Open-ended Essay Review

1. Open-ended Essay Review Class notes and knowledge (3)

2. What did you do well? • Included a lot of detail from your novels • Focused on answering the prompts • Provided insightful connections to the meaning of the work • Were BETTER about specificity in thesis statements • Wrote a LOT (long essays)

3. What should you work on? • Still need to remember AUTHOR and TITLE in introduction • Some of you did not relate the theme of the novel to a universal idea (see next slides) • Some of your “details” were the most obvious ones, and you didn’t dig beneath the surface • You did not always incorporate a discussion of literary elements and techniques • A few misread or interpretted the prompt

4. How to improve? • If you got a #15, you need to prove that the theme is universal. • i.e. “Janie’s realization at the end of the novel is that she didn’t need marriage to find fulfillment in life.” • UNIVERSALIZED: In the search for meaning in life, love and relationships may provide guidance, but are not the final answer. Independence and internal peace are the keys to fulfillment.

5. INCLUDE BOTH! • Note: It is important to include BOTH the theme of the novel/passage, but also, in your conclusion most likely, provide a connection to show the universality of that theme.

6. Techniques and Elements • When discussing key points of the plot, an added bonus is to discuss them in terms of literary elements, such as “symbolism” or “conflict” • Dropping terms (like dropping names), as long as it’s done correctly, will score you higher points because you prove to know both content and technique

7. And P.S. • If you don’t read, or don’t display knowledge of the whole scope of the novel, it is really hard to do well on these essays. • Even if the prompt asks you to focus on a more specific aspect, like a journey or conflict, you should still try to draw in important (vital) plot elements and connect them to the focus (i.e. the consequences of the conflict)…