English 1010-025 Fall 2009 Formal Essay Assignment 1:

The Postman Always Rings (at Least) Twice

Objective: Successful completion of this essay assignment will result in 3-5 typed, double-spaced, well-thought-out pages of text that meet the requirements listed below. Do keep in mind that this paper will be graded, not marked pass/fail, which means that you may earn some, none, or all of the 10% of your grade that this is worth.

The purpose of this assignment is to have you choose a short nonfiction news text and analyze a few of the metaphors in it, with the ultimate goal of crafting an essay that describes some aspect of what they're doing in relation to that particular text. You may choose to analyze any recent newspaper or magazine article (online or print) of suitable length published within the last 3 months. The text you choose may be on any subject, as long as it is of suitable length and metaphorical content. To find a text, you may try anything from a print copy of a newspaper or magazine to searching on an online database of articles.   Please be sure to include a copy of the text you analyze with your essay. Once you select a text, your goal will be to compose an essay that analyzes the role that metaphor plays in it along the lines of Postman’s discussion of metaphors in his essay “Defending Against the Indefensible.”

General Requirements: The paper must have a unique and appropriate title, one that fits the paper’s particular content and begins to point the reader in the direction the paper will go. An essay introduction that lacks some indication of the paper’s purpose, scope, and structure (see Swales) will significantly impact the grade the paper receives. An essay without suitable and substantial and carefully analyzed quotations from the text(s) you discuss will surely fail. Transitions between paragraphs should exist in some form as well. The conclusion should not repeat the intro, but point out what has been accomplished and perhaps what has not—and if you can think of any, suggestions for future research make for a nice closing point.

What Your Essay Might Look Like

Following are some general recommendations as concerns structure and content: this is merely advice---make the choices your own.

Beginning

Set up the context for the essay. Summarize what the essay is about, what it’s dealing with, what its approach is, perhaps some suggestion of the direction it will take. Don’t just jump in as though this were all already clear—i.e., don’t begin your essay with a sentence like this: “This text has several metaphors which I am going to analyze.” In response to the above, I will end up asking: 1) what text? 2) which metaphors, how many, and why these? 3) why I am reading this? (in short—what am I going to get out of this essay?) It is also recommended that somewhere in the first few paragraphs you summarize the subject of the text you are analyzing. Again, see Swales.

Middle

The analysis. You may structure this vast middle part any way that makes sense to you. Much of this will depend on the text you are analyzing and what you have discovered about it. If most of your work concerns several related metaphors (i.e. on the same theme or drawing from the same metaphorical concept) then this will probably be your focus. Important: try to come up with a reason for dealing with the metaphors in the way you do--- if possible, don’t structure your essay along the lines of “Ok, here’s a metaphor I found. Oh, here’s another one. Looky here, I’m going to tell you about a third one.” In other words, don’t just tell me that you found them, or just discuss them in the order in which you found them---try to explain your reasoning for discussing these particular metaphors and how important (or unimportant) they are to the overall text.

End

Please, for the love of all that you consider sacred, do not restate your introduction as a conclusion. I’ll gag. If you don’t come upon a conclusion naturally, then consider including the following in your concluding remarks: suggestions as to what the essay has accomplished; suggestions as to what more might be accomplished if the work were continued; questions that remain to be answered; problems that were discovered/presented in the process of the analysis. In short, your conclusion should position the rest of your essay in terms of what’s been done, and what, if anything, might still be done.

Last General Remark: Using 1st and 2nd person: You are welcome to use these forms of address; I do. However, don’t use them simply because you do so out of habit, or because you can’t think of anything else, or just as a fallback. Use them because you have a good reason for doing so (just as I did at the beginning of this paragraph—as long as one considers a lame joke to be a good reason—of course, if you didn’t get the joke, give it another look).