Assignment: Scholarly Article Critical Analysis
Article: The Masque of the red death by Edgar Allen Poe
Find a journal article related to that topic. Read the article, and take notes as you read. Identify the main idea of the article along with supporting references
and details. Highlight sections of the article you may decide to quote in your paper.
Your paper should be a minimum of 2 pages and a maximum of 3 pages. 4th page will be works cited page.
Journal articles are generally appropriate choices for scholarly research because most of them are of an academic nature. Try to find journals that are peerreviewed and/or associated with professional organizations (e.g. PMLA). Generally speaking, these will be more reliable than other journals. However, the
vast majority of the journals you locate using the TC databases will be of a scholarly nature and will be appropriate for this assignment as well as your
research paper.
Answer each of the following questions with at least one paragraph. Quote passages from the article to support your responses. Use in-text citations citing
the source.
* ♣ Who is the author(s) of the article?
* ♣ When was the article published? Does this affect your understanding of the topic?
* ♣ Purpose of the journal.
* ♣ Does the article have any particular bias? Some journals may have a particular “slant” in the articles they publish; some publications may favor a
particular literary opinion about the subject you have chosen. Articles with an identifiable bias can still be useful and appropriate for your analysis; however,
you will need to specifically identify that bias in your paper.
* ♣ Respond to the author’s arguments by exploring how he or she either does or does not seem credible to you.
* ♣ Are there any gaps in the author(s) argument? Discuss any doubts you have about what the article says.
* ♣ What evidence from the article seems most convincing to you?
* ♣ What evidence is least convincing to you?
* ♣ What do you understand better after having read this article?
Basic MLA Format
1. 1. 1” margins
2. 2. 12 pt. Times New Roman Font
3. 3. Double spacing
4. 4. Heading: Name, professor, class, and date in upper left of first page only
5. 5. Last name and page number in the upper right of the header on every page
6. Set the “spacing after” to 0 on the Page Layout tab. (This avoids extra spaces after the title, paragraphs, or any place where you hit the “enter” key).
7. Because you will be citing an academic journal in your paper, you must include a works cited page. Remember to include parenthetical citations within the
text wherever source material is cited.
* ♣ You must upload your paper to the dropbox in one of the appropriate file formats (doc, .docx, .rtf, .pdf). If you upload your paper in a format other than
one of these, you will receive a 0 for the assignment.
* ♣ If you upload the “wrong” file to the dropbox, you will not be able to upload another file after the due date. Please double-check the file, and make sure
that you are uploading the correct assignment.
Academic Prose:
* ♣ Do not use contractions.
* ♣ Do not use the first-person pronouns “I” “me” or “my.”
* ♣ Do not use the second-person pronouns “you” “your” or “yours.”
* ♣ Do not engage in personal stories, meaning stories of your own life experiences, or the experiences of friends, family, and so on.
* ♣ Avoid any form of direct address to the reader, such as “think about the fact that . . .”
* ♣ Avoid too casual of a prose style, such as sentences that begin with words like “well, sure, now, yes, no.”
* ♣ Do not use phrases such as, “a lot,” “lots” or “lots of,” which can usually be replaced with one of the following words: many, most, much, often.
* ♣ Do not use exclamation points, for they are almost always unnecessary.
* ♣ Periods and commas should be inside of quotation marks, but other forms of punctuation go outside of quotation marks.
* ♣ Do not use the word “okay” when words like “acceptable” could be used instead.
* ♣ Do not use the word “nowdays,” “nowadays,” or any slight variation thereof.
* ♣ Do not use the phrase “did a good job.”
* ♣ Do not refer to the paper itself and what it will do. “This paper will show that…”
* ♣ When you refer to an author, use either his/her full name or the last name; never refer to him/her by the first name only.
Title:
The title of your paper should NOT be any of the following:
* ♣ “Paper One”
* ♣ “Assignment One”
* ♣ “American Lit”
* ♣ “ENGL 2327 Paper”
* ♣ The title of the story/essay/poem you are writing about