ENGL 322: Black Women Writers

Some Key Points to Help You:

1. You should be using academic articles for this assignment. 👩🏽‍🎓 Make sure they are written by a professor or researcher at an academic or research institution. (A ".edu" is not enough.)
2. It may help to choose keywords that reflect your specific observations of the novel, rather than the big themes used in the essay prompt.  (For example: "Social death" is both a big term and specific to Patterson -- what are the ways in which you see "social death" operating in Kindred or Beloved that others might have written about? The loss of family? The loss of dignity? The violence? The loss of one's history? Then search for those terms--there might be more written about that. Not sure? Search for criticism of your novel in MLA International Bibliography and see what scholars are talking about that interests you.)
3. Not all academic articles are equal!  If you want to go above and beyond, try to find key works  in the field rather than just any old article that happens to have your terms in it. What essays/books are all your articles mentioning? If you found a dissertation or thesis, what works are they saying are the most important in the field? Can you use citation counts in Google Scholar or AI citation network maps to help point you to the most cited articles?
4. Spending more time on choosing quality research now means less time trying to draw out something meaningful from a random article later.
5. Books don't have to be scary -- a book that collects a bunch of important readings on a topic can save you the time of scrolling through hundreds of search results trying to find the important ones. Use the table of contents and the index, or the "search inside" feature on a e-book.
6. I'm here for you -- don't be shy, send an email to GKL2@stmarys-ca.edu or book an appointment with me!