Welcome to The 101, a series that is new we provide you with the quick-and-dirty on some crucial college abilities, from analyzing poems and brief tales to distinguishing unreliable narrators! First up, tackling the dreaded lit paper! —ed.
We stepped into my first college English course smug and self-assured—twelve many years of five-paragraph essays and I also thought I had it down. It absolutely was easy: an intro, three human body paragraphs (to your tune of, “My first point is…,” “My second point is …”), and a summary that fundamentally duplicated the intro word for word. I tuned away within my professor’s warning that writing in university had been various and I also pumped out of the lame essay form We had been familiar with. I acquired a C. I'd no clue exactly what a paper that is college-level like, aside from how exactly to compose one, and I also drowned my sorrows in Netflix and Ben and Jerry’s. Ultimately I figured it down through learning from mistakes, but test and error’s overrated. Here’s the eight-step essay-writing guide If only somebody had offered freshman me personally.
1) Do a close reading
This will be one thing I’d learned about in twelfth grade but hardly ever really grasped. A beneficial close reading is fundamentally a number of solid findings about whatever you’re analyzing—whether it is The Odyssey, the fantastic Gatsby, or your professor’s love novella. There’s no point behind a close that is initial other than simply observing details, like images that get repeated, metaphors that stick out, or something that catches your eye. (more…)
