Writer's name: ________________
 

Editor's Name: ________________

     1. OVERVIEW/ FULFILLMENT OF ASSIGNMENT

TECHNICAL
• Does the paper have a title? Is it an interesting, appealing, and descriptive title?
• Is the paper long enough?  Is it close to three full typed pages (750 wds.) long?
• If it isn't long enough, what has been left out?
• Where could the writer add in more quotes or explanations of quotes?
• Are there at least five direct quotations, properly punctuated?
• Are all paraphrases legal?  Are there no garbled paraphrases (GPP) which accidentally plagiarize?
CONCEPTUAL
• Does the choice of paper topic lend itself well to the assignment (poetry explication or poetry analysis)?
• Do you buy the basic interpretation?  Does it seem to make sense?
• Does the writer present the poem in terms of a tension between oppositions, ambiguity, or irony?  Is more than one possible interpretation discussed?  Does the writer leap too quickly towards an allegorical interpretation?

• Fully identify the topic of the paper, including author, title, date of all texts mentioned?
• Provide enough background about the author, date, source, and general topic so that the  average reader can understand the historical context and the basic issues?
• Have a thesis about the basic meaning of the work being analyzed?
• Is the thesis not merely descriptive?  Does it make a proposition which the rest of the paper proves?
• Provide some kind of map of the structure and concerns of the rest of the paper without resorting to stage directions?

• Is there a clear logic to the structure of the paper?
• Does the order of paragraphs make sense?
• Does the paper more or less follow the structure of the work analyzed?
• Does the paper signpost enough; does it always keep you orientated as to where you are in the story?

• Are there enough examples?  Does the writer actually prove their thesis using examples?
• Do examples make sense?  Are they relevant to the point being made?

• Has the writer stated the major ideas instead of letting quotes  take over his/her voice and authority?  Does the writer make the claims and use quotes only as support?
• Has the writer quoted enough? Is all the evidence actually included in the paper so that the reader does not have to read through the poem to get the point?
• Is every quote introduced so that context and significance are clear?  Do we always know who is speaking to whom?
•  Do all quotes flow smoothly and clearly into the grammatical structure of sentences?
•  Are all quotes properly punctuated?  (Periods go after parentheses for inserted quotations; before parentheses in block quotes.)
•  Are quotes that are longer than two lines indented?  Has the writer remembered not to put quote marks around indented quotes?
• Are there quote marks around titles of essays?  Are book and magazine titles underlined?  (NB: The title of the student's paper should not be in quotes, or underlined, or written out in block caps)

        * FRAG -- fragment (no IS and/or IV)
        * CS or FS -- comma splice or fused sentence (ISIV, ISIV or ISIVISIV)
        * SVA -- lack of subject-verb agreement
        * MC -- Mixed Construction (sentence starts out with one structure and switches midstream)
        * GCMSP -- grammatically crucial misspelling (mixes up parts of speech: its/it's; there/their/they're; then/than)

•     Commas

*CSquote -- comma slice created by joining a quote which is a full sentence with an introduction which is a full sentence.
*,and – Make sure that commas before co-ordinate conjunctions are only used when they are joing two complete, independent subject-verb units.
 
 

Semi-Colons-- Are all semi-colons correctly used so that they join two complete, independent subject-verb units?