Analysis Paper

Part 2: Analysis Paper
Composition

Before continuing, please make sure you have completed Part One, including sending your essay to John Nelson.

After a great discussion of gender issues, the story, and what your reactions to some of my questions were, it's time to begin working on the second stage. Here is your key question: What did people say about the story? Your paper will try to answer that question in some way. You won't be able to discuss everything that was said, or address all the essays, so you will need to find some narrow part of the discussion for your analysis.

Here's the key to the paper. You're no longer discussing the story or gender issues in the paper. Think of it this way: You were just in a great discussion, or maybe you got out of a good class, and someone asks you what you were doing. "We were discussing the role of women and this story we read," you say. "What did people say?" they ask you. Your paper is your answer to that question in essay form. To answer it completely, you will have to inform your reader about what was happening in class--you discussed some gender issues, you read a story, and you discussed it. Informing your reader of this will be a part of the essay. Here are the guidelines and a link to an example essay.

Your paper will use the discussion board if you like, but the essays you wrote that expressed your opinions about the story will be central. Those will be posted when they become available.

Writing a good essay this time requires analysis. As the writer, you have to pull together ideas and comments together in a new way. You need to categorize some of the ideas and comments you have seen and make some sense out of them. It's like you have been given a room full of material, and someone has asked you to pick some of it out and organize it. It's not easy, but it's something new, and it's very similar to a scientific investigation. You're asking, "What happened in the discussion? What does the discussion reveal?

If you follow the procedures below, it should lead you to a good start on the paper.

1. Write about your experience in the discussion. What did you think about that? Were people agreeable to your comments? Did you find yourself or your ideas being attacked?

2. Write about what was most memorable about the discussion. What did you learn? Tell about something that surprised you. Think especially about anything that you mentioned to someone during the time the discussion was going on. What did you tell them?

3. Look back at the discussion. What are some of the things that you think others might be interested in hearing about? What was said there that other people, not in the discussion, might find interesting? Did everyone seem agreeable? Or did you find that there are some things that you're not very happy to see?

4. Think about the story and your reaction to it. What questions that I asked were you most interested in? Read the answers that everyone gave to the questions. What do you find interesting there?

5. Now, if you had to say one or two things about the discussion and the comments, what would they be? It should be something that requires some analysis, something that isn't immediately visible in the discussion. It should also be something that you can support. Saying "It was interesting!" won't really work. It's got to be something focused on the discussion itself. "Some of my classmates seem to have a chip on their shoulders," might be a better beginning point. Or "People in the class seem to have a pretty liberal idea of what role women can play in society." Or "The women were sure happy that the mother put the father in his place. That kind of bothers me."

For example (I'm making this up), you might have noticed that the men in the class were more insistent than the women that there were men's roles and women's roles. Did this insistence continue after reading the story? What did the men say about the husband's breakdown in the end?

What you're doing at this point is moving toward a thesis. You might call it a hypothesis. You're testing an idea. Use the new discussion board to help.