Review 1.4 Précis Guidelines, and write your essay. You may write about any of the poems listed on the syllabus for this week. Work to complete your draft as best you can, including your Works Cited, in order to get the best feedback possible before the final draft is due for a grade.

Read each selection assigned for the week, and then select one poem to respond to by typing a 3 page précis (part summary/part critical response). (700-1000 words) *You can write over the maximum word count, but make sure you make it to the minimum!

Respond on two levels of discourse: 1) literal: what is specifically said? What happens in the course of the poem, play, story; what is the plot? and 2) figurative: what are the devices of language—poetic devices like imagery, meter, rhyme, symbolism, metaphor, simile, anaphora, etc., and how do they affect your thematic reading of the piece? 

Overall, your responses should be expositional in nature. That is: make assertions about the text, cite the text, and explain your point in reference to the citation. Sometimes I will ask specific questions for you to consider. Remember, each quote should appear in one of your own sentences, so use meaningful quotes that you can explain and interpret. 

The following is a checklist for each précis assignment. Be sure to address each:

1. Name the author and title, giving a brief literal summary (explain the plot) of the poem.
2. Identify 2 elements of language (use the vocabulary list: metaphor, imagery, symbolism, etc.)
3. Cite an example of both elements as you name them.
4. Explain and interpret the relevance of each citation.
5. Discuss how these citations relate to one thematic idea (pick only ONE abstraction you think this poem is “about”: Grief; Victory; Nature; Solitude; Family; etc.)
6. Be sure to cite from at least one scholarly source (use the databases). 

Remember, it is less important to discuss whether or not you “like” an assigned reading than it is to be able to discuss how language helps us to consider an idea, a theme. Review the samples in the module.

Here is a video in which I discuss the basics of MLA formatting as they apply to the Précis assignment this semester:

POEM TO RESPOND TO: 

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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