Academic Honesty Survey
Student Course Evaluations
Final writing assignments will not be
accepted late without medical
documentation.
Final Assignment and Exam
Your final writing assignment is due by noon on
Friday, May 22 in the drop box for EN 2910
located in 347 Stong.
The final exam is scheduled to begin at 3:30 on
Sunday, May 24 in rooms E and F in Curtis
Lecture Halls. You have two hours to
complete the exam.
Final Exam Format
You are responsible for having read and taken
lecture notes for: Shakespeare, Jonson,
Rowlandson, Franklin, Shelley, Hawthorne,
Melville, Poe, Wharton, Jacobs, Whitman,
Gilman, Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner, Ellison,
O’Connor and Baldwin.
You should certainly read the other authors, but
you won’t be responsible for them during the
exam.
The first section tests your reading
comprehension. It’s not enough to rely only
on lecture notes.
The second tests your understanding of the
elements of style.
The third consists of quote identification. You’ll
be asked to cite the title, author,
speaker/character if there is one, and to
explain the quote’s significance. Quotes are
taken from lecture slides.
Reading comprehension
What musician does Sonny idolize?
Who killed Justine in Frankenstein?
What food makes up the bulk of Bartleby’s diet?
What does Lenehan get from the servant girl in
“The Two Gallants”?
Describe Belacqua Shuah’s schedule for the day?
Where does Cordelia go once Lear casts her in
exile?
How Fiction Works by James Wood
“Literature differs from life in that life is
amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us
toward it, whereas literature teaches us to
notice—to notice the way my mother, say often
wipes her mouth before she kisses me; the
drilling sound of a London cab when its diesel
engines is flabbily idling; the way old leather
jackets have white lines in them like the striations
of fat in pieces of meat; the way a baby’s arms
are so fat that they seem tied with string.”
“Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it
floats a rival reality. It is the entire
imaginative process in one move. If I compare
the slates on roof to an armadillo’s back or [...]
the bald patch on the top of my head to a crop
circle [...], I am asking you to do what Conrad
said fiction should make you do—see. I am
asking you to imagine another dimension, to
picture a likeness.”
Elements of Style
equals all the collective choices an author makes
about how to present her/his ideas in prose
including diction (word choice), syntax
(sentence structure), characterization, theme,
humour, tone, epiphany/moment of grace as
well as:
Narrative structure: linear vs. foreshadowing or
flashback which produce a non linear
structure.
Point of View/Narrative Mode
Single or multiple narrators; epistolary/letter
form; first person (“I”); second person (“You);
third person objective (the fly on the wall);
third person subjective (often an unreliable
narrator); third person omniscient (narrator
knows all about events and characters’
thoughts, motivations); third person limited
(often referred to as stream of consciousness).
Figurative language
metaphor
simile
imagery
personification
alliteration/assonance
onomatopoeia
irony
allusion
allegory
anaphora
apocope
aphaersis
enallage/metaplasmus
asyndeton/polysyndeton
hyperbole
apostrophe
antithesis
symbolism
“In the centre of the day, tossed among the
shoal of travelling sardines in a coleopter with
a big white carapace, a chicken with a long,
featherless neck suddenly harangued one, a
peace-abiding one, of their number, and its
parlance, moist with protest, was unfolded
upon the airs.”
“On the platform, pla pla pla, of a bus, chuff
chuff chuff, which was an S (and singing still
dost soar, and soaring ever singest), it was
about noon, ding dang dong, ding dang dong,
a ridiculous ephebus, poof poof, who had one
of those hate, pooh, suddenly turned (twirl
twirl)on his neighbour angrily, grrh grrh, and
said hm hm: “You are purposely jostling me,
Sir,” Ha ha. Whereupon phfftt, he threw
himself on to a free seat and sat down, plonk.”
“O platinum-nibbed stylograph, let thy smooth
and rapid course trace on this single-sided
calendar paper those alphabetic glyphs which
shall transmit to men of sparkling spectacles
the narcissistic tale of a double encounter of
omnibusilistic cause. Proud courser of my
dreams, faithful camel of my literary exploits,
lissome fountain of words counted, weighed
and chosen . . .”
“The portion of some is to have their afflictions
by drops, now one drop and then another; but
the dregs of the cup, the wine of
astonishment, like a sweeping rain that
leaveth no food, did the Lord prepare to be
my portion. Affliction I wanted and affliction I
had, full measure.”
“It must be the flag of my disposition, out of
hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly
dropt.”
“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a
creature driven and derided by vanity; and my
eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
“She was ‘as easy as an old shoe’– a shoe that
too many feet had worn.”
“to humor him in his strange willfulness will cost
me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul
what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for
my conscience.”
In the scientific style, you will formulate an
argument about one author’s writing style
with an interesting thesis based on some level
of controversy. Choose an author from the
last portion of the reading list beginning with
James Joyce through to David Sedaris. You
will need to demonstrate that you have
mastered the correct way to cite borrowed
sources by using two articles in your
argument.
The sources that you cite must come from a
reputable academic journal, not from say
Rollingstone. You can access Project Muse
and JSTOR journal databases through your
university library account. The sources are to
be used to support your argument and not to
eclipse it. Use attributive tags to create strong
paraphrases which distinguish the borrowed
ideas and words from your own.
In the opaque style, you will attempt to imitate
the writing style of Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner,
Ellison, O’Connor, Baldwin, Thompson or
Sedaris. Create an alternate scenario for the
characters one author develops and fashion
together a narrative in 7-10 pages. You will
need to pay attention all the stylistic choices
involved in order to craft an imitation of an
author’s style.
Citation
• the act of citing or quoting a reference to an
authority or a precedent. A means to
differentiate your original work from
borrowed words and ideas.
• You cannot discuss a text without formally
citing it. Offering a plot summary is
insufficient.
• If you have a works cited page you must
actually attribute the material in the body of
your essay.
• You must attribute all borrowed material in
order to avoid plagiarism and maintain
academic integrity.
• When I read your essays I assume that every
word and idea is yours unless you tell me
otherwise by including a paraphrase,
quotation or summary which cites another
author.
• When you do research, what you learn does
not simply become yours just because you
found it. Always cite your sources.
Intellectual integrity depends upon it.
• The first time that you use a source, try to
identify the author and title, from then on,
you can refer to the author by last name.
• Strive to introduce borrowed material with an
attributive tag rather than burying the author
at the end of the sentence in parentheses.
Paraphrase
A paraphrase demonstrates that you have
understood the argument; it allows you to
clearly signal to your audience that you are
capable of synthesizing other positions among
your own.
A paraphrase helps you to avoid plagiarism.
Using a paraphrase allows you to refrain from an
over-reliance on placing quotations in your
compositions.
Attributive tags
Accept, admit, affirm, analyze, argue, assert,
believe, cite, compare, conclude, contradict,
criticize, declare, deduce, defend,
demonstrate, deny, disprove, dispute, doubt,
endorse, examine, explain, hint, ignore,
illustrate, imply, include, infer, inquire, insist,
interpret, justify, liken, mention, note, oppose,
ponder, prove, purport, question, reason,
rebut, recommend, refuse, refute, report
restrict, reveal, select, state, stress, submit,
suggest, support, suppose, surmise, validate,
verify, wonder.
Remember that you have to change the original
diction and syntax with your own in order to
craft a true paraphrase. Don’t add or omit
meaning to the original source.
“Dante and the Lobster” begins Beckett’s
meditation on the arbitrary nature of suffering
(Kiberd).
Declan Kiberd isolates Beckett’s “Dante and the
Lobster” as the genesis of the author’s careerlong exploration into the arbitrary nature of
suffering (Inventing Ireland 454).
Tate wrote that “Good Country People “is
without exception the most terrible and
powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever
read” (Gooch).
Brad Gooch discloses in his recently released
biography of O’Connor that her friend Allen
Tate believed the story to be “without
exception the most terrible and powerful
story of Maimed Souls I have ever read”
(Flannery 255).
Your works cited page contains the full
publication information for your reader, so in
the body of the text you can keep references
brief. Page numbers are required for quotes,
but are otherwise not always necessary unless
you are citing a large work or more than one
work from an author.
Be Creative and Inventive
Wilde reminds us that in manners of critical
writing that “attitude is everything.”
For O’Connor, style is the “manners and
mystery” to be unlocked on the page.
Lanham advises us to make “manner the
matter”
Reach beyond obvious observations. So what?
Avoid repetition in diction and syntax.
Don’t try and bend the text to fit your thesis or
analysis.
You cannot choose to ignore what contradicts or
disproves your idea.
Refrain from using long block quotes or from
quoting too much.
Don’t let quotes hang without always explaining
why you’ve used them and why they are
important.