Critical Analysis: “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”
Critical Analysis: “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”
For your “formal” paper, you can write about one of the books assigned for the course—Douglass’ Narrative of the Life, or King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” for example, or one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. If you choose this option, you need to FOCUS on one or two related key aspects of the book. You might focus on education and race in Douglass, for example, or King’s persuasive rhetorical strategies. Whichever option you might select, your job is to do a careful, thoughtful, and thorough analysis of what the writer is saying and how he provides evidence in the form of reasons, examples, and incidents to support his argument and ideas. The common denominator in all of these options is analysis. Your goal is to explain what a text says, shows, suggests, “sells”—and to analyze “how” it does so, that is, in what manner it attempts to make its case. You need to supply evidence in the form of references to and quotations from whatever you are analyzing to support your claims about it. Your goal is to persuade your readers to see what you see in the text, to understand the text the way you do, to get readers to nod their heads in agreement.
