Open-ended Essay Review

Class notes and knowledge (3)

What did you do well?

• Included a lot of detail from your novels• Focused on answering the prompts• Provided insightful connections to the

meaning of the work• Were BETTER about specificity in thesis

statements• Wrote a LOT (long essays)

What should you work on?

• Still need to remember AUTHOR and TITLE in introduction

• Some of you did not relate the theme of the novel to a universal idea (see next slides)

• Some of your “details” were the most obvious ones, and you didn’t dig beneath the surface

• You did not always incorporate a discussion of literary elements and techniques

• A few misread or interpretted the prompt

How to improve?

• If you got a #15, you need to prove that the theme is universal.

• i.e. “Janie’s realization at the end of the novel is that she didn’t need marriage to find fulfillment in life.”– UNIVERSALIZED: In the search for meaning in life,

love and relationships may provide guidance, but are not the final answer. Independence and internal peace are the keys to fulfillment.

INCLUDE BOTH!

• Note: It is important to include BOTH the theme of the novel/passage, but also, in your conclusion most likely, provide a connection to show the universality of that theme.

Techniques and Elements

• When discussing key points of the plot, an added bonus is to discuss them in terms of literary elements, such as “symbolism” or “conflict”

• Dropping terms (like dropping names), as long as it’s done correctly, will score you higher points because you prove to know both content and technique

And P.S.

• If you don’t read, or don’t display knowledge of the whole scope of the novel, it is really hard to do well on these essays.

• Even if the prompt asks you to focus on a more specific aspect, like a journey or conflict, you should still try to draw in important (vital) plot elements and connect them to the focus (i.e. the consequences of the conflict)…