Length: 750-900 words; about 4 pp. when typed double-space.

–Your task is to take Medley by Toni Cade Bambara and prepare an analytical, interpretive essay. The essay needs to hinge on a thesis, a main idea that you demonstrate in each step of the paper. The goal is to write an essay that helps another reader understand the story better and to account for features and ideas that are less than obvious, that need to be proven.

–Structure the essay with an introductory paragraph that focuses on the problems, issues, conflicts, themes, or character changes that the story addresses. The remaining three to five paragraphs should break down your thesis to cover different angles and elements of the story. Different writers will have different ways of arranging and presenting their ideas, but the most important point is that your essay is organized around the presentation of ideas, and not bound by the sequence of the plot. For instance, if there are two sides to every conflict, you can address each side in a separate paragraph and then ask why they are or aren’t resolved in the third. If a character faces a crisis, you can ask why the character was motivated to change or take action, whether the action was effective, what problems or complications it caused. You can also think about arranging the body of your paper around the four or so most central examples of the story’s conflict, with each one showing some different but connected dimension of the conflict.

–The best papers are efficient: They don’t waste space summarizing the story for someone who’s already read it, but get right to the point of arriving at a thesis that needs to be proven. Each section of the paper advances a new, but continuous, idea.

–All of the stories address the place of music or art in the worlds of the main characters, so theses and examples that look closely at the characterizations of artists and their art are more likely to be on the mark. Obviously, stories that have non-musicians as their central characters would focus on the main character’s broader dilemma but still look in some detail at connections to music or art.

–Write about the story in the present and present perfect tenses: “Sonny returns to Harlem after he has served time in prison and drug rehabilitation.” Use frequent short quotations (phrase- or sentence-length at most) and references to the text to back up any points that are less than obvious and need proof. Make sure you always “frame” your quotes by introducing their context in the story beforehand and explaining their significance to your main point immediately afterwards.