This week I’m asking you to write a brief essay about what you’re read in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
- How does Douglass show slavery as dehumanizing, but education, even self-education, as emphasizing and empowering an individual’s humanity?
- How does Douglass deal with complicated feelings and thoughts about religion throughout his book?
- What kind of ethical responsibility does Douglass carry on his shoulders and how does he demonstrate that responsibility through not just what, but how he writes?
- How does your evidence from the text demonstrate Douglass’s book as either a dark and largely negative account about the horrors of slavery in America, or as a triumphant account of how America can overcome the worst aspects of its history?
1) Don’t restate the prompt.
2) Though you may have been taught to begin with a “hook,” avoid anything that sounds or feels gimmicky. If it feels phony, it will sound phony too.
3) There’s a Creative Writing 101 rule, “Show, don’t tell,” that will help you here. If you start with an instance or a visual that leads to a point you’d like to make, you put the reader directly into your writing. If I just tell you Blanche, in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, is passive-aggressive, I’m not communicating to you nearly as much as if I show you specific things she says that demonstrate this characteristic.
4) You do need a thesis, but it’s not the thesis from the five paragraph essay formula you probably learned in high school. Think of the thesis as the one central claim you’re proving in court. It should have four characteristics that I’d like you to memorize. It should be:
- a) specific, not vague
- b) concise. Sometimes complicated ideas need a lot of words, but there shouldn’t be an excess of words not contributing to expressing your point.
- c) arguable. This doesn’t mean “argumentative.” It means something that needs to be argued.
- d) verifiable, which means you can prove it with logic and evidence. Matters of taste are not verifiable. Nor are matters of faith, since faith, as the Apostle Paul says, is “the evidence of things not seen.” Our thesis claims have to deal with the evidence we can see and the logic that connects it.
5) Each paragraph should be a step in proving the thesis.
6) You can and should quote and cite to back up your evidence. Make sure you quote verbatim. If you don’t, you’re saying that someone said something he or she didn’t. Make sure you use quotation marks. Otherwise, you’re plagiarizing. Make sure you cite accurately.
For example:
- a) In Craig Childs’s book Apocalyptic Planet, he writes, “Shishmaref is an Inupiat village with ancestry dating back as far as the Yup’ik. Literally falling into the sea, Shishmaref has been disappearing house by house” (94).
or
- b) “Shishmaref is an Inupiat village with ancestry dating back as far as the Yup’ik. Literally falling into the sea, Shishmaref has been disappearing house by house” (Childs, Apocalyptic Planet, 94).
7) Your conclusion should not, as you’ve probably been taught, try to say everything you’ve already said in a smaller space. Nor need it start, “To conclude” or “In conclusion.” It should not be redundant. The conclusion should be the final statement your whole argument has brought you to make.
8) Use college-level and professional grammar and mechanics.