First, this is an argumentative paper, one backed up by evidence from the text; it should also be backed up by at least two secondary sources that are to be cited in your paper. Your secondary sources can come from scholarly books or articles published in peer-reviewed journals, written for either the Sciences or the Humanities. Someone’s personal blog or a student-study site like Gradesaver or Sparknotes do not count as peer-reviewed. Your goal is to synthesize and organize the information you gather from these sources into your analysis by introducing readers to a scholarly conversation. Citations from all sources should be given parenthetically just after the quote or reference, with a “Works Cited” listed, in MLA style, at the end.
Second, at some point, your paper should bring two texts from this class into conversation with one another. While you should focus on one central text (like Frankenstein) in your paper, I am asking you to take the ideas from another text and set them into the conversation. For example, how can you use Skloot’s The Immortal Life or Gawande’s Being Mortal to think through Shelley’s Frankenstein? How can Biss’ On Immunity help us read Woolf’s On Being Ill? The point is to read one text by the light of another. To be clear, this is not a comparative paper, where you say, “Skloot does this, but Sacks does this; however, Sacks does this, and Skloot does that!” Rather, the point is to use one text and its ideas to help produce or frame the reading of another.
