20 Sep The Scarlet Letter

Here you are at the end of a challenging novel. I hope you feel a sense of accomplishment! This was not an easy novel to read, but you did it! This will be the instructions for your final assignment for the novel.

Your assignment is to write an essay in which you will examine a passage from the novel and then answer a question. Before I tell you the question, I want you to know that you MUST pick only one of the 2 given questions. You CANNOT take both sides. Doing so takes away from the validity and credibility of your argument. Okay, now that we have that settled, here’s the question: in the passage below, is this Dimmesdale’s grand redemptive moment or his grand egotistical moment? That’s it! Pick one or the other. 

So how do you do this? Well, you must reread the excerpt attached above (top-left corner) and below from Dimmesdale’s farewell speech in Chapter 23. Then, in a well-developed essay of at least 4 paragraphs, answer the question that you have chosen. You might consider looking up the word “redemptive” or “egotistical” just to get a proper perspective of the direction of your essay. DO NOT DEFINE THESE WORDS IN YOUR ESSAY, but make sure you have a working knowledge of the word. 

You may include anything in the entire novel that helps you to prove that Dimmesdale’s farewell speech is either his long-awaited moment of redemption or a big show of ego. You must use 2 quotes in your paper: 1 from the excerpt below and 1 from somewhere else in the novel. By “quote,” I do not mean that you have to quote something in quotation marks in the book. That would limit you to dialogue between characters. By “quote,” I mean you may use anything said by the narrator or the characters. Make sure that your quote is relevant to what you’re discussing in that paragraph. No credit will be given for random quotes thrown in. 

You MUST document the novel at the end of your paper on a separate Work Cited page, and you must include in-text citations. (Hawthorne 132; ch.23). That’s MLA 8. You can stick with what you know from MLA 7 (Hawthorne 132) if you’d like which is basically no chapter number. (You will only have 1 entry on the Work Cited page – The Scarlet Letter.)

This is a formal essay, written in MLA format. That means a heading, page numbers, a title . . . all those details that go into an MLA paper. There are a few formal writing reminders in the next entry in Buzz.

Introduction: 3-4 sentences. Begin generally talking about the novel, the time period, Puritans, etc. and then narrow down to the characters and then to your thesis statement which should be the last sentence of your introduction. AVOID 1ST PERSON!!!!!

Body: 2 paragraphs where you analyze and discuss your response to the question. At the very minimum, each paragraph should be 5 sentences. 

Conclusion: 2-3 sentences. Restate your thesis, then think about going from specific to general. End with a “big picture”-type statement. Not necessarily one that teaches a moral, but something that the reader can ponder.