After grading enough student essays on Jean Anouilh's Antigone, certain mistakes begin to appear so consistently that they are worth naming explicitly and addressing before students ever begin drafting. These recurring errors are rarely about a lack of effort; more often they reflect gaps in how students have been taught to approach literary analysis generally, gaps that this particular play tends to expose with unusual clarity given its interpretive complexity. Naming these patterns for students in advance can prevent a significant share of the grading headaches teachers otherwise face.

The single most common mistake is treating the play as a straightforward morality tale with Antigone as an unambiguous hero and Creon as an unambiguous villain, a reading that Anouilh's text actively resists through its careful, sympathetic construction of Creon's reasoning. Students who fall into this pattern tend to cherry-pick evidence that supports the simpler reading while ignoring passages that complicate it, producing essays that feel thin even when they are grammatically polished and well organized. Correcting this mistake usually requires direct instruction pointing students specifically toward Creon's more sympathetic moments.

A second frequent mistake is confusing Anouilh's Antigone with Sophocles's original when students have encountered summaries or discussions of the myth elsewhere, leading to factual errors about plot details or character motivations that do not actually appear in Anouilh's specific version. This confusion is understandable given how widely known the Antigone myth is across multiple retellings, but it produces essays that misrepresent the assigned text. Requiring students to cite specific line numbers or page references for key claims helps catch this problem before it undermines an otherwise strong essay.

Structural and Evidence-Based Mistakes

Many essays suffer from a structural pattern where each body paragraph simply moves chronologically through the play rather than being organized around distinct analytical points. This produces essays that read more like annotated plot summaries than genuine arguments, since the organizing logic is the sequence of events rather than the structure of the claim being made. Teaching students to organize paragraphs by idea rather than by chronology, even when discussing a text with a clear linear plot like this one, tends to produce noticeably more analytical writing.

• Watch for essays that treat Creon as a simple villain without engaging his more sympathetic moments
• Check for factual confusion between Anouilh's version and the original Sophocles myth
• Flag paragraph structures organized by plot chronology rather than by analytical point
• Note quotations that are dropped into paragraphs without any surrounding analysis or context
• Identify conclusions that merely repeat the introduction rather than extending the argument

The Dropped Quotation Problem

Another recurring mistake is what teachers often call the dropped quotation, where a student inserts a line from the play into their essay without any surrounding sentence explaining its relevance or connecting it back to the paragraph's central claim. This produces writing that shifts abruptly between the student's own voice and Anouilh's dialogue without a clear bridge between the two. Teaching a simple structure, introducing the quotation's context, presenting the quotation itself, and then explaining its significance, gives students a reliable pattern to follow that noticeably improves essay coherence.

This mistake is especially common with quotations from Creon's long speeches, since students often recognize that a particular passage is important without fully working out why. Feedback that asks a direct follow-up question, such as "what specifically in this quotation supports your claim about Creon's fear of chaos," can help students develop the analytical habit of explaining evidence rather than simply presenting it and assuming its significance is self-evident to the reader.

Conclusion Paragraphs That Add Nothing New

A surprisingly common pattern in student conclusions is near-verbatim repetition of the introduction, sometimes with only minor word changes, as if the student believes the conclusion's job is simply to remind the reader of what was already said. Strong conclusions instead extend the argument slightly further, perhaps by considering a broader implication of the claim or connecting it to the play's larger themes in a way not fully developed in the body paragraphs. Teaching this distinction explicitly, with a clear example of a conclusion that adds genuine value, tends to improve this weak spot quickly.

For Antigone specifically, effective conclusions often return to the play's central tension between individual conscience and civic order, using the student's specific argument as a lens for a final, slightly broader reflection on that tension. This gives students a concrete template to work from rather than leaving them to guess at what a conclusion should accomplish beyond restating the thesis they already stated clearly in the introduction.

Turning Common Mistakes Into Teaching Opportunities

Rather than treating these recurring mistakes purely as grading deductions, many teachers find it effective to address them directly in a short mini-lesson before the essay is assigned, using anonymized examples from past student work to illustrate each pattern. Seeing a concrete example of a dropped quotation, or an oversimplified reading of Creon, tends to help students recognize and avoid the same pattern in their own drafts far more effectively than a general warning delivered without a specific illustration.

Keeping a running collection of these common mistakes, refreshed each year with new examples from current student work, builds an increasingly useful teaching resource over time. This collection can be shared across a department teaching the same text, ensuring that all sections benefit from lessons learned in any individual classroom, and it reduces the amount of repetitive individual feedback any single teacher needs to write from scratch each grading cycle.