Thankfully, the beginning of the semester opened with an essay I was already comfortable with, and that easy familiarity allowed me to get myself back into the swing of academic writing with a gentle nudge instead of an outright shove. In a close reading essay, the aim is to identify a problem within a single text and attempt to resolve it through evidence and analysis without outside research. Essentially, it’s using simply the text to talk about the text, an obvious choice for the first essay of the semester.
My initial plan for this essay, which was required to be about the key aspect of power throughout Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was to reflect upon the use of narrative as a weapon within the text. It is clear that power struggles form the heart of the play, but I was especially intrigued by Prospero’s actions, attitude, and word choice in his relationships with his daughter, Miranda, and his spirit, Ariel. I wanted to discuss how Prospero used storytelling and victim-playing within his stories in order to gain the favor of his subjects, and comment on how it reflects the real-life dangers of being manipulated by those with charismatic diction and storytelling, such as politicians or journalists.
First, I pored over the text to find the instances in which Prospero used narrative manipulation on Ariel and Miranda, and then analyzed the consequences that resulted from it. This ultimately accumulated in me finding two instances of his storytelling control, and two consequential outcomes from those instances. This gave me two overarching themes and four passages to work with.
Perhaps unfortunately for the purpose of this class, I attacked the paper in the way I always do: with the Letty process. That’s picking the quotes, using them to decide a claim, designing an extraordinarily thorough outline of exactly what I wanted to say and how and where I wanted to say it, slamming the paper out in a couple of days, and moving on to the other assignments piling up around me. As this was the first paper, it was the best place to get this method out of my system and begin discovering how to tweak it in order to become a more proficient reviser for the more complicated essays coming down the line.
And so, with that, I came to my first draft of the paper, which was my usual; it was a bunch of really lengthy paragraphs and drawn-out ideas all coming from an outline I had revised to perfection. Here, most of my revision was still in the early stages of the paper, the idea-generating before my fingers really hit the keys.
With the peer review I received, it was clear and relieving to me that I had gotten all my major points across in the first draft right out of the gate. However, it was suggested to me that I could add more real-world examples to my paragraphs in order to strengthen my claims, which I did to some extent, but I still tried to keep those examples somewhat vague so as to not draw too much attention away from the text itself, which was the heart of my analysis. I also noticed after the first draft that a few of my sentences seemed a little long and rambling, which detracted from their value, so I tried to clean those up as much as possible so as to not repeat myself or confuse my readers.
This led to the construction of my second draft, which I felt was a more polished and clarified version of what I had in the previous version. This was the draft I submitted for instructor review, as I was confident with its solidity and depth of claim.
Despite the resulting congratulations for a put-together paper, there were a few major suggestions given to me in my instructor review. Ironically enough, my first tip was to take out the real-world references in the body of my argument, which resulted in me basically undoing the work I had done between the first and second draft. Next, my professor noticed I hadn’t considered Miranda’s verbal reactions to Prospero’s storytelling in a concrete manner, and so I reworked the former half of my paper to include quotations that exemplified her reactions. From my feedback I was also inspired to consider a few significant pieces of evidence I had not thought of before, which I happily made room for. The overarching theme in my instructor review was that I had perhaps too many instances revolving around the same basic claim, never extending my analysis of Prospero’s narrative control past the first act–and so, I cut the latter half of the paper (Ariel’s part) down substantially and combined many pieces to avoid repeating myself, and replaced the empty space with a look into the effects of Prospero’s manipulation on Miranda and Ariel in the play’s final scenes and how his power extends to its fullest capacity by the epilogue. This allowed my argument to take on new complexities and perspectives and offer new chronological evidence while still maintaining the same claim.
While this influx of new material might seem to add a whole new mess of moving parts to my essay, I feel it instead enriched and developed my claim to new levels it would not have reached had I stuck with a discussion of only the first act. Though I involve many characters, scenes, and extensive evidence in my final draft, my claim remains focused on one point, and I leave no loose ends, so I stand by my decision to follow my instructor’s advice in this manner as an effective one.
The only piece of advice I did not heed was in a suggestion of formatting–to take Miranda out of the beginning of the essay and discuss her later on. As I wanted to juggle more characters than just Miranda for a full view of Prospero’s manipulative tactics, I felt I could better work through the material by including her significance from the start so the paper could move forward without having to stop and rewind to address Miranda. Thus, I merely reworked her central paragraphs instead of moving her around.
Overall, while perhaps I got bogged down by the sheer amount of content discussed in my essay, resulting in something that was not my best work, I am satisfied with the third draft this process portfolio houses and believe it was a great first step into a semester of effective claim-arguing. However, it did not make the cut into my presentation portfolio simply because it is only demonstrative of a single skill: close reading. All the other essays from this semester demonstrate this same skill, and do so alongside many other skills in much more complicated ways, which I feel makes them far worthier of taking up space as “chosen” essays in the presentation portfolio.
