Exercise 3.1 (Warm-up for Essay 3)
Due Session 19
Identify the major additional source that you plan to consider in your next essay, and identify the required readings that seem likely to play a role in your next essay.
After reading the additional major source for your third essay, draw up a list of ten passages that will help you develop an argument linking this source to related sources among our required readings.
Exercise 3.2 (Warm-up for Essay 3)
Due Session 21
Track down an article or a chapter of a longer book that offers a critical perspective on one of the works you plan to use in your third essay. You may have difficulty locating articles that focus on the individual essays that you have read, but you should be able to find articles that respond to the book within which the essays originally appeared. This information is available in the back of American Earth and online for Pollan, Kolbert, Bass, and Kingsolver. You may decide to work with a secondary source that responds to the entire opus of a particular author, but you should avoid sources that merely generalize about an author’s ideas.
Once you have found a suitable article or book chapter, read it carefully and write a brief statement of the perspective that it offers. Select 4 or 5 passages that might contribute to your next essay. These passages may articulate a point of view that reinforces your own thinking. If so, you may integrate them as supporting evidence within your third essay. If the article or book chapter that you have found articulates a point of view at odds with your own, don’t worry; just be sure that you can respond effectively to that point of view. In the process of responding to a contrasting point of view, you will inevitably clarify your own thinking and sharpen your analysis. Your essay will also benefit from this opportunity to articulate, and reply to, a specific counter-argument.
Be sure that you write down all of the publication information that you will need for your works cited list. Record the page reference for each passage.
Prospectus
Due Session 22
Your third essay, like the second essay, should explore a question or problem that has emerged from your reading. You may not be able to arrive at an answer or a solution, but over the course of your essay, you should at least be able to refine the central question or identify a range of solutions for your problem. By the end of your third essay, your readers should be able to see what they have gained by exploring this question or problem with you. Stay close to the texts as you explore your chosen issue. Do not wander through the theoretical stratosphere.
The prospectus should identify the central issue, your plan for addressing that issue, and the sources you plan to use (150 to 200 words). Once you begin writing your essay, you will almost inevitably diverge from the path that you lay out in the prospectus, but you should nonetheless make a serious effort to think through the problems that you may face.
Draft of Essay 3
Requirements for Essay 3:
- First version due Session 23
- Final version due Session 26 (No additional revisions will be possible.)
Guidelines for Draft of Essay 3
Workshop 3
In-class on Session 24
Final Revision Workshop
In-class on Session 25
Identify and post two or three complete paragraphs from the current draft of Essay 3 (one to one and a half pages). Select paragraphs that play a key role, or paragraphs that are giving you trouble.
Revision
Due Session 26
Example student work
“Wilderness Through the Eyes of Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry” (PDF) - Courtesy of Laura Treers and used with permission.
