My paper, “Blanche Dubois: An Antihero,” started with a free write, which I have found for myself to be the best way to begin a paper. The free write concerned Tennessee Williams’s sympathy (or lack thereof) in A Streetcar Named Desire and was meant to be a response to three critical articles about the play.
I found what kept me interested throughout the process of writing this paper was how much I disagreed with some of the claims made by the argument sources. I genuinely found some of the statements made by these critics to be quite inaccurate, at least in my opinion, so proving them wrong with the evidence in my paper followed naturally. In any paper one can easily tell if the writer truly believes in his or her argument; admittedly, I have written papers where it is obvious I don’t stand completely on my own side, but this one isn’t one of them.
If I were asked to write another draft of this paper, I would probably boil down the content; I feel I have learned to keep my wordiness much more in check since I wrote this paper. I would also try to interact a bit more with the argument sources instead of using them in mere bits and pieces.
LAUREN SEIGLE is undeclared for her major but is a proud member of the College of Communication’s class of 2013. She hails from the depths of southern Massachusetts and would like to partially dedicate the publication of this paper to her first-semester writing professor Mike D’Alessandro. In fact, he was so helpful that Lauren is transferring to Emerson College in fall of 2010 so she can knock on his door in the South End whenever she needs writing advice. This essay was written for Michael D’Alessandro’s course, WR 100: The City in Twentieth-Century American Drama.