Harlem Renaissance Two Authors Project Paper Guide

Start with the arithmetic, because this brief sets a word budget that will not survive being discovered late. The Harlem Renaissance topic requires five things, and two of them are summaries of eight to ten sentences each. At a normal sentence length that is three hundred to four hundred words spent before you have described a single writing style, inside a paper of seven hundred and fifty to a thousand. The summaries are therefore roughly a third of the paper by instruction, and the remaining bullets have to fit in what is left. Planning that split before drafting is the difference between a paper that covers everything and one that arrives at the last bullet with sixty words to spare. Working backwards from the ceiling — a hundred words for each of the remaining three bullets plus a short introduction — gives you a plan you can actually hold to.

There is a discrepancy in the brief worth noticing rather than tripping over. The grading criteria say the paper is assessed on "the extent to which all four (4) parts in the topic were addressed", but the Harlem Renaissance topic lists five bullets. The count in the rubric is generic across the topic choices; the bullets under your chosen topic are the actual requirement. Cover all five. This is the sort of internal inconsistency that makes students guess, and guessing downward — deciding one bullet must be optional — is the expensive direction to guess in. If it genuinely worries you, it is also the sort of thing an instructor will answer in a sentence, and the brief already anticipates contact by asking for topic approval. Asking about it also creates a record that you sought clarification, which is worth having if the coverage question comes up at grading.

Choose your two authors for the second bullet rather than the first, because that is the one that constrains you. Any Harlem Renaissance figure can have their role and importance described; far fewer pairs let you write substantively about literary careers *and* relationships with other writers. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston are the obvious choice precisely because their relationship is documented in detail — collaboration, a shared patron, and a famous rupture over the play Mule Bone — which turns a bullet most students pad into the most interesting paragraph in the paper. Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer all sit in the same network, so other pairs work; pairs chosen only for fame tend not to. Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset are a strong alternative pair, connected through The Crisis and its editorial circle.

The summary bullet specifies sentences, not words, and that is unusual enough to be deliberate. Eight to ten sentences per work, two paragraphs in total, means one paragraph per author and a countable target — so count them. A summary of the main ideas is not a plot retelling and not an evaluation: it is what the work is arguing or exploring. For a poem that may be most of the piece; for a novel it will be thematic rather than sequential. Choosing a shorter work makes this bullet far easier to do well, and nothing in the brief requires a novel — Hughes's essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" or a single poem is a legitimate "work" and leaves room for the other four bullets. Write the summaries last if you can, once you know how many words the other bullets actually consumed, since a summary is the easiest section to expand or compress to a target.

The style bullet asks for three things inside one paragraph per author: writing style, the types of images used, and themes. Those are separable and a paragraph that blurs them reads as one observation repeated. Style is how the sentences and lines behave — Hughes's use of blues and jazz rhythm, Hurston's rendering of vernacular speech. Images are what recurs concretely: rivers, streets, porches, the South. Themes are what the work is about at the level of idea. Naming one specific example under each of the three, rather than characterising the author in the abstract, is what makes this paragraph evidence rather than assertion, and it is only three sentences of work. Where the two authors differ sharply on one of the three, say so — a contrast makes both paragraphs sharper than two independent descriptions would.

The final bullet — how these authors have impacted your own life and how you will apply their ideas to your career — is where papers most often go vague, and it is worth being concrete instead. The application does not have to be literary. Hurston's ethnographic method is about listening to how people actually speak before writing them down; Hughes's argument in the Racial Mountain essay is about refusing to shape your work to an audience's expectations. Either translates directly into a professional claim about research, communication or integrity. A named idea applied to a named situation beats a paragraph about being inspired, and it is the part of the paper that is unmistakably yours. It is also the only bullet a marker cannot have read a version of before, which is a reason to give it real space rather than a closing sentence.

Two mechanical requirements are easy to lose marks on because they are unfamiliar. Sources are documented in SWS style — the Strayer Writing Standards — which is not APA and not MLA, and a paper formatted in the wrong system loses marks it did not need to. The class text is named as an expected source, and the brief explicitly rules out low-quality sources, naming Wikipedia, and forbids any site that provides or sells college essays. Given the topic, the obvious replacements are institutional: the Library of Congress research guide and classroom materials, the Smithsonian's museum resources, and the National Humanities Center's primary source collections. Check what SWS wants for a web source in particular, since most of your material for this topic will be online and that is where the formatting differences bite.

One structural note about the paper as a whole. The five bullets are the paper's outline and the grading criteria say so — the first item assessed is the level to which the instructions were followed. So use the bullets as section order, and consider using headings that echo them, because a marker checking coverage should not have to hunt. The brief also asks for specific illustrative examples throughout, which in a literature paper means quoting lines. Two or three short quotations, each attached to a claim you are making rather than standing on their own, will do more for this paper than any amount of general admiration for the period. Quote the line, then say what it demonstrates, rather than letting the quotation carry the argument by itself — a quotation without a claim attached reads as filler at this length.