I have asked you to read four works that deal directly or indirectly with the Black experience. The fictional works are “Everyday Use” and the chapter “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man. The non-fictional works are Atlanta Exposition Address and “Chapter 3” from The Souls of Black Folk. Ellison’s work takes place in the 1930s, Walker’s story takes place in the 1970s, Washington delivers his speech in 1895, and Du Bois reacts to Washington’s ideas from that period of time.
For your fourth essay, write an essay of approximately 1000 words in which you discuss how the Black experience has changed over the years. You will want to describe what Blacks experience today, and you certainly can include the events that have occurred over the last several years or so and what these events have signified. You must include what the Black experience was in the past based upon the above four readings for the course including the videos of the biographies of Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison that were made available in previous modules. You can also, if you wish, include information from the videos of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois that you previously viewed.
You can also make references to works that you have read for other classes or on your own that are relevant to the topic. You should not, however, resort to the internet to seek out what others have said about the Black experience. You have sufficient sources from this course (the four readings and the videos) as well as your general knowledge of recent occurrences to write a well-informed essay.
By now you know that when you include direct quotes, you need in-text citations, but you will also need to include in-text citations for paraphrasing the writers’ ideas in order for the reader to know whose ideas you are discussing. Your works-cited page will be more expansive because you will have to list a number of works and authors. If you make clear in your own sentences to which writer you are referring, then, of course, you do not need an in-text citation.
In addition to your MLA Handbook, I made available two videos, one on in-text citations and the other on the list of works cited. They both appear in the Introduction to Module Ten. Therefore, there is no reason for you to have errors with their format, the required information, and the order in which the information must appear.
You wrote a thoughtful, well-organized essay on the topic using a formal point of view (no I pronoun).
You did not use the “you” pronoun (which one should always avoid).
Your paper uses the correct MLA heading format on each page.
Your essay contains quotes followed by the correct format for in-text citations.
Your works-cited page has the correct information for the two works of fiction and the two works of non-fiction as well as the two biographies (videos) of Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison as well as any allowable sources (additional videos) you chose to include in your essay.
You italicized the titles of the major works and used quotation marks around short works.
You avoided the following grammar errors: fragments, fused or run-together sentences, comma splices, subject-verb agreement, capitalization, spelling and typos. If you have none of the three major errors (fragments, fused sentences, comma splices) in your essay, you will earn 20 extra credit points (see essay rubric). You can also earn 10 extra credit points if you have no subject-verb agreement, capitalization, spelling, and typo errors and a minimum of punctuation errors (see essay rubric).
Your essay is approximately 1,000-words in length.
