WR 121
Textual Analysis Essay
This assignment invites you to read to expand your knowledge and to use what you have read
to stimulate your own thinking and writing. For this essay you will be writing in response to one
of three common texts:
− Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Qualities of the Prince”
− Lao-Tzu’s “Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching”
− Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Origin of Civil Society”
For this assignment you will develop an essay that shows your understanding and analysis of
one common text as well as your ability to connect the text to your own thinking.
The final product will be about 1,000 to 1,500 words long, and will include appropriate citations
of quotes and a works cited page. Generally, you will need to include at least 2 (and possibly
more) direct quotes from the essay as well as summarizing and paraphrasing central ideas from
the text directly related to your own thinking.
To get you started:
“At the core of any idea of government is the belief that individuals need an organized
allocation of authority to protect their well-being. Lao-tzu reflects on the ruler who
would, by careful management, maintain a happy citizenry. He makes clear that the
success of the existing form of government depends on good relations between the
leader and the people. His view is that the less the Master needs to do—or the less
government needs to intervene—the happier the people will be. Machiavelli places
the survival of the prince (rules) above all other considerations of government and,
unlike Lao-tzu, ignores the concerns and rights of the individual. His commitment to a
powerful prince is based on his view that in the long run strength will guarantee the
peace and happiness of the citizen for whom independence is otherwise irrelevant.
Rousseau’s emphasis on the social contract focuses on the theory that citizens
voluntarily submit to governance in the hope of gaining greater personal freedom. A
fundamental principle in his essay is that the individual’s agreement with the state is
designed to increase the individual’s freedoms rather than to diminish them.”
–Lynne Nolan
Your assignment is to write an essay analyzing the ideas of one of these authors and use
those ideas in direct conversation with your own ideas about how a society should be
governed.
Your completed essay will show that you can engage with a sophisticated text, discuss and
understand it, quote from it by using accepted conventions of academic discourse, and emerge
with your own well-articulated thoughts and judgments or conclusions in a text of your own
making. This assignment involves a lot of thinking and a lot of work – you need to “wrestle”
with the primary text and develop a thoughtful, well-reasoned, and specific response to the
ideas presented in it. The overall goal of a textual analysis essay is to help bring your thoughts
into dialogue with those of a published writer, and to help you move toward writing with
increased authority, agency, and standing.
There are some very practical teaching goals for this assignment. Writing the essay will give you
experience in some important scholarly practices that are essential for writing about texts: how
to summarize fairly and clearly; how to fold quotations of the words of others comfortably into
the flow of your own words; and how to use academic citations according to the appropriate
conventions.
How to Proceed
The sequence for preparing your essay is as follows…Carefully re-read the assigned piece, take
notes, look for passages which incite your own thinking, reflect on what you’ve read, arrive at
some original insight or observation, and then write a paper in which you use what you have
read as the point of departure for your own ideas. This is not a personal essay—the basis for
this paper is a text, not your own experience. This is not a book report—you are not simply
pointing out what is in the text. This is an essay that asks you to work with a text to arrive at an
original insight or idea. The goal of this assignment is to help you read better and write better
about what you’ve read. To be more specific…
Goals or Why Are We Doing This?
− To encourage you to write with authority and agency about what you have read.
− To help you practice engaging, conversing, wrestling, exploring, and having a
conversation with authoritative texts.
− To work on being both deferential and thoughtful when writing from literature.
− To help you structure your own active train of thought in response to a text.
− To work on summarizing, quoting, and citing material correctly.
Some Criteria for Evaluating the Essay
Here are some of the criteria I will look at when deciding what grade to give your work:
1) Ideas and Content—Does the essay have a point of view? Is that meaning clear? Is it
insightful?
2) Organization—Does the essay have a clear purpose and focus? Is it clear what the essay
is about? Is there enough information to accomplish its purpose, and is the essay in an
order that makes sense?
3) Language and Mechanics—Does the writer have a distinctive voice? Is he or she able to
adapt that voice to different subjects and purposes? Is word choice distinctive and
meaningful? Are the pieces edited to make every word count? Do mechanical errors
distract?
4) Working with Sources—Does the essay work deftly with sources? Are quotations
appropriately introduced, interpreted, and relevant to the ideas presented in the essay?
DUE DATES:
A position statement is due Sunday, July 17
th by 2pm.
A completed rough draft is due for peer review on Friday, July 22nd by 5pm.
Revised essays should be 1,000 to 1,500 words typed, with double spacing and one-inch
margins and are due Sunday, July 31st by 5pm.
Please create a document that includes:
− your original position statement
− a 1-page letter explaining your revision process including details on how your thinking
and writing changed from draft to draft
− the revised essay
− a table of contents for each of these pieces
