Welcome! This LibGuide was created to support you in your Essay 3: Researching and Analyzing Patterns in "There 
There." When it's time to work on this on your own use this LibGuide as your landing page to guide you in how to find the best information for your essay and how to cite the information you found. You can use the tabs to focus on separate components that will support you in in the research and citation portion of your essay.
For this essay, you will ask: What kinds of new things will fiction teach us about personal relationships to the environment, and our perception of it? How will this pattern help us make sense of the novel’s big ideas such as identity, storytelling, and urban life?
What to Do:
1. Using the “Approaches to Brainstorming” handout and your Observation Inventory as a guide, select ONE recurring (at least 3 times) pattern of repeating words/images that appear in There There that you find most interesting or unexpected. Choose your pattern from the following list:
• spiders/webs
• costumes/masks
• blood
• heads
• bullets/war
• the earth/nature imagery
• names/language
• feathers/flying/birds
• BART/transportation
• music/songs
NOTE: If you are interested in another pattern that is not listed here, you may propose to write about that, but you MUST come talk to me and get it approved.
2. Trace that pattern or strand throughout the novella. Then, consider the following questions:
• What does my observation about the pattern imply?
• Why does this observation matter?
• Where does this observation take us?
• How can the observation help me start to draw more general conclusions about the novel as a whole?” 1
We are essentially asking “So what?” Why and how does the pattern you have chosen help us understand the novel and its themes in a new and interesting way? This establishes a motive for your paper, which will give your audience a reason to read your essay. Your motive should go beyond the clearly stated details and themes of the story’s plot. It shouldn’t be something that is obvious.
3. With your observations and motive in mind, write an essay of 5-6 pages analyzing the pattern or strand of your choice and making an original argument about how it helps us understand There There and its big ideas. Ideas that we have discussed include:
• Identity
• Community
• Urban life
• Connections to the Environment (broadly – our surroundings)
• History
• Trauma
4. Your essay should provide close readings of multiple passages from the novel that help illustrate the pattern you have chosen and support your analysis. Your close readings will ideally consider both content (the novel’s plot, setting, and characters) and form (the novel’s narration style, structure, use of metaphor, etc.)
5. Your essay should incorporate at least TWO outside secondary sources to provide context or explanation for a component of your analysis. Your sources should meet the following criteria:
• At least 1 source should be a reading that was assigned and discussed in class. (Any of the Unit 1 readings, Braiding Sweetgrass, or the Schwarz reading on Oakland’s housing inequity.)
• At least 1 source should be one that you have found yourself on one of the following library databases:
i. JSTOR
1 Questions are from David Rosenwasser & Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically (5th ed.). Thomson Wadsworth, 2009, p. 50.
ii. ProQuest (ebooks or periodicals)
iii. AlterNative journal
• You are welcome to use more than one source in either of the above categories, but you must have at least one source in each category!
• Optional: If you are struggling to come up with possible ideas for research, you may consult the library reference database The American Indian Experience (ABC-CLIO). That source has encyclopedia articles related to Native American culture, history, and society. Note: you may NOT use this database as your only outside source, but you can use it to identify search terms and possible sources to track down (often found in the references of specific entries). If you do reference information you got from an article in this database, you should still cite it in your in-text citations and works cited page.
6. All information quoted from the novel or summarized/quoted/paraphrased from outside sources. should be cited in MLA format using in-text citations and a works cited page
