I will be looking for three things in this paper: (1) the interest and importance of the topic; (2) the quality of the thesis; (3) the coherence (match) between the thesis and the evidence brought forward to support it. (1) should be fairly self-explanatory: make sure you pick a topic that shows you have been following the major issues we have been discussing. (2) simply means your essay has to have a critical point to prove. You need to put forward a claim, and then back it up with quoted, cited, and analyzed evidence from the text. Under (3), you need simply to remember that literary arguments are almost always arguments from example—the more specific and complex the example, the more convincing it will be. In practice, in a 6-7 page essay, this usually means zeroing in on one text, and then finding two or three key passages and discussing them in some detail.