Prior to beginning work on this assignment, review the discussion of genre in Chapter 3 of Film: From Watching to Seeing, as well as your instructor’s guidance and lecture materials, and Chapter 11 in Film Genre Reader IV. The ENG225 Research Guide in the Ashford University Library will be particularly helpful in locating required sources. This assignment is your opportunity to demonstrate understanding of one selected genre. To do that, you will watch a full feature-length film from that genre.
Please choose a film from this list of approved choices.
Note: You should watch your chosen film twice—once to ensure that you have grasped the storytelling and once to take more specific notes on aspects of the film you wish to discuss. If you would like to write about a film that is not on this list, you must email your professor for approval in advance or you may not receive credit on this assignment.
It is recommended that you look ahead to the Week 3 written assignment and Week 5 Final Paper guidelines to ensure that you choose a film for this assignment that will work with the requirements on those later assignments. You may opt to write about the same film in your Week 3 and Week 5 written assignments, and applicable pieces of this assignment can be used to write that assignment. If you do this, you should reflect on and revise this assignment based on the instructor’s feedback before you incorporate it into any future writing assignment.
Your paper should be organized around a thesis statement that focuses on how your chosen feature-length film both aligns with and expands upon your chosen genre. Consider using the Ashford Writing Center Thesis Generator (Links to an external site.) to help develop your thesis. Review the Week 2 sample paper, which provides an example of a well-developed analysis as well as insight on composition.
In your paper,
- Explain genre theory and, using Chapter 3 of the text as a reference, describe the conventions and attributes of the genre you have selected.
- Identify a feature-length film that fits your selected genre and briefly summarize the movie. As you develop this summary, remember the differences between a film’s story and a film’s plot and be sure to highlight specific genre elements.
- Interpret at least two genre conventions exhibited in your chosen feature-length film that help classify it in the selected genre. Be sure to provide a specific example of each convention (e.g., a particular scene or plot component).
- Provide an example of a third convention from your chosen feature-length film and explain how this convention expands the boundaries of the specified genre.
The Genre and Genre Theory paper
- Must be 900 to 1200 words in length and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style.
- Must include a separate title page with the following:
- Title of paper
- Student’s name
- Course name and number
- Instructor’s name
- Date submitted
For further assistance with the formatting and the title page, refer to APA Formatting for Word 2013
- Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice resource for additional guidance.
- Must include an introduction and conclusion paragraph. Your introduction paragraph needs to end with a clear thesis statement that indicates the purpose of your paper.
- For assistance on writing Introductions & Conclusions as well as Writing a Thesis Statement , refer to the Ashford Writing Center resources.
- Must use at least two scholarly sources in addition to the course text.
- The Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.
- To assist you in completing the research required for this assignment, view this Ashford University Library Quick ‘n’ Dirty tutorial, which introduces the Ashford University Library and the research process, and provides some library search tips.
- Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper guide.
- Must include a separate references page that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications