For your first paper you must write on one of the poems or prose pieces we cover in class before we start on Paradise Lost. If you first obtain special permission, you may be allowed to write on a poem or an essay other than those we discuss in class, provided the piece you choose was authored by one of the authors whose works we read during January. You must make your paper conform to the template for electronic submission, as well as including an electronic copy of it formatted in MSWord. In both formats, your paper must also conform to MLA rules for citation and bibliography.

You will be expected to write a concise explication of the piece of literature you choose to work on, and to write to an audience of students such as those in ENGL 2283 who can be expected to have read the piece but not to have done any research on it, and not to have done a great deal of thinking about it.

You are required to read and incorporate into your paper at least two essay-length articles or chapters on the poem or prose piece you seek to explicate. This incorporation can be done in the form of a couple of paragraphs along the line of a literature review. The literature review is an integral part of longer academic works, and in it the author summarizes the critical conversation that provides the scholarly context within which discussions of the work are currently being conducted. Alternatively, you might choose to use your research to help you explain particularly difficult passages or concepts within the c17th poem or prose piece.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has developed rules for the presentation of scholarly research in the Humanities. The purpose of these rules is to ensure scholars who read works written in conformance with MLA rules can conduct their own scholarly investigation into the sources that support the work being read, and to ensure immediate recognition of and distinction between a "Chapter Title" and a Book Title, or an "Article Title" and the name of the Journal within which the article appears. To engage in scholarly work in the humanities you need not know this meta-discourse intimately (I certainly don't), but you do need to know of it, to know that you must follow it, and therefore to know how to access it in order to make your work conform to it.

You are required to provide a list of references (a.k.a. a bibliography) you consulted as you prepared to write and wrote your paper. This list will conform to MLA rules.

In addition to adhering to the conventions of the MLA, you are also required to re-format your paper into an electronic template. I will provide you with this template, and place what will then be your webpage into the larger website for the first assignment for ENGL 2283 - 2006. Even though I will provide you with a template, you will still have to do more work to ensure your webpage is properly formatted, so be sure to plan accordingly.

I also have more faith in your aesthetic sense than I do in my own, so I encourage you to modify the template in small ways to make your page more attractive, or perhaps more functional. We will discuss this option in class.