First Paper Assignment Sheet

Due: Oct. 9/12

For your first assignment, you can write on anything you believe to be worthy of comment in “The Dream of the Rood” (32 – 36), “The Wanderer” (117), “The Wife’s Lament” (120), Beowulf (36 – 108), or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (183 – 238).

Re-read your chosen poem as many times as you can as you start thinking about it. As you read it, take notes: note lines, metaphors, images that strike you as particularly imaginative, difficult, or beautiful; note words or phrases that you do not understand, or that surprise you in any way, or that seem to invite deeper thought for any reason; note ideas that come to mind as you are reading; note comparisons the poem (or any part of it) prompts you to think of to things outside the poem (e.g. another poem, a novel, a short story, a play, a movie, something that happened to you, a friend, or a family member, some story you heard from a grandparent, etc.); note places in the poem that seem to refer or allude in any way to another place in the poem. Everyone in class should have engaged in this enterprise already for Beowulf.

From the notes you take, develop your own thesis. For this assignment you are not required to develop an argumentative thesis (that will be required for papers 2 and 3). But you are required to

1. use evidence to support your thesis,
2. quote directly from the poem,
3. discuss the poem or some aspect of the poem in a non-trivial way (in essence I’d like you to teach the rest of the class and me something we might not have learned without your help),
4. address your paper to readers such as those in our class who have not read and re-read the poem you are working on as diligently as you, and
5. compose your work in the best prose of which you are capable.
6. include a bibliographic citation citing the poem correctly in accordance with the MLA style

Students commonly mistake their English professor for their editor or their human grammar checker. Do not do that. Proofread your work. Have a friend proofread your work. I distinguish between stupid mistakes and innocent mistakes. Stupid mistakes r these you could of cought have you pade closer attentoin to what your were doing. That is, stupid mistakes are those you could have caught had you paid closer attention to what you were doing. It is okay to write like you are texting when you are texting. But for an assignment for grade in a university class you must meet a different standard. You are not stupid, so do not submit work that would lead a reader to think you are or might be. Your computer has a spell-checking feature; use it. Your computer has a grammar-checking function; use it. Think about mistakes that other professors or high school teachers have flagged in your writing. If you do not think you can spot such errors in your own writing (yet), then make use of the Acadia Writing Centre. Innocent mistakes are mistakes of the kind you make out of ignorance. For example, if you do not know how to use a semi-colon, you can hardly be expected to use it correctly. You will not be penalized for innocent mistakes. You will be penalized heavily for leaving stupid mistakes in your paper. Early in the process of writing any paper, everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. The difference between bad papers, good papers, and really good papers is more often than not a function of the number of times the writer revises the paper. The more times you re-read and correct your own work, the better it will be. The more times you re-read and revise the ideas in your paper, the better it will be.

Writing is a practice rather than a body of knowledge, and as such a person can only improve by doing it. Like any practice, it takes time. As someone who reads for a living, I can usually tell how much time a person has devoted to their writing of an individual document. I can certainly tell the difference between my own hastily composed pieces and those I to which I give enough time. If you want to improve your writing, and you want to earn a good grade in English 1413.C1, slow down. Take your time. Do not expect to write your paper in one sitting. A good paper will demand more of you.

The answer to the most commonly asked question of student assignments is this: it needs to be as long as your thesis needs, and it should be no longer. I do not want to read pages of rambling, off-topic prose because you think the paper should be longer than it is. No one does.

Good writing demands of the author two introductions: one you need to get going, to write the paper, the other is for your reader, and it can only be well written after you have finished your paper. As the person who will mark and grade your paper, I do not want to read the first kind of introduction, the one that you write to get started.

The following is basic advice, but it is good advice: your paper should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Tell your reader what you are going to say, say it, then tell your reader what you have said.

Get started. Give yourself enough time to succeed.

Good luck.