Grammar, punctuation, and spelling all count in this 1000-word essay, roughly four pages, which uses MLA citation to objectively explore one of three different theses and incorporates one of five assigned secondary sources. The essay should be divided into paragraphs made up of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Be sure to give your essay an original titlenot Hesse Essay and not Midtermcentered above the introductory paragraph, and be sure to indent every new with a tab.
Parag 1) The introduction explains briefly what the book is about, and it italicizes the title of the book. The introductory paragraph ends by explicitly stating the essays thesis. Please position the thesis statement, just as it is worded above, at the end of the introduction. Do not change the thesis. Notice also that it is worded generally, meaning that the strongest essays will be those that discuss a variety of secondary characters (ideally, each in a separate paragraph) instead of just Siddhartha. Remember that you are choosing only one topicyou cannot write on all threeand that a good essay will be treating a variety of episodes and situations in the book rather than getting stuck on one or two incidents. It is not necessary to discuss episodes in the books chronological order because you are NOT writing a report or summary of what happens but an analysis of it. (Do NOT start paragraphs with Then or Afterwards or In the next chapter.)
Body Paragraphs 2 through 4, 5, or 6) Paragraphs should fall between 150-250 words in length. Not counting the introduction and the conclusion, the essay should contain somewhere between 4 and 6 body paragraphs, each of which is built around a different example that relates to the thesis. Each body paragraph should begin with a topic sentence (and never a quotation) that indicates the main idea of the paragraph. Each body paragraph supports a single main idea by using material and examples from the text in the form of quotation and/or paraphrase. If you are building on material you wrote in last week’s forum, remember to summarize briefly the situation surrounding each example, as if the reader of your essay was not so familiar with the different episodes that make up Siddhartha. (You would want, for example, to explain in a sentence who Gotama was, if your paragraph was centered on the idea that Siddhartha learns something from him.) Remember also that the speaker should always be indicated before a quotation, and references need to be given by using parenthetical page citation. IMPORTANT: Make sure to cite the page numbers of passages in our book that you refer to.
Last) The conclusion does not introduce new examples. Instead, it recapitulates what has already been said and puts the essays thesis in a broader context. It is the best place for making personal comments, if you like. After the conclusion of the essay, bibliographic information about the text should be given as the Work Cited, which you should copy from the Course Syllabus. If you incorporate an idea from a secondary source or video, it also needs appear among the Works Cited. Do not quote from Wikipedia, SparksNotes, or Gradesaver. These are not college-level secondary sources.
Remember to use Times New Roman font (12pt size) and to double-space between lines.The conclusion needs to be followed by a Works Cited list containing both the primary and secondary sources. For the secondary source, use the citation key located in the article. For the primary, copy the following:
Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. 1922. Trans. Sherab Codzin Kohn. Boulder: Shambhala, 2018. Print.
Check that the essays length is +1000 words, and print the word count to the essay last after the Work Cited.
