Character Study Essay—15% of Course Grade Writing Prompt: Write a 2.5-page essay

Character Study Essay—15% of Course Grade
Writing Prompt: Write a 2.5-page essay character study essay by choosing one character from one of the stories in this Short Story Libguide.
Choose a moment or very brief scene in the story (less than half a page) when the author makes this character’s actions especially striking, puzzling, revealing, or meaningful. Drawing on your skills of close reading and analysis, examine the scene’s details for evidence of significant implications of the character’s behavior. Use these questions to get started:
What does the story’s narrator tell us about the character at this moment? Is anything left out?
What does the character say for themselves? Does the character use words, gestures, objects, silences, or other means to communicate?
How does the character’s behavior at this moment reflect or distract from his or her true intentions? How does the author make us aware of what those intentions are? In what ways and to what effect might the character seem to be playing a part?
How do markers of dress, gender, race, profession, or class communicate in place of words? What are the significance of these external markers?
How does the character’s behavior in this scene reflect upon the story’s themes or issues elsewhere in the text? (You don’t have to cover all possible themes or the whole text.)
Essay Requirements
Participation in PeerMark. This requires you to submit 2 pages of your essay on Friday, and review 4 of your classmates’ essays by Sunday.
2.5 pages, MLA 9 format (also, be sure to have a Works Cited page even though the only work cited will be quotes from the story).
2.5 pages means there are at least 11 lines written on page 3. Any less that and your essay will be considered incomplete, and incomplete work almost always receives a grade of less than 70.
The Works Cited page is part of the essay, it should be page 4, and it does not count toward the page-length requirement.
12-point font, Cambria or Times New Roman only.
Give your essay an evocative title.
Do not feel bound to the mechanical structure of the 5-paragraph essay. It will limit your ability to develop creative, original thinking and writing.
Your essay should include a brief conclusion paragraph that seeks to further the insights of the essay in a sophisticated, satisfying manner. Definitely do not repeat/paraphrase the essay’s thesis statement and summarize its main points.
No outside research is allowed; you must make use of the primary source for support.
Do not quote the story for more than 2 consecutive lines of text in your essay.