized). Please follow the guidelines below about writing a summary.
Identify the authors by their full names, with the titles of the essays in quotation marks (not italics), in the introductory paragraph. After the first reference to the author’s name, use only the author’s last name (not the first name) for any subsequent references.
Put a major idea that you have learned from the source into the topic sentence of each body paragraph of your summary. You do not need to repeat the authors’ full names or the titles of the essays in the body paragraphs; just the author’s last name (for example, “Smith’s essay”) will suffice.
Use at least three specific details and two brief direct quotations in each body paragraph.
End each body paragraph with a sentence of your own in which you analyze or explain the significance of the quoted material or other examples you have selected in the paragraph. Do not end body paragraphs with quoted words.
Make sure that your conclusion clearly indicates what your own project will be.
Review the section in Module 1 on Works Cited. Use a Works Cited page in MLA format at the end of the essay, putting the authors’ surnames first and in alphabetical order, followed by the titles of the essays in quotation marks, and then by the original dates of the essays (found in the heading of each essay), the web site, and your date of access. Use the following notation for the container of the sample essays from Canvas modules:
Delta College Canvas Hutcheon English 1A Summer 2023, sjdc.instructure.com/courses, followed by the date of your access.
See a sample entry below. See Works Cited pages of sample essays in Modules 2 and 3 for proper indenting of all lines after the first line of each entry.
Weese, Peter. “Quitting Smoking Is Easy, Right?” 7 May 2018. Delta College Canvas Hutcheon Spring 2024, sjdc.instructure.com/courses. Retrieved 2 Feb. 2024.
Be sure to include (integrated with the rest of the list, in alphabetical order by authors’ last names) a Works Cited notation in MLA format for the new essay that you summarize. Be especially careful to avoid mixing MLA and APA formats. APA puts the date in parentheses after the author’s name, but MLA does not. Please use MLA format for this class.