Puzzling papers

The writing assignment, I thought, was quite clear: in-depth, focused analysis of a particular literary work, examining how it responds to a particular idea. No outside sources. Rely on evidence from within the work. That means using quotes--at least a few--but not too many very long quotes because readers skip 'em. And even though it's an upper-level writing proficiency class, I distributed and went over a handout to help students brush up their skills in integrating, punctuating, and citing quotes, and I showed them an online sample paper demonstrating the finer points of MLA format. "Make your paper look just like this," I told them, "and if you don't know how to do that, come and see me."

Most of the papers were really good, but the bad papers were bad in some really peculiar ways. Here's a paper that tries to analyze a work of literature without actually quoting from any particular text. Here's one that lists two works in the Works Cited but doesn't actually quote or cite any works within the analysis. Here's one that is made up almost entirely of paraphrased material taken from online sources. Here's one that starts off sounding a bit superficial on the first page, leading me to hope that the ideas will be developed in further depth on the next page, but then I turn the page and find oh, about three more sentences before the dreaded phrase "In conclusion." And here's one that is made up of vague generalizations interspersed with many very long quotes, all of them single-spaced, centered, and in boldface type. Okay! What do I do with that?

In an upper-level course, I prefer to engage with student essays on the level of ideas, content, and elegance of writing, but here I'm encountering some really basic misunderstanding of the conventions of literary analysis. I'm not interested in devoting more class time to the thrilling topic of how to format long quotes; further, I'm not sure what to do with students in an upper-level literature class who don't realize that analyzing a work of literature requires some familiarity with the actual literature. Besides, most of the students already knows this stuff, and why bore them to pieces just to help out the small but significant group of struggling students?

Clearly, some intervention is called for, but what? An out-of-class workshop? Individual tutorials? My experience with that kind of activity is that the students who need it the most can't be bothered to show up. So I'm scratching my head and I welcome suggestions: how do I deal with a handful of students who just don't get it?