The book that the prompt refers to is “Stand Your Ground” by Kelly Brown Douglas
Some Guidelines to Follow:
Basic readability and attention to rules: do you avoid spelling and grammar mistakes? Do you follow the formatting rules? Do your sentences make sense? Do you have a college-level command of the English language? Do you follow the rules for citation? Do you use inclusive language? Do you underline your thesis statement?
Understanding of the material and ability to analyze it and synthesize its main ideas: do you demonstrate that you understand the argument being made by the author? Are you faithfully representing the position you’re engaging? This doesn’t entail
that you spend your entire paper summarizing/reproducing every element of the argument necessarily, but, whenever you do summarize or refer to the text, do you capture it as best you could? As a general rule: don’t claim anything without showing
that you have textual support for it. Moreover, make sure that what you say about the author is not only accurate to this or that passage but also reflective of the author’s reasoning as a whole. Put yourself in the author’s shoes.
Your own evaluation: ultimately, these papers are from your own perspective, so I am going to be tracking whether your own position is intelligent and informed by your engagement with the text. There isn’t one right answer for any of these essay questions,
but there are better and worse positions, so make sure you are persuading me of yours. Don’t just say that something is good or bad; explain why you think that in a responsible way that is based on thought rather than just a gut reaction. Take me through the steps of your thinking, and do so by referring concretely to the text on which you’re focused. Also, if your own position is in no way shaped by what we’ve been studying in class so far, I am going to find that odd. At the same time, don’t simply repeat things said in
class lecture or discussion without further engagement and reflection in your own voice. Overall, your task in writing a paper is not to express feelings or assert mere opinions. Rather, it is to develop an informed, creative position on a particular topic that has emerged organically from the texts.
