Dr. Michael Delahoyde
Washington State University

The Objective:

Goals of this course include the improvement of your skills in information literacy and critical analysis by researching and articulating your insights into some kind of presentational or written format. On the due date noted, you will be pleased and alleviated to turn in one of the two most significant pieces of work you will have produced for the semester in this class -- a four-page analysis of an artwork, musical piece, poem, or focused aspect of the play. You are welcome to accomplish as a group involving another student in the class if the aim becomes a somewhat more substantial project to be turned in.

Collaborative projects are welcome here but certainly not forced. Decide if you intend to work with another person, or if you're working alone. Once you decide to work with others, the project is locked in; so do not agree to join with knavish, hedge-born scuts who will come futilely whimpering to me later for extensions when they justifiably get booted out of the group. The project will be minimally a total of four pages, double-spaced, with a Works Cited list (or annotated bibliography) beyond that.

Select a brutally specific piece to focus on: a single poem or lyric, a particular work of art or manuscript illumination, a motet or madrigal, a short portion of a single scene in the play. Do not start out with the misguided notion that your painful goal is to "fill pages" and that therefore the chore will be easier if you tackle twenty-three different pieces and four themes: "Love, Death, Infatuation, and Family Values in Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume de Lorris, Shakespeare, Roman de la Rose Illuminations, and 17th-Century Norwegian Sea Chanties concerning Cheese."

Research your subject. When working in collaboration, how you divide up the labor is your choice. Each project is required to include at least two secondary sources, and it is certain that the internet is not your salvation. Go to the WSU Libraries web page -- http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/ -- and instead of hitting Griffin automatically, select Find Journal Articles, scroll to either the English Literature indexes or another pertinent topic (Art? Music?), and select the best, often the top-of-the-list bibliography (for literature, the MLA International Bibliography; for others, maybe the Humanities Index). Then conduct a search with some logical keywords. The ideal sources are scholarly journal articles. These articles are sometimes gathered together and published afterwards in books, but you need to demonstrate that you can carry out more sophisticated research than a book search. Encyclopedia-type online resources are embarrassing and worthless at the academic stage in which you should be operating now. The articles do not need to address your subject directly. They should, however, relate to your subject and supply at least some pithy quotations to help illuminate the importance and key ideas within your chosen piece. A significant part of the grade on this project will reflect the quality and pertinence of the resources.

Original insight and analysis should still dominate the entire discussion. Your final revised essay must be a minimum of four full, typed, double-spaced pages containing an intriguing (not underlined) title, an original unified thesis, vigorous analytical work, no extra spacing between paragraphs, all in a clean, effective, illuminating, properly documented presentation (correctly punctuated in-text parenthetical citations -- for secondary sources, of author and page). The analysis should consist of microscopic details described engagingly, and interpretive insights explaining their significance, organized logically in a way that supports and explains your thesis vision of the overall piece.

At the end of the paper, include (not treat and attach as a separate document to be forgotten) a Works Cited list, correctly formatted in MLA style. Replicating some chaotic online catalog format, or relying on programs that promise to do this formatting for you, is 100% guaranteed to fail you. For further instruction regarding format and details of documentation, refer to the web page -- http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/shakespeare/mla.html -- or ask me ahead of time.

"Are you gonna be like really strict on us about Works Cited format and all that stuff?" Uh, yeah? And stop priding yourself on having a jaunty identity based largely on your supposedly unique lack of skill in spelling. The presentation and appearance of your work should be proofread and letter-perfect so that niggling surface matters do not distract your readers from your ideas.

You are obligated to hand in the assignment at the beginning of the class period on the designated due date. Truancy is, of course, no excuse (i.e., "I couldn't get my paper in 'cuz I cut class"). Fate, as we know, plays amusing tricks. I tell you right now that Aunt Louise could drop dead in a flash on "paper-due eve": and what were you doing the previous day? It is your obligation to anticipate anything like this in your life that could go wrong and to take preventive measures or to develop back-up plans. You also must accept responsibility for being so foolish as to stake your grade on a computer's or printer's reliability. And no bitter ironies about roommates and alarm-clocks. No work submitted means you did not meet the requirements of the course (big F); late work will not be evaluated but at least you will have met requirements minimally (little F factored in).

Other writing recommendations about various issues can be found among my web pages,
including my snotty comments regarding rancid phrases
and about generally turning in the project.

I am glad to provide advice and help at any stage, from pre-writing and researching to the drafting, of this project. Ultimately, though, it must be completed and turned in when due; the compressed summer-semester schedule does not allow for screwing around and lame excuses. The project is worth roughly 10% of your final grade for the course.