Yoga vs. Renunciation

Write a two to three page essay in which you present a sustained analysis of one of the following works: The Bhagavad-Gita; Lazoi’s Deodejing; The Christain Bible; A Thousand and One Nights; Somadeva’s “The Red Lotus of Chastity”, Bo Juyi “The Song of Lasting Regret,” or any of the Three Women Poets’ collection and Dharmakriti. To produce a successful analysis essay, you should present an argument/thesis, which will be your most important preliminary step to produce a fresh, organized, and sustained analysis.

In writing a successful analysis, the key is to not lose sight of your thesis and to make sure all your analysis is connected to and supports your thesis and your paper’s claim about the literary work you are analyzing. You should use textual evidence (quotes) from your chosen work and do close reading of these excerpts to show how they prove and substantiate your thesis. Remember that the purpose of this assignment is to make you focus on what the author is doing and why, rather than just what the text is saying, i.e. summary.

Make sure you don’t confuse a summary for an analysis. A summary will just provide an account of the surface meaning of the text. However, an analysis provides an in-depth discussion of the meaning and the significance one or more elements of a text or of how a theme works in a text.

Introduction: introduce the work and author, give us background about the author and the time period, state your thesis, identify the argument you will be making about the work, provide some sense as to why this issue is important, and give a preview of the paper’s content, which mostly is presented in your introductory paragraph. The thesis should depend on your analysis and argument about the text.

The body of the essay will lay out your evidence and analysis of the work. You will need to use quotes to build your analysis. Make sure you use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph. Your goal should be to relate all of the relevant details in the body to that thesis. This means that some details may be omitted in the paper because they do not support or concern the thesis being argued. 

Note that the order of the evidence you present should not follow the order of the passage you discuss. Rather, the order of the evidence depends on how it relates to your central argument and how you lay it out in your thesis.
Make sure, in your close reading of a text, that you do not transform a clear thought or a complex passage into a bundle of unsupported or farfetched claims.

The conclusion should restate your thesis and sum up the main claims your paper discussed and your insight based on your analysis.

The essay should be titled and typed in Times New Roman, 12-point font, using MLA citation format and a works-cited page. For help with MLA, go to:

1- Diana Hacker Website at www.dianahacker.com/resdoc

2- Purdue’s OWL at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/