Detailed Description Examples
This page contains links to examples of successful description sections from a variety of session proposals (these examples are applicable to all types of special-session and nonguaranteed-session proposals). Click on a link below to view the example. These excerpts appear as they were received by the MLA and have not been edited to conform to MLA style.
Note: The current description word count guideline is between 500 and 750 words to encourage a more focused description; these proposals had a limit of 1,000 words.
Examples from Special-Session Proposals
- Ideas of Form in Twentieth-Century Poetry: What We Talk about When We Talk about Form
(Example of a proposal organized by a graduate student) - Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: New Approaches to African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919
(Example of a proposal with three graduate student panelists) - Reconsidering Robert Creeley
(Example of a proposal that is also a tribute) - Saintly Women and Priestly Poets: The Fifteenth-Century English Poetry of Osbern Bokenham, John Capgrave, and John Audelay
(Example of a proposal with a good rationale and history) - Revision as Writing, Writing as Revision
(Example of a roundtable proposal) - Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance at Twenty Five
(Example of a proposal focusing on one work)
Examples from Nonguaranteed-Session Proposals
- Literature, Wars, and the American Body
(Example of a collaborative session proposal)
- Drawing Women’s Lives
(Example of a single-entity proposal)