2100 Synthesis Paper 1

Final Version, February 25, 2019

Due Date and Length Requirement

Due Date: Friday, March 8, 2019 or sooner (not later) • Minimum Length: 2400 words (8-10 double-spaced pages)

Purpose

The purpose of your first Synthesis Paper (which you can think of as your midterm assignment) is to give you a chance to draw together the works we have discussed so far this semester according to a particular coherent theme or pattern that interests you and allows you to pay adequate attention to each work.

Focus

The specific focus of your paper is up to you, but some possibilities (building on themes I have presented in my lectures, for example) would include the following:

Connectivity/The Illusion of Separation
The Power of Imagination
Art as a Response to Social Challenges (such as fascism, imperialism, sexism, and so on)
The Implications of the Hero’s Journey

General Expectations

As in any college writing assignment, you will be judged according to your explanatory skills, your creativity, and your ability to write standard academic English prose (yes—sentence structure, paragraphs, grammar, spelling, etc.). If you are already aware that any of these areas is a personal weakness, be sure to work on those challenges with a tutor at the Writing Center or via online resources.

Required Content

In your Synthesis Paper you will have to include discussion regarding each of the works we have studied in the first half of the semester.

This means that you should have at least 1-2 pages of discussion for each of the following works:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Pan’s Labyrinth
Avatar
Black Panther Graphic Novels (Coates, A Nation Under Our Feet, Books 1-3)
Black Panther movie

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But How Do I Write 8-10 Pages?

Frequently, when someone is asked to take on a task that they are not familiar with, it is difficult to imagine how to even get started. This is no different for writing essays.

What I often suggest is that you visualize a map of your paper, seeing all eight (or ten) pages before you with each page dedicated to a particular portion of your overall task. So I have created the following image of a paper laid out before you on a desktop just to give you such a visualizing opportunity:

If you imagine writing at least one full page for each work we have studied so far—making sure that your discussion of each work develops your overall thesis or topic—then the weight of imagining some abstract eight-page paper might appear (literally) less daunting.

Now, you don’t necessarily have to organize your paper one movie at a time, of course. You might rather organize your argument according to topics—such as stages on the Hero’s Journey—and then discuss the works in light of these points of focus.

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Resources

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