During our class discussions of Ender's Game, we have been applying Booth's terms to scenes in the novel in order to analyze various moments of persuasion. Our goal is to use Booth's terms to either shed new light on the novel or, potentially, to help us understand Booth's terms and theories in a new way.
You will do this same thing in your response paper, analyzing some moment in the novel with Booth's terms.
1) Identify and summarize a moment in Ender's Game that you would like to analyze using Booth's terms. You do not need to explain every component of the scene you're analyzing, but you do need to describe in detail the most important components of it and provide some context of how the scene fits into the rest of the novel.
2) Identify and summarize the terms or concepts from Booth that you would like to use to analyze the moment you have identified. This section should be detailed and should serve to show that you understand Booth's term and can explain it to someone who may not be familiar with his theories.
3) Conduct your analysis by explaining how Booth's terms apply to the moment you have chosen. You should be citing specific moments and passages when you do this and not just speaking in general terms about the scene you have chosen. You should be choosing multiple examples to support your analysis.
4) Explain how your analysis can help us understand the novel in a new way or how your analysis might help us understand Booth's concepts in a new way.
Your paper can be no more than 1,000 words, and it must do all four of the things listed above.
When providing comments on these papers, I will be looking to see that the paper does the following things:
- Responds to the prompt above.
- Provides a detailed response to the prompt, using specific examples from the book to support your claims.
- Shows evidence that you have incorporated feedback from me and your classmates as you have expanded and revised the paper. (You'll have opportunities to get feedback during class discussion and during our writing workshop day.)
- Demonstrates a careful writing and revision process.
- Is carefully written, generally free of grammatical errors, and observes the word limits described above.
