Essay Prompt
Persuasive Essay
Transcendentalism/Anti-transcendentalism
Prompt: Which literary movement is more successful at establishing its beliefs:
transcendentalism or anti-transcendentalism? Using concrete details from the texts we have
read, which work(s) more effectively discredit the ideas of the contrasting literary movement?
Timed Writing Tips
Thesis development:
 Include title of work and author’s name (don’t misspell either of these).
 Make sure your thesis makes sense (has a subject) and responds specifically to the prompt.
 Make sure you are arguing something. Your thesis needs to be provable!
Organization and Structure
 Every body paragraph needs a topic sentence. A topic sentence is the main idea of your paragraph—the big
point you are trying to make in this specific paragraph.
You must LEAD IN to your concrete details, whether they be direct quotes (better of the two) or
paraphrase. Your lead in needs to be a complete sentence and needs to put your concrete detail in context.
 Make sure that your lead in is correct and accurate for your quote.
 After your concrete detail, you need to analyze. In your commentary/analysis, you need to prove deeper
thinking by a. explaining what the quote reveals and b. how it supports your thesis. Remember commentary
A and commentary B? They are still relevant and you still need them!
BANNED WORD LIST: Do not use these words, on pain of points being taken off!
I (me, my, our)
A lot
You (your)
As stated in my thesis (or anything that references
This shows that/This quote proves that
that you are writing an essay)
Pesky Details: The devil is in the details. Keep these straight!
 You aren’t buddies with the author, so you aren’t on a first name basis with him. Use last name only.
 Longer titles (novels, full length plays) are italicized; shorter works (poems, short stories) get quotation
marks. Nothing is underlined anymore—it’s so yesterday.
 You are (or should be) writing a literary analysis, not a review of the author or the work. Nathaniel
Hawthorne doesn’t care if you think he did a “great job” at symbolism with “Young Goodman Brown”, and
neither do I. So get rid of evaluations.
Citations
If you are only quoting one work throughout the entire essay, then you don’t need to bother with last names. You
simply give the quote and then have the page number in the parentheses after the quote.
Remember the end quotation mark goes BEFORE the parentheses.
Remember that the end punctuation (a period) goes AFTER the parentheses.
Example: “Spare me! You forget nothin’ and forgive nothin’. Learn charity, woman” (54).
If the author ends what you want to excerpt with a question mark or an exclamation point, keep it inside the quote
and then add a period after your citation.
Example: “This warrant’s vengeance! I’ll not give my wife to vengeance!” (77).