Media Essay

For this assignment, students will write an evaluative essay comparing two media.  You'll use the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" and the film Away from Her.  You will begin working on this assignment (reading, viewing, drafting) in Unit Three, but submit the paper in Unit Four. 

An evaluative essay has three main components:

criteria

judgment

evidence

For this essay, the short story is the source material. You're going to evaluate how well the film stands up to the short story. So, first, you must establish criteria. What makes the short story successful? You want to think about this very carefully as you read and make notes. Notice elements of plot, structure, character, and point of view. You'll write about these in the first section of your paper. 

Then, you'll judge the movie based on the criteria you've established. Determine whether or not the film meets the criteria you established in the first part of the paper. Include evidence from both the text and the movie to support your judgments. 

Finally, make an ultimate judgment. Does the film live up to the standards set by the story?

This essay should:

have specific criteria, using the short story as source material

use that criterion to make judgments about the film

support the judgment with evidence from the text and film

be 1000 words long

have an explicit thesis statement, with the main idea (the topic of the paper) and a controlling idea (what you, as the author, are saying about the topic)

In this case, we're making a judgment, and that should be included in the thesis.  Remember — this judgment is not about the film or text being good or bad.  It's about whether or not the film lives up to the criteria established in the short story. 

include an integrated, direct quote from the text/film to support the thesis in each of the body paragraphs

be written using APA formatting guidelines

use APA guidelines for citation, both in-text and on a References page

avoid using 1st- or 2nd-person references (focus on objective 3rd-person references instead)

be submitted as a MS Word .docx file