Young Writers Society

Ok to the point!

Our teacher decided to give a you know what and actually gave us a guide sheet to write our essay!

It basically outlines how to get enough marks yadda yadda yadda etc. etc.

In the guide it says to include the following in your itnroduction: "tell your reader your intent to answer the essay question above."

Which if any of you want to know out of curiosity is:

To what extent does act 3 scene 3 highlight a change in Othello? Is this a pivotal part in the play?

I don't intend to stick 100% to this guide but I want to know if the "tell your reader your intent to answer the essay question above." part means to put this into the intro

"In this essay I am going to..." I heard that was a really bad thing to put in an essay :S

EDIT: Blasted typos

"In this essay I am going to..."

When it comes to literary essays, that is worse than nails on chalkboards. You did two things you should never ever ever do, which your teacher might not have told you about yet, but will make your paper look really good if you avoid. Never refer to your paper within the paper ["In this essay"] and never use the first person or talk about yourself ["I am going to..."]. You will also want to avoid that second person ["You can see how..."] and the plural ["here we know that..."]. Some people use "one"? ["One should know that"] but he told us not to use "one" and then other classes go ahead and use it? Haha, so that one I am not sure about.

You will want to state what you are going to talk about, but don't feel like you have to tell the reader you're going to state when you are talking about. Just say: "Act 3 scene 3 shows a change of ______ in Othello because..." The Because it really important. You will always want something in that blank space so that your explanation is in more detail. This could be your first sentence, and your thesis. The because can be really broad, but it needs to be specific. It could also be a list, but that would be daunting. I've never read Othello, so forgive the silliness. ^_^ It could be, "because the characters died" but it would be better to say "because the characters died of fright" which is actually a really, really bad example...Haha.

Well! I hope what I do have here helps you. If you would like, you could write up your introduction and I could read over it for you. I'm not master in lit papers, but I do get -A on all of mine! Which is a really good score in the class, when only one person all year has received an A. So I should be able to help you out. ^_~

Yeah, what she said!

I taught two essay classes last semester and one this semester, so here's some quick advice for literary essays:

Have a good outline. This is essential.

Don't throw your thesis statement at the readers right away. Start by generally talking about the subject, narrowing down until you state your thesis, at the end of the first paragraph. And, as Suzanne said, do NOT explain what you're going to write-- just write it!

Remember to reiterate your thesis (in different words) at the end of the essay, closing on a general but authoritative note.

Good luck!

Ick. I have to write an essay too...Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn. *sulks* I don't want to...

Start by generally talking about the subject, narrowing down until you state your thesis, at the end of the first paragraph.

Well, this is suggested overall, but I'm guessing that Warlock is in the 8th or 9th grade, and really you could write an amazing essay without doing that in that grade.

Plus, I still have no idea how to do that very well, haha. It's just hard to do. So it isn't necessary. I just learned how to do it this year. I'd just write the intro as an intro? . . . Does that make sense?