english “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato “The Stolen Party” by Lilliana Hekker

For your first essay, I want you to think about what Plato has to say in "The Allegory of the Cave" about how we learn about the world around us, and the ways that our senses and our experiences can either prevent us from knowing the truth or lead us to understand the truth. Think about what keeps the prisoners in the cave, and how, eventually, they escape. Describe this for your reader, and then compare or contrast what you’ve learned from Plato to either "Birches," "The Stolen Party," "The Hand," or your own experiences. Please note that you’ll need to lay the foundation by describing to your reader what Plato says, quoting liberally from that text. Please give yourself time to write and revise a rough draft. Plato’s text is difficult, and if you have problems, you’ll need to reread Plato, or search the internet for information about Plato. You may want to go back to your discussion board on Plato and use some of the information you started there in this paper. Your paper should be 3 to 6 pages in length.

All your papers this semester will be written following MLA formatting rules, and if you’ve never used MLA before or are more familiar with AP formatting, you’ll need to review MLA rules here (Links to an external site.). For this first paper you do NOT need a works cited page, but if you use quotations or information gotten from somewhere else, you do need to cite that information using MLA rules. The basics of internal citations can be found here (Links to an external site.); I won’t be taking off for incorrectly formatted quotations on this first paper, but I will be correcting them for future use.