General expectations: Your essay needs a clear thesis statement that expresses a complex argument. The essay needs to be organized into focused paragraphs that each add one rationale to help “prove” the claim made by your thesis statement. Each rationale must be supported with specific examples from the text, and those examples must be analyzed and interpreted.
Evidence (quotes and paraphrasing) must be properly cited using MLA format. Finally, the essay must be written as grammatically and stylistically correctly as possible. Prompt: The authors we have read are very skilled at playing on the reader’s expectation for a character to undergo a transformation over the course of a story. But it is not always clear whether the characters actually do change. Select two protagonists (each one from a separate reading) and analyze them comparatively for how they do or do not change over time. You mustn’t simply describe their transformation. Rather, you need to develop an argument about the underlying conditions that lead to and/or prevent their transformation. Your argument also needs to be comparative, which is to say you need to illuminate the similarities and differences in those underlying conditions. You might also consider how the authors are using the characters’ transformation, or lack thereof, to develop bigger themes about society.
