make a claim about something that stories do and use several quotes from Elizabeth Svoboda’s article “The Power of Story” to support your claim

Essay 2: Using an Expert’s Writing on Stories is the second piece of writing for our class that I will evaluate and grade. (If we were still meeting in person, this would be a graded in-class essay, instead of an out-of-class essay.) Before you work on this assignment, I recommend that you read the instructions for the assignment from Wed. 10/21 about using sources, if you haven’t read them already.
Write an essay of at least 500 words and 4 (or more) paragraphs. In that essay, make a claim about something that stories do and use several quotes from Elizabeth Svoboda’s article “The Power of Story” to support your claim.

In the introduction of the essay get us (your readers) thinking with you about the question What do stories do? Talk about why this is an interesting question, but do not give any answers to the question or evidence until the last sentence of the introduction, the thesis. That is your claim, the answer to the question that you will support in the body of your essay using Svoboda’s article as a source.

Remember that an effective body paragraph begins with a topic sentence that states its main idea and ends with a concluding sentence that sums up the paragraph or returns to its main idea. Last week’s homework (4/14 or 4/15) helped you discover what readers need to know about a source and about a quote to be able to understand the quote when you use it in a body paragraph. The handouts below give more information about this. The first one will be helpful to use also later in the semester when you are working on using sources in your research paper. The second handout is the criteria for this assignment.

Remember the steps for the process of writing something. You can’t start writing with the first sentence of the essay. Instead, follow these steps:
(1) decide what two sections of “The Power of Story” were especially helpful for you.

(2) Think about what those sections tell you about what stories do, and write it in a sentence. It could be one thing for both sections of the article–so one idea in one sentence–, or it could be two different things, one for each section–so two sentences, each with a different idea of what stories do.

(3a) If you are saying stories do one main thing then this sentence will become the thesis of the essay. Then you need to look at the two sections of “The Power of Story” that you plan to use in your essay and decide how each section supports that thesis. Then write a sentence for each that will be the main idea (topic sentence) of each body paragraph.

(3b) If you are saying stories do two different things, then these sentences can be topic sentences of body paragraphs and you need to write one broader “umbrella” sentence for the thesis. If you are saying stories do one main thing,

(4) Then choose the quotes that you want to include in the body paragraphs to support your claim.

(5) Now you can start writing the essay, being sure to introduce the source in the first body paragraph and to include any context we need to understand each quote. (See instructions for the introduction above.)

(6) Don’t forget to end the essay with a conclusion that returns to the thesis–the main claim of the essay.