Formal Paper 1: Analyzing Evidence and Close Reading
You will be writing a close reading paper focusing on ONE of the readings we have done so far in
class: “College Calculus” by John Cassidy, OR “Workism is Making Americans Miserable” by Derek
Thompson, OR “Letter to My Son” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, OR “The flexible work fallacy” by Sally
Davies.
Your paper must use two quotations and one instance of paraphrase so that you have THREE
PIECES OF EVIDENCE to support your claims.
When analyzing your evidence, whether quotations or summary/paraphrase, you should follow the
analysis steps we modeled in class: introduce the evidence, summarize and explain what is literally
happening in your own words, expand the summary by targeting keywords from the evidence,
articulate the conclusions you have drawn from the evidence and the connections (the takeaway) you
are trying to show your reader.
These three pieces of evidence should help you think through a question you have, or a specific
issue that you think might be present in the particular work you are focusing on.
Do not
try to explain an entire reading! I do not want you to summarize or explain the entire
work. I am looking for you to isolate a theme or one small idea from the reading. I want you to
explain a few selected moments in a reading, explain what they are doing independently of one
another, and then how the three pieces of evidence work together as evidence to support a claim.
