Love Essay Revision Tips:
- Thesis fills in this statement: “To be in love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream means ___________.” Your argument needs to argue what the nature of love is. To say, for example, love is complicated, doesn’t specifically enough tell the reader what love is. In their first drafts, for example, a few classmates wrote that love in the play was a kind of blindness. This clearly states what the nature of love is in the play. Love means to stumble in the dark. Love turns everyone into amateurs
- Quotes need to make sense in the context of your paragraph. To simply insert a quote doesn’t explain its purpose to the reader. Here is an example of how a quote is successfully incorporated. “Early in the play, Lysander talks about the difficulty of love when he states that “the course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1. 132-140).
- Be sure to follow up quotes with analysis. For example, if you include the quote where Hermia recognizes Lysander from his voice though she cannot see him, follow it up with the many ways that this line symbolizes a blindness. She literally cannot see him, but also can’t see that he has fallen out of love for her and left her behind.
- Remember to write the play in title case, written either in quotes or in italics. Remember also that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not a book but a play
- See http://web.presby.edu/writingcenter/guides/eng1.html for complete MLA format for Shakespeare
