The First Practice Theme Essay

In the honors class that's one practice theme essay down...and hopefully you learned a lot to apply to the second practice theme essay you'll be writing tonight.

You discussed the difficulties and successes you had last night with the writing.  Your peers then helped you to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses.

We were reminded that we all need to include

-a lead/introduction
-title and author
-a theme/claim
-context
-S.P.A.T.
-conclusion
-paragraphs.

In addition you need to be sure that the arguments you share are accurate and developed well enough to support the theme you identified from the story.  I'm looking for well-developed and insightful analysis of each story's theme.  Don't limit yourself.

With that in mind, be aware that the two pages you write in your writer's notebook will most likely be insufficient for the final draft.  What you are writing in your notebooks is a start, a draft.  Once you select a theme to fully develop, it should be expected that the length of the paper will grow.

One thing I'd like to explain about S.P.A.T.  I know writing is not formulaic, and writing that is formulaic tends not to be as strong as more creative endeavors; however, for the sake of this paper, S.P.A.T. gives us all a place to start.  I do not want anyone thinking or believing that all you need to do to be effective is to follow S.P.A.T.  To the contrary feel free to go beyond S.P.A.T.  If you want to layer multiple quotes effectively in your analysis then by all means do so.  The most successful papers will not be written by rote. Start spatting but then be creative and make the writing truly your own.

Both the honors and the standard class should be writing a 2 page minimum theme paper tonight over one of your themes that you have not written about yet.  As you write be sure to make the adjustments that your partners, teacher, peers and self noted.  This paper, though still a draft, should be stronger than last night's paper (for the honors classes; this is the first night of writing for the standard class).

We'll go to the IMC tomorrow for book selection: classics for honors and novels for standard.  Bring your book if you already have it.

Until next time...