using formalism to analyz “people like that are the only people here”

Order Description

• Contain a thesis that states the theme, or overall argument, the story makes about the topic.
• Development of that thesis with thorough support/evidence and analysis of that information that is organized so that a reader can easily understandand experience your ideas.

Suggestions:

• The order in which you discuss things matters. In an early draft order should not be your concern, but as you progress through your reading and re-reading, and re-tooling of your essay, imagine the experience your reader is likely to have. Just as a teacher needs to pay attention to the order in which he/she offers certain pieces of information to the class, so does a writer.
• Some background information on the story will be important to give your reader early on as you will be assuming your reader is unfamiliar with this text, but don’t overdo the summary portion of your essay. Your reader will be eager to learn what you make of this story more than the details of the story in a vacuum. (They could get that information online!)
• Your intro should serve to prepare your reader for your thesis.
• Your thesis should prepare your reader for a discussion of how the writer’s overall meaning/theme/argument is created through either 1) literary devices/writerly tools and decisions (Formalism) OR 2) your individual interaction with the text as determined by your experiences, values, associations, etc. (Reader Response)—depending on which approach you are taking for the particular essay.
• Body paragraphs should take on, one at a time, different aspects of how this meaning (which was conveyed in the thesis) was created.
• Ideas and instances from the text should be smoothly integrated with your ideas and should adhere to MLA conventions when as in the stance of quoting. (See Library Tutorial from last week)
• In your concluding paragraph, review for your reader your overall claim about that the story’s meaning and how that meaning was created.
• Be open to changing your thesis! Good writing is almost always the product of revision—of seeing your ideas differently over and over again.
• Start soon—good work takes time.

Formalism:

• Sees a piece of literature as complete and existing without respect to the reader.
• Is interested in the way in which all of the features of a piece work together as a whole toward a particular aim of the writer.
• Attends to devices the writer used such as: structure, imagery, character development, setting, language, etc. (See list in week two box)

Ask yourself questions such as:
-How does the form of this story create a particular meaning in the text?
-Why would the writer have chosen to make this particular “move” as he/she was writing?
-What if he/she had chosen to make a different “move”? How might the meaning have changed?

the story is in this website http://jordansebastianbonner.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Moore.pdf