Length: 300 to 500 words

Carefully read a chapter of the Preface text and offer one paragraph each of summary and analysis, a little more than half a page each.

You probably should begin your descriptive summary paragraph with a one-sentence account of the selection, and then identify its content and structure in an organized fashion. For both the descriptive summary and the analysis, you should incorporate textual evidence by introducing its context (where in the book the quote appears and such), punctuating the quote correctly, restating it in your own words, and then relating its particular meaning to the point you make regarding the chapter.

Your paragraph of analysis should offer some point about the meaning, consequences, subtext, tone, style, or some other matter of the chapter or essay. Proceed with a claim or set of related claims about the text, for which you should offer evidence from the text in the form of quotes.

Each paragraph should feature one to two quotations as evidence and one or two partial quotes. Additionally, you’ll make use of summary and paraphrase as appropriate. You are best off making your claims specific throughout each paragraph, and only in the concluding sentence of each offering a more general point.

Use chapter 3 of They Say / I Say—"The Art of Quoting"—as your guide to incorporating quotations.

Analysis means lots of things, so let’s be clear on what it is not:

• It is not simple claim of taste, whether something is good or bad (by which you really mean whether you like it or not), though you may indicate the why of such an evaluation;
• It is not unsupported opinion;
• It is not vague, general, or lacking evidence.

Your analysis, then, should be the careful, specific, and evidenced demonstration of some particular and not obvious characteristic of the chapter: what it means, what it does, what its purpose is, who its audience is, the implied position of the author, what text it resembles, where it is especially successful, or where it fails to work well.

This summary and analysis is worth ten points, so do your best. I will evaluate your effort based on document formatting, the engagement and effort of your paper, the clarity and quality of thought, apt selection and incorporation of quotes, and sentence-level correctness.