1.  Poem titles need to be surrounded by quotation marks and nothing else.  Poem titles do not need to be underlined or italicized.

2.  What does it mean to be American?

3.  In the poem, it says…  In the poem, he says…

4.  Using pronouns in an analytical paper takes away some meaning from the text.  You want to be explicit as to who/what you are referring to in order to prove your point.

5.  Keep your tenses the same – past or present.  Don’t begin a paragraph indicating a certain poet WROTE a certain poem and then explain what he DOES to get his point across.

6.  Whitman, not Walt

7.  Whitman is no longer alive

8.  Should be the last sentence in your introduction paragraph.  The 3 poems/poets you will discuss + the idea you try to express in their work + the poetic device these poets use to express their ideas = Thesis statement

9.  Comfortable Sarcasm?

10.  If you have included the name of the poet elsewhere in your paper, do not include the poet's name in your parenthetical citation. Instead, include the first significant word of the poem's title, followed by the line number(s).  This is especially important if you are quoting more than one poem by the same author in your paper. Example: Eliot immediately engages the reader with his use of the second person in the opening lines: "Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky" ("Prufrock" 1-2).  However, if you have mentioned the title of the poem in the sentences immediately preceding you quotation, you can cite the line number only. Example: In his "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Eliot immediately engages the reader with his use of the second person in the opening lines: "Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky" (1-2).

11.  Hughes’s  De Hoyos’s Not  Hughes’  De Hoyo’s