Assignment: Drama Paper

Due: Thursday, May 21

Consider your reading of the play Some Girl(s) by Neil LaBute. Imagine that a publisher is planning to publish a second edition of the play for English 1B students and has asked you to write an essay that analyzes the play for its readers. The purpose of this essay is to help readers discover the underlying significance and meanings of the play: it may analyze the merits and shortcomings of a text, shed some light on the basic elements (plot, character, etc.), and provide closure to the reading experience.

To complete your Drama Paper, write an essay that analyzes Some Girl(s). Be sure to analyze the play in terms of the elements of drama you read about in Kelly’s “What Is Drama?”:

• Plot: How does the play begin? End? What is the climax of the plot?
• Character: Who is the protagonist? Did you identify any antagonists? Which characters did you find sympathetic or unsympathetic? Did you identify with any of the characters?
• Symbol: Did you identify any universal, conventional, or literary symbols? What do these symbols represent, and how does their meaning relate to the theme?
• Cultural context: What elements of the play reveal and/or relate to American culture in the 2000s? How do these elements and, in turn, the cultural context, relate to the play’s theme?

Also consider these points of analysis:

• Is this play a comedy or tragedy? How does this classification affect the play’s meaning?
• What are your impressions and conclusions after reading and discussing the play? Would you recommend this book to a fellow student who needed to choose a play to read for class? Why or why not?

Note that this assignment is not designed to be a written emotional response to the book; instead, this assignment requires that you carefully consider your own experience of reading the book in order to guide another reader’s interpretation. Provide and analyze frequent quotations from the play as specific examples of the points you are trying to make. As you include your quotes, use the “quotation sandwich” concept to make it clear which character actually says the words you quote.

Format Instructions for Your Drama Paper

• Length: 4-5 typed, 12-point font, double-spaced pages in MLA format. This means that the paper must be at least 4 full pages long, and should not exceed 5 full pages in length (not counting your Works Cited page). A paper that does not meet the length requirement will not receive a passing grade.

• First Page Information: In the upper-left corner of the first page, double-space the following information: your name and the name of the assignment. On the next line, center your paper’s unique title that alludes to your topic and grabs the reader’s attention.

• Works Cited page: Your paper must include an MLA formatted Works Cited page with a separate citation for each text you quote in your paper. Since the assignment only requires you to quote from the play, you are only required to have this one citation in your Works Cited page. However, if you decide to quote from sources like a dictionary or Kelly’s “What Is Drama?”, you need to include a citation for each additional source. A paper without an attached Works Cited page will not receive a passing grade.

• Parenthetical References: with each quote, you must include an MLA style parenthetical citation that identifies the source the quote came from and the page number it is on for a printed source (Smith 45). A paper that does not contain parenthetical references will not receive a passing grade.

• Due dates: Your paper is due on the due date either in class at the beginning of classor in Canvas no later than 9:20am.

• Grading: Your Drama Paper is worth 100 points. I will grade these papers according to the Grading Description in our syllabus.

Applicable MLA Formatting for Your

Drama Paper

Parenthetical citations and Works Cited pages allow readers to know which sources you consulted in writing your essay, so that they can either verify your interpretation of the sources or use them in their own scholarly work.

Use a parenthetical citation for each quote or paraphrase:

In MLA style, referring to the works of others in your text is done by using what’s known as parenthetical citation. Immediately following a quotation from a source or a paraphrase of a source’s ideas, you place the author’s name followed by a space and the relevant page number(s).

Human beings have been described as “symbol-using animals” (Burke 3).

Your in-text citation will correspond with an entry in your Works Cited page, which, for the Burke citation above, will look something like this:

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. Print.

Use short quotations, not block quotations:

To indicate short quotations (fewer than four typed lines) in your text, enclose the quotation within double quotation marks. Provide the author and specific page citation in the text, and include a complete reference on the Works Cited page. Punctuation marks such as periods, commas, and semicolons should appear after the parenthetical citation. Question marks and exclamation points should appear within the quotation marks if they are a part of the quoted passage but after the parenthetical citation if they are a part of your text. For example:

According to some, dreams express “profound aspects of personality” (Foulkes 184), though others disagree.

According to Foulkes’s study, dreams may express “profound aspects of personality” (184).

Is it possible that dreams may express “profound aspects of personality” (Foulkes 184)?

Here’s how to format longer “Block Quotations”:

Place quotations longer than four typed lines in a free-standing block of text, and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, with the entire quote indented one inch from the left margin; maintain double-spacing. Only indent the first line of the quotation by a half inch if you are citing multiple paragraphs. Your parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark. Space the block quotation the same as the rest of your paper (double-spaced). For example:

Debbie obviously distrusts John in the following conversation:

John:                You look like you’re thinking something…

Debbie:            So what?

John:                Well, I was thinking we could go to the movies.

Debbie:            What’s your motive, John?

John:                Why must you always assume I’m scheming?!   (Slater 97)

When quoting a dramatic work like Some Girls, you may want to use this format even with a shorter quote if you want to show the nature of a brief conversation between two of the characters. However, even when quoting drama, use block quotations sparingly in shorter papers (such as this Drama Paper assignment), and be sure to thoroughly explain and analyze all aspects of the block quote.

Cite the play as a “Book with a Single Author”:

Last name, First name. Title of Book. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication.

Medium of publication.

Should you choose to incorporate examples from the film version of the play, here’s the Works Cited citation for the DVD version:

Some Girl(s). Dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Perf. Adam Brody, Kristen Bell, Zoe Kazan, Mia

Maestro. Phase 4 Films, 2013. DVD.

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