Investing Time in Mikaela's Draft

Mikaela, I felt as I was reading your essay that the order of the paragraphs made sense in building up your argument.  You have an engaging voice as you write and you definitely used the research you've done to your advantage, not just sticking it in the paragraphs but making it prove your point.  You use your knowledge of Shakespeare's time to make a convincing argument and I like how you've connected all these aspects of time into something that doesn't feel sporadic, but orderly.


I have some suggestions that I think will strengthen your paper.  Let me know if you have any questions about them!

• This might not be as big a deal, as Dr. Burton said this could kind of be your "so what," but I felt like the "so what" is a little bit of an afterthought, that basically you should read this paper because it will help you understand more about some interesting things in The Winter's Tale.  Reading over the "so what" again, it does seem a little stronger than I'd thought, but I'd go back over it and see what you think.  I know you mention Shakespeare using Time to his advantage as a business man; it kind of seems like that idea might apply to the whole essay: music, helping out the actors to memorize their lines and make-up artists to have the play divided.  
• I would go back to your paragraphs and pick out the main point of each.  Sometimes, the topic sentence doesn't alert the reader to what the paragraph will be about.  For example, in the paragraph beginning with "Gildon's thoughts in this regard," this topic sentence doesn't explain why it matters that there are Greek allusions in the play.  In this way, each paragraph should be a little mini-essay, with its own thesis and "so what" at the end, just on a smaller scale.  I'm a little unsure myself if it's okay to have a topic sentence more like the one you used with "Gildon's thoughts" in a long research paper because some ideas do need more than one paragraph, but I think it's a good rule to follow.

You asked which argument you should cut out, and I'm not sure because the arguments seem important.  I'm kind of debating between the paragraph beginning with "Breaking the theatrical 'rule' of the Unity of time" and the paragraph beginning with "Spring and summer within The Winter's Tale," the argument about spring and summer being liberating.  I think you could just bring up the negative aspects of the winter season, even though it'd be nice to represent summer and winter equally, just because the examples in the winter season paragraph are stronger.

You're doing an awesome job, Mikaela!  The paper was really interesting to read.