THIS IS NOT A SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT!!
I am self assessing a rubric I am using this as an example to help my students.
Instructions and book are in the file attachments.
Please match this rubric.
Thesis and motive:
The major claim of the essay is complex, insightful, and unexpected. The major claim responds to a true question, tension or problem. It is stated clearly at the outset and evolves throughout the paper. The introduction has a clear motive that outlines the stakes of the argument and demonstrates a meaningful context for the author’s claims.
Evidence and analysis:
The best available evidence is introduced not only to support but also to challenge and complicate the claims and stakes of the essay. It is often drawn from unexpected places, and its nuances are insightfully explored. The argument is sufficiently complex to require an explanation of how the evidence supports the essay’s claims, and evidence is used to develop new claims.
Research: Your research is not only technically correct, as illustrated in the chapter from Kelly Mays on "The Literature Research Essay," but integrated with elegance and grace.
Structure: Ideas develop over the course of the essay so that the foundations established early on push the argument toward a more complex conclusion. The structure is both logical and suspenseful or engaging.
Writing style: The writing is clear and concise, yet sophisticated, demonstrating sentence variety and appropriate vocabulary. The essay is a pleasure to read. The paper includes the proper use of MLA style.
An idea thesis I think you should follow isJesmyn Ward employs memory in "Salvage the Bones" as an essential tool that ensures survival and fundamentally shapes Esch’s identity amid the numerous challenges posed by her impending motherhood. Ward reveals how memory, interwoven with the contrast between the brutal and delicate moments of her life, serves as a foundation for personal maternal identity and resilience.
Some example quotes could be:
“Her stomach was big with Junior. It healed crooked and purple, puffy, and she had to go to the clinic to get an ointment for it when it started to leak pus. Whenever she would walk me through the store or through a crowd when we were out in public, holding the back of my neck with her hand, I’d feel the scar and see those pelicans. Up close, their beaks were etched with dark like the barnacles on a ship’s hull, the same color as Mama’s hand, and they were sharp as knives. They didn’t like us swimming close to them. Her hand was special, her own, one. Mama.”(70)
“What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit.” (6)
“But I looked in the mirror and knew the rest of me wasn’t so remarkable: wide nose, dark skin, Mama’s slim, short frame with all the curves folded in so that I looked square. I changed my shirt and listened to them talking outside.”(10)
“It used to have Mama’s clothesline tied to it with the other end fixed to a pine tree. After Mama died, Daddy moved the clothesline to a closer tree, but he didn’t tie it tight enough, so when Randall and I wash clothes and hang them out with wooden clothespins, the line sags, and our pants dangle in the dirt.”(87)
The dog barks loudly, fast as a drum, and something about the way the bark rises at the end reminds me of Mama’s moans, of those bowing pines, of a body that can no longer hold itself together, of something on the verge of breaking. (174)
She starts to link versions of herself with her mother. “It was always what Mama told us to do when we went running to her with a cut or scrape. She would push and blow at the wound after putting alcohol on it, and when she’d stopped blowing, it wouldn’t hurt anymore” ( 12)
“the patient had what he called a memory "flashback," a fragmentary recollection of a childhood event, a scene of himself running home after school. This remarkable demonstration suggested to Penfield that entire scenes from our past are stored in our brains like video tapes. We not only cannot escape our past, but we are, in some very deep sense that past; for whether we are aware of it or not, much of our past is recorded in our brains and it must, in some as yet unknown ways, determine how we behave and what we are.”(Rosenfield, Israel. “Memory and Identity.” New Literary History, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 197–203. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057275)
“At least we got the memory,” [Esch] say[s]”