Essay Advice
I shifted the "advice" portion of the essays page here for ease of access and out of a desire to limit the scope and range of the information presented on the "assignment sheet" page. So this page now includes advice on drafting both essays and advice on rewriting the analytical essay. Please let me know if and how I can make this page more helpful.
Analytical Essay
Advice on Drafting Process
Note: This advice on the drafting process is also relevant for any of the analytical/expository writing you do in this course (including the comparative essay)--and probably for other courses, as well, and not just in English.
Note: I've numbered the paragraphs in this section to correspond to the numbering of requirements for the analytical essay on the essays page.
1. The best way to make sure you are making an argument or offering an interpretation is to put forward a position that's truly debate-able, that's interesting to you, and that you believe you can show to be interesting to your classmates (the audience you should imagine for your essay). It doesn't make sense to devote a significant number of words to an argument so vague or general or obvious that anyone would agree with it. Rather, your job is to sort through the possibile answers to the question or issue raised in the option you've chosen and convince your audience that your answer or position is the most plausible.
A lot of this work of sorting through possible answers to come up with the one you find most plausible should take place before you ever sit down at a keyboard or desk to compose your paper. You should reread the story(-ies) you're writing on, mark significant passages, write questions or observations in the margins, take notes, brainstorm, make up lists or charts or concept maps, doodle, try to produce an outline, free write--whatever "pre-writing" process works best for you at getting your interpretive juices flowing. Often the things I tell you not to do in the final draft of your paper are excellent pre-writing strategies. You can think of them as building blocks that you can shape and then put together in different combinations, until you begin to move from putting together your observations and relating them to each other to actually coming up with an argument or a thesis that you want to try to prove. I can't recommend strongly enough that you go to the links page's section on researching and writing well, and check out the Princeton or Purdue writing center handouts on brainstorming, pre-writing exercises, and developing a thesis--you wouldn't believe how many people skip this essential first step of collecting and manipulating their ideas and observations, and instead stare blankly at a blank page or computer screen, hoping inspiration will strike. Don't fall into this trap of expecting your ideas to emerge fully formed and in complete sentences. The sooner you accept that writing is a process of discovery--that you will figure out what your real argument is as you struggle to find the words that will best develop it--the better you will be able to deal with the inevitable frustrations and dead-ends that come up as you are trying to figure out just what it is you want to argue. There's a lot of preparatory work to be done before you can expect to begin drafting the roughest of rough drafts, and the quicker you develop your own brainstorming strategies for "priming the engine," the more efficient your writing process will eventually become.
When you do move on to the drafting and rewriting stages, though, remember that a key part of persuading your audience that your answer is plausible and your evidence is relevant is anticipating how they might react to your answer and evidence. By imagining possible objections or counter-examples and then either explicitly or implicitly forestalling them in the written essay, you show your audience that you are taking them seriously and that you have thought carefully about the question. It's much more persuasive to deal with a major objection or counter-example to your argument than to pretend it doesn't exist. In fact, one of the best ways to make your own thesis stronger is to try advancing a thesis that contradicts yours. Some people find this process of imagining counter-evidence and counter-arguments more helpful to do early in the pre-writing stage, others when revising their first draft. Find out what works best for you by trying out different approaches this semester.
You will most likely find that you need to write a first draft that is much longer than the page limit in order to a) figure out precisely what your main argument is and b) figure out how best to convince your readers of the plausibility of your argument. Therefore, it is in your best interest to give yourself time to not only write that longer first draft but also to go through a serious re-vision process--to select, prioritize, reorder, condense, and cut in light of putting your ideas as clearly, concisely, precisely, and persuasively as you possibly can. The upshot of this is that you should never, ever, decide not to pursue a line of thought in writing because doing so will take you over the page length. Follow the idea where it takes you. Most experienced writers don't write their first drafts with a set blueprint in mind--they generally discover what they mean or change their minds while writing. Worry about page lengths only after you've thought through the issue in writing to your satisfaction. Once you've figured out a) and b) above, you can then move on to making the difficult choices about which sentences are too wordy and which paragraphs are really digressions from your key idea that you don't have space to develop and how to make your argument economically.
2. One consequence of the need for conciseness is that you may find that you need to rethink the "five-paragraph" essay structure you were probably taught in high school. (You know: the kind where you have a "funnel"-style introduction in which you move from a general observation to your specific, three-part thesis statement; a body consisting of three paragraphs of "evidence" for each of the three parts of your thesis, complete with topic sentences that restate each part of the thesis and a transition into the next paragraph's topic sentence; and a "reverse-funnel"-style conclusion that restates the thesis and takes it from the specific to the general.)
Although you should definitely hang onto the key elements of the five-paragraph essay--an introduction, body, and conclusion; a main argument; some kind of topic sentences and transitions; a sense of structure; and a consideration of evidence--you should definitely avoid the "funnel" and "reverse-funnel" styles of introduction and conclusion and absolutely avoid needless repetition. Cut to the chase. Develop your own personal voice and style of analysis and persuasion. The only thing your introduction must do is "hook" your readers and make them want to read the rest of the essay (this is usually done by giving them some sense of where the rest of the essay is going or what the point of the essay is; often, having brainstormed on the inevitable "so what?" question most readers approach any piece of writing with, will help you write an effective introduction). The only thing the body of your paper must attempt is to persuade your readers of the validity and plausibility of your answer to your central question. The only thing your conclusion shouldn't do is restate the thesis or move from the specific back to the general. Instead, your conclusion should "shift gears" in some way, approach your answer from another angle or discuss what follows from it. Above all, be aware of the form and structure of your own writing: think about what points you want to make in what order--about the most effective way of ordering your essay so that it helps you persuade your audience of your point's validity.
Advice on Revision Process
Due: Your revisions are due ten days after the date on my comments to you, in my mailbox in the English department office (Fenton 277). The grade you receive on your rewrite will completely replace your original grade.
Format: Same as for original, but be sure to have a vivid title for your essay that gives a sense of your main argument. I was shocked at how many people failed to even give their papers a title!
Process: Make an appointment to come see me if your main problem is a misunderstanding of the assignment's requirements and expectations and if you're not 100% certain you understand what it takes to correct that misunderstanding. Read my comments carefully, reread the assignment sheet for your option, and then reread your paper using the same criteria that we used in the peer review/assessment workshop. Brainstorm ways to improve on every one of those criteria. If you turn in a paper in which only the typos are fixed but the really essential problems are left untouched, you will not receive a higher grade. The idea of giving you a chance to rewrite the paper is that you will do a serious "re-vision" of the paper, not just clean it up. If you are at all unsure about what this entails after going through the above process--and reading the specific advice on the option you chose or which you want to refocus your paper on--make an appointment to come see me. Talking it out may work better for some people than going from written comments and advice. If you're one of those people, then it's your responsibility to take the initiative in setting up a writing conference with me.
General Comments and Advice: Let me just say that I found it highly disappointing how few people brought a complete draft to the peer review/assessment workshopping session the class meeting before the papers were due, and even more disappointing how few people took the workshopping session seriously. How many people brought the assignment sheet so they could make a detailed answer to questions 1 (on your partner's understanding the assignment) and 2 (assessing your partner's main argument's relevance to the assignment)? However, no matter what the quality of response your partner made, you paper is ultimately your own responsibility. You had 3-4 days to revise the paper and apply the same questions your partner did to your second or third drafts. You had the opportunity to ask me questions about the assignment options weeks before the due date. I can't help but feel people took this first writing assignment too lightly. The number of people whose papers had problems on questions 1 and 2 from the peer workshop sheet--my foundational criteria when grading any paper that's a response to a specific assignment--floored me.
These issues showed up in the grade distribution for my two sections: 1 A-, 4 B+, 5 B (meaning that ten students, roughly 20% of the class, did well on the analytical essay), 17 B- (meaning that 27 students, roughly 55% of the class, did adequately or better), 4 C+, 4 C, 6 C-, 8 D (meaning that 18 students, roughly 37% of the class, had serious problems with the analytical essay). To briefly explain my grading criteria for task-oriented essays (ones that are not chosen by the student but are assigned options), any paper in which the student shows basic understanding of the assignment, has a main argument, makes some efforts to support it, and has a solid grasp of organization, sentence-level prose, and the conventions of college writing will get a B-. (In the old days, such an average paper would receive an average grade, a C, but this is the era of grade inflation.) To fall out of the B-range, a paper would have to be less than solid on any of the above criteria. The farther below a B- a paper is, the more likely it is that it shows a serious misunderstanding of the assignment, lacks a main argument, doesn't support it, and shows problems with the fundamentals of expository prose. The farther above a B- it gets, the more advanced the understanding of the assignment is, the more ambitious the main argument is, the more persuasive the arguments and evidence used to support it are, and the better structured and written it is.
On the bright side, big problems are often the easiest to correct. So check out the following thought experiments/stories that go with each option. It would probably be useful to go through them all--not just the option you chose--since the kinds of analyses required in the analytical essay will be the foundation for more complex tasks required in the comparative essay (which is due closer than you may think!). The fact that 45% of my students fell below the B- mark is a serious issue for me. Anyone who gets below a B- is likely to have serious trouble with the other writing in the course. (The next assignment, for instance, is more advanced and difficult than this one. To do really well on the comparative essay, you have to be able to use the skills of thematic analysis, structural analysis, and functional analysis that the analytical essay was designed to give you practice on well.) Hence, for those 22 students, I will expect a serious "re-vision" in which you improve your understanding of the requirements of your chosen option, develop a debate-able thesis that requires you to write a persuasive, not descriptive essay in order to support it, and improve your writing at the sentence and paragraph level. For the 27 students who earned a B- or better, don't rest on your laurels. I should be giving out loads of grades in the A-range for this assignment, particularly given how well so many of you are doing in other aspects of the course (observations and discussion questions, class participation, your projects). After the rewrites, I expect to see a drastic change in the above grade distribution.
General Comments and Advice on Specific Options
Fortunately, the academic world is a place in which mistakes are opportunities for learning rather than opportunities for your boss to fire you. 27 of the 49 of you chose this option (with grades ranging from D to B+), and around 18 of those people did just what the "You" did in the Lazio thought experiment above. In other words, they took an already simple task and misread it to make it even simpler--and in the process wrote an essay that is barely relevant to the actual assignment for option #1A. Let me explain.
Consider key instructions from the assignment sheet: "focus on one migration narrative in particular and make an argument about the most important issues it seems designed to make its readers consider"; "emphasize explanations and justifications over assertions alone in the body of your paper"; "make an argument about why it matters that the particular migration narrative you chose to focus on is most centrally about the issues you have identified, what's at stake in its focus on those issues, what conclusions can be drawn from its emphasis on them." In order to craft a paper that fulfills these requirements, you need to write a persuasive essay in which your goal is not to convince your readers that the themes/issues you identify are actually in the narrative you chose to focus on, but instead to build a case for why those themes/issues are the most important ones in the story. To do that, you need to contrast your chosen themes/issues with other plausible ones, and show why yours "matter" more in the migration narrative you're analyzing--you need to justify your choice of themes/issues as the "most important" ones.
Now, for those people who whose option #1B (the comparative option), the most common problem could be explained this way. If Lazio had given you the assignment to compare what senior citizens and your peers felt on a particular issue, and you just said that both groups had opinions on that issue without going into differences in their views or what follows from your analysis of where they agree and disagree on that issue, that would perfectly describe the problem many people who chose this option ran smack into. It's not enough to show that two stories both deal with the same issue or theme--the paper has to be about the significance of similarities and differences you note in the ways your two migration narratives deal with that issue or develop the theme. That's the only way the paper will get out of descriptive mode and into persuasive mode.
If any of this is unclear, please make an appointment to see me immediately. As you'll see from your grades, even the people who fell into the common error described above are not going to get the academic equivalent of a pink slip. But I'll be very disappointed if the goals you set for yourself in this course are so low that you'll find that grade acceptable.
Now, 8 of you chose this option (grades ranged from C to B+, with the majority at B- or below), and the most common mistake was to fail to keep the focus on the assigned task: "make a persuasive argument about...the consequences or effects of the form of the migration narrative"; "the point of this option is not to provide a plot summary or paraphrase of the migration narrative; rather, it is to analyze the specific way in which the story is told, in order to get at the ways those formal/structural choices are meaningful in and of themselves." I tried to be as clear as possible about grading criteria: "You will be graded on your choice of formal elements to focus your analysis on and how persuasive your conclusions about the consequences or effects of those formal elements are." However, what many people actually did was get caught up in paraphrasing or summarizing the migration narrative, or discussing characters or themes, or began to talk about a formal element like "point-of-view" but slipped quickly back into plot summary. Others drew very vague and general conclusions from their analysis of form--they had arguments that were relevant to the assignment, but their arguments were not really that "debate-able"--they didn't require much justification.
OK, seriously, 6 people chose this option, and almost everyone understood the requirements of the assignment decently (grades ranged from D to A-, with the majority being in the B to B- range). Maybe not everyone did such a fine analysis in figuring out the equivalent of who played the key role in Hillary's turnaround as his daughter did in the story above--or rather, in crafting "a persuasive argument about the most important 'work' the migration narrative does." But generally, people made solid efforts to "Remember, the point of this option is not for you to provide your readers with a list of the functions performed by the migration narrative you've chosen to analyze, along with some explanation of your assertions to fill out individual body paragraphs; rather, it's for you to build a persuasive argument about the most important roles the narrative plays within the larger work from which it comes. You should be trying to convey why it matters that a given migration narrative does certain 'work' within the book, what is significant about the functions it performs, what conclusions can be drawn from its playing the roles it does." Where papers could stand the most improvement was in making more specific, "debate-able" claims about the most important "work" their migration narrative does (and countering objections, forestalling counter-arguments and counter-evidence), in convincing readers about the significance of this "work" (why it matters that the narrative does it), and in drawing larger conclusions from the fact of this "work" being done. Most people in this option were on the right track, but needed to push their analyses further.
I was glad to see that 7 people chose this option, and that they not only had the guts to meet its challenge but understood well what the assignment required. Grades only ranged from C to B-, though, because many claims that people chose to make about authorial intention provoked a similar kind of comment as Jon Stewart's unprintable one in the story above. That is, while generally relevant to the topic and technically correct, many of the claims people made about authorial intention in A Way in the World and Crossing the River were not particularly interesting, detailed, or revealing--too many really would have taken a paragraph to prove, or a few sentences, with the proper conciseness and precision of language use. I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point clear: it's not worth coming up with a claim about authorial intention unless it's daring in some way--unless it tries to account for as much of what's going on in the story or novel as possible within the space limitations of the essay. As I put it on the assignment sheet, "Your job is to go beyond obvious, general claims, and use evidence from the form, structure, and function of migration narratives in either one of these works to account for the choices Naipaul/Phillips made and what those choices reveal about his ends." It's not enough to come up with a claim about authorial intention and some evidence to back it up. You need to brainstorm as many claims as possible and make an informed decision about which you feel "works" the best. For too many of these papers, I got the feeling that people went with the first idea that came to mind and didn't put enough thought into the rereading and brainstorming portion of the pre-writing process for this paper.
Remember that a short essay does not mean an opportunity to make a point or two and get out quickly, but instead is a challenge to you over how ambitious and complex your main claim is and how best to support it within the space limitations. I hope many people take the opportunity to rewrite their first essay. There is a small chance that if you switch options you might get a lower grade than on the original, but the odds of your misunderstanding the assignment after all the thought you put into re-visions are very slim. But I expect that everyone who takes the time to do a serious "re-vision" of their papers in which they improve on the most important flaws of their previous draft and aren't simply "cleaning up" the prose will see an improvement in their grade--and in many cases, I believe, a marked improvement.
Comparative Essay
Advice on Drafting Process
Note: I've numbered the paragraphs in this section to correspond to the numbering of requirements for the comparative essay on the essays page.
1. The best way to make sure you are making an argument or offering an interpretation is to generate questions that you have about the texts we've read, choose one, and set out to answer it for yourself. You should choose a question that's interesting to you and that you believe you can show to be interesting to your classmates (the audience you should imagine for your essay). Moreover, you should choose a question that's truly debate-able, a question to which you can imagine several possible answers. Your job is to sort through the possibilities and convince your audience that your answer is the most plausible.
I strongly recommend that you don't focus your paper on comparing two different characters. Why? You run an even greater risk of simply making observations and giving descriptions--or falling into the dreaded plot summary--in your essay, rather than making an argument about the significance of those similarities or differences, about what's at stake in them or what follows from them. You still may focus your paper on comparing two characters from different works, so long as you are aware of this risk and have thought carefully about how to avoid it. In your email to me, you should explain how you will develop an argument for your paper, and not just make it descriptive.
2. You should choose a topic on which you have a number of observations that you can develop or distill into a coherent argument or interpretation. Above all, choose something that interests you and on which you feel you have a perspective that's distinctive. Try to bring to our attention something that you've noticed about the stories you're comparing to which you feel that the class as a whole hasn't paid sufficient attention. Try to make that "interpretive leap" from noticing cool connections and contrasts to coming up with a sustained argument about their significance.
Whatever question you choose, you should be able to say why it is important. The more you think about this, the more effective your introduction and conclusion will be--you will be able to answer the "so what?" or "why should we care?" question with which most readers approach every piece of writing.
EN 209: Novels and Tales, Fall 2000
Created: 11/1/00, 8:57 am
Last modified: 11/16/00, 2:04 pm