SCHOLARLY ARTICLE ANALYSIS PROJECT
Dr. Halbert's Courses
Last update: 11 September 2023

One of the biggest challenges facing students in a 200-level Literature course is writing a literary analysis. While writing any kind of analysis can be hard, it's exponentially harder if you have never read an article published by an academic in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal. Seeing how professionals write a literarry analysis with enough proficency to have other academics agree that the argument is solid enough to be published in a journal can help you to understand the expectations of an academic paper so that you can adjust the organization and style of your own academic writing style to mirror what is expected of literary scholars. While you are not expected to write at this level in this course, striving to move towards this level will help you to improve your approach to writing at the college level.

Beyond the impact on your own potential approach to writing papers for this course, a task common to almost all upper-level college courses is finding, reading, and evaluating academic articles to help inform you as you develop a thesis for a project.  Such readings will provide some of the evidence you will use to support your own claims about a topic.  To use them effectively, you need to evaluate each piece to determine if it's a potentially legitimate source. 

Such essays are also a good way to see how professional academic writers set up their papers.  As you read and mark the text, consider the following issues:

• Who is writing the piece? What is the basis of his/her/their expertise to comment on the topic?
• Where was the piece published? What is the knowledge level of the intended audience?
• What is the central argument of the text?
• How is the topic introduced? How does the author establish an issue or context to which this text is responding? How does the article connect to the work of other scholars?
• What kind of evidence is used? How are quotations documented, introduced, and discussed? How is the works cited page organized?
• Is the argument convincing? Why? Where does it seem to fall apart if it does so?

To complete this assignment, you will need the assigned scholarly article found in the File section of the Canvas site. See the Daily Homework Schedule for the title. Then download the MS Word template for the assignment.  Read the questions first, then read and mark the assigned essay in order to identify the information you will need to answer the questions.  You may want to have access to the Internet available to you to pull extra information into your answers.  Then submit your assignment to the "Scholarly Article Analysis Project" Assignment as anMS Word attachment.  Make sure the filename follows this convention: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_ANALYSIS_ENG000.docx (substituting the appropriate information where needed).