General Guidance for the Final Exam Essay:

Before beginning this essay, the student should complete the Objective Test. It is also a great idea to have reviewed my feedback on previous essays. This essay will not receive extensive feedback because it is the final assignment of the semester.

As the Final Essay of the semester, this submission should demonstrate the student’s ability to apply everything they have read and learned throughout the semester to answering a very complex question. This essay will be argumentative in nature. If the student has not studied argument in the past, a good search for them to explore would be the structure of a Toulmin Argument.

Ignoring the guidelines (under the prompt) will result in a zero grade and you will not be permitted to re-submit the final essay. Be sure you give yourself plenty of time to complete this essay.

Prompt:

This semester the student has explored poetry. A very large sampling of literary works has been read. Hopefully, by reading these works the student has a better appreciation for literature and how it can be used to explore complex issues and improve our lives.

In a well-supported essay of at least 800 words, argue for a specific definition of what makes a poetry “literature,” and how literature is then distinct from other types of writing (like your composition essays). What’s the difference between the two types of writing?

Use only examples from the assigned readings throughout the semester and your experiences previously as an ENGL 1010 or 1020 student to support this argument.

Guidelines:

Not meeting the following guidelines will result in a zero on the essay.

1. Must respond to the above prompt.

2. Must be MLA formatted.

3. Must include proper in-text and works cited citation.

4. Must be a minimum of five paragraphs.

5. Must be be no less than 850 words.

6. On plagiarism checks, it must not exceed 25% originality reports. (This means that it must not be more than 25% other peoples’ words and those words must be cited properly).

7. Must not include use of “you, your, you all, y’all, yourself, or you’re.”

8. Should be proofread.

9. I provided feedback to help you improve on the last essay and the journals. It will be clear to me if you have applied that feedback to this paper. If you are making obvious errors I have already covered, it will work against your grade.

10. Do not include outside citation or information from sources beyond the literary works we have read this semester.

11. Do not refer to other literary works that you have read outside of this class.

12. Do not mention or include a dictionary definition of “literature.” Those definitions are largely useless for this activity.

13. UPLOAD THE ESSAY AS A PDF OR DOCX.

Must be 850 words!! No less.