Homework Help: English Essay Writing

Posted by I need ENGLISH help on Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 1:25pm.

Here is my intro paragraph to my AP English 12 FINAL paper. I feel like it's really weak and short for a paper thats supposed to be 10 pages long. Please help!

Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight’s Children, and Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, both employ similar writing styles in their respective novels. Since both of the novels are classified in the same genre, magical-realism, it is not inconceivable that the literary techniques of idiosyncratic capitalizations, personification, and elaborate similes are found abundantly in both. The use of these techniques keeps the narration exciting; managing to keep the plot morally strenuous as well as imaginatively supple.

English Essay Writing - Writeacher, Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 1:36pm
Two things -- one technical, the other rather major.

1. Replace the semicolon in the last sentence with a comma. You don't have two complete sentences on each side of the semicolon. You also need a comma after "strenuous."

2. Why are you worrying about the complete introduction before writing the first draft of the body of your paper? All you should be concerned with until you're almost finished with the paper is the thesis statement. If I take the last sentence above as your thesis statement, it's OK -- not complete yet, but OK.

So ... do you have a plan or an outline (use it like a roadmap) for your entire paper? If not, that's what you need to do next. Don't worry about finalizing the introduction, but do make sure your thesis statement is a good one.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/thesis.htm
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/thesistatement.html

Once you have a good, complete plan (outline), then dive into the first draft of the body of your paper. This should be the bulk of your time and energy. Once you have it drafted, revised, etc., THEN you should deal with the introduction.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index2.htm
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/index.html
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/intro.html

And don't worry about the length of the intro. For one of my major grad school papers, I used a really significant quotation from the book my paper was based on (The Brothers Karamazov) and took off from there. But using the particular quotation didn't occur to me until I was well into writing the paper itself.

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