Sunday, September 13, 2009

Evaluative Essay and Evaluative Essay Review

This essay assignment has two parts.
  1. Write a fifteen-hundred word essay that evaluates the lecture presentation of any one of the course texts. Your essay will show evidence of your own critical understanding of the course text and evidence also of careful engagement in lecture. Your evaluation, then, will need to show that you have read, analysed and evaluated your selected course text carefully and attended attentively and evaluated carefully all the course lectures. The topic post is here.
  2. After you have received your commented and graded evaluative essay, you will write a one thousand to fifteen hundred-word review of your essay in light of later course lectures. That is, you will compare and evaluate your own first effort in light of additional lecture material and a different course text.
For part one, you might, for example, develop a particular lecture point on Spiegelman's Maus--its presentation of his father as stereotypical Jew, say-- that puts additional, or even countervailing, light on that aspect. You are, in other words, entering into a dialectic with lecture, from your own detailed engagement with the text.

For part two, you might find that your first analysis lacked an effective historical context, and the lecture on Brown's Louis Riel made the importance of the historical dimension much clearer. You would, in other words, be continuing the dialectic, but adding your own first essay to the on-going conversation.

Nb. A legend for the copyediting symbols used in marking essays is now posted.

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