The Dialogue Essay Due next Sunday, November 1 2.5 pages double spaced The second essay asks you to put two writers’ ideas in conversation with one another. You will be analyzing two stories alongside each other in an effort to find a connecting idea or element. TOPIC: Choose two of the three stories we have read and make an argument about how they are similar. Clearly the stories are all very different, but here you are challenged to consider them for how they operate in similar ways – something you began in your freewriting exercise for this week. You can take what you worked on and what you discussed on Blackboard and develop it into an essay. You do not need to write about all the ways they are the same. This is not a catalogue. You just need to choose one way – whether it’s narrator, theme, symbol, etc. or anything else you discover – and develop an argument about how both stories approach this. You can and should also point out the differences within this one element; you’re aiming to show how both authors do something similar, but perhaps in different ways and to different effects. ORGANIZATION: Your first paragraph should make the general case for how the stories are similar – an overall argument. The body of your paper then offers specific examples from both the stories to help you make your point. You may want to write one paragraph about one story and then another about the other and then provide a third paragraph to tie them both together. OR you could deal with both stories in each paragraph. The structure is yours to choose. What’s important is that you support your argument with specific examples from both stories. Also be sure to provide enough context and background about the stories that your examples make sense. GUIDANCE ON CRAFTING YOUR PAPER One very valuable way to approach this kind of topic is to set up a contrast. This means first telling the reader what is different about the stories, and then expressing the similarity. Let me give you an example: If I were to write a paper about the similarities between Wallace and Graff, my introduction might look like this: On their surface, Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism” and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water” seem very different. Graff is writing about how schools and colleges should tap into students’ street smarts in order to cultivate their intellectual abilities, while Wallace is extolling the moral benefits of college, claiming that a liberal arts education helps us become more empathetic and see beyond ourselves. Graff is offering practical guidance while Wallace is offering a philosophical meditation. And yet both authors are getting at something very similar: a good education is not about filling us with knowledge about a particular subject but about giving us the tools to view the world around us thoughtfully and intelligently, and as Graff puts it, “through academic eyes.” Notice how I first explain the key differences between the texts. This gives me the opportunity to give a little context and background about each, while at the same time, giving my essay a point. If I just jumped right in and said that these texts were similar, the reader might ask, Who cares? So what? But by saying that they seem different but really aren’t, the reader says, Hmm, interesting point. CITATIONS Citations are used to tell the reader where your sources in your paper come from. In this essay, I want you to use in-text citations. This is in preparation for your final paper in which you will use citations and provide a Works Cited page. For now, I just want you to get comfortable citing your sources. This means, every time you quote from the stories, you must provide the page number on which the quote appears. There is a specific way of doing this according to MLA (Modern Language Association), which is the body that sets the format for research in the humanities. For MLA in-text citations, if it is evident which story you are writing about (and you should make it evident), you just need to put the page number in parentheses, BEFORE the period, but AFTER the quotation marks. Example: The narrator in Diaz’s story writes, “Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator” (1). Note: Always introduce your quotes – do not drop quotes in without saying who said what. If you do not have page numbers on your copy of anyone of the stories, please create page numbers – 1,2,3 – so that you can include them in the text. This is the best MLA resource out there: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/02/ Please read it carefully.
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