Assignment 3, Scholarly paper or
Independent Newspaper Feature Story
Because of the situatedness of a scholarly paper (in standard English,
"their specialized nature"), you may not want to write one for this
class. As an option, we will have an alternative assignment which is writing
a feature story for a local, independent newspaper or news weekly.
Usually, you can tell which of these two assignments you'd
prefer to write based on your major. If your field is in the
humanities, I would prefer that you stick with the scholarly
paper. If your field is not -- if it is, for example,
engineering, computer science, or chemistry -- I would like you to
consider which assignment would be more useful to you. Read the
goals of each genre, below, and make your own decision, letting your instructor know which you
select before getting too far down the road of drafting.
Scholarly Paper
We've discussed, particularly in the "Inventing the University"
article, how and what we write tend to pigeonhole us socially.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing; being able to write like a community -- being familiar
with their genres -- often allows us
entrance into those same communities with less resistance.
Yet at the same time, unlearning the
habits of intermediate genres is often something important to
perform. For instance, when we wrote an application letter,
layout on the printed page was nearly as important as content.
Foregrounding our qualifications for employment, specifically by
putting them first in the letter, was of absolute importance. We
also created two kinds of pictures, one with narrative (an anecdote)
and another with lists (our description of experience), that would not
occur in a standard "five-paragraph paper." Though many of the
same things that were important to the "five-paragraph paper" were
still essential, from good grammar to good, readable style, we made
nearly as many changes to those rules as the number of rules we
actually kept.
Even within academia, the
research paper continues to change shape, moving from a five paragraph
paper that treats three topics quickly, with minimal integration to a
sustained consideration of the nuanced themes within particular
works. We've talked a bit about the style and content of typical
five paragraph essays, and read through a
bit about what Friedrich
Nietzsche had to say about their content as quoted by Friedrich Kittler.
Often, they claim, "we" are taught to write about ourselves, our own
reactions to information, making our five paragraph compositions very
much reader responses. Kittler sums his and Nietzsche's shared
critique that this "'appeal to the individual' is the opposite of
scholarly training... precisely because the model pupil takes [this
appeal] literally" (Kittler
181-2).
What's missing -- and what we're looking to correct -- is that the
"model pupil" thinks academia wants to hear about them specifically,
when writing about oneself is often really a crutch to enable writing,
and to have these excercises inch writers towards confidence in
composition. That is, since writing about oneself often makes it
easy to overcome writers' block and create content, instructors often
encourage this sort of writing so that there is some writing to review and to
improve upon. Perhaps you're not ready to write about Marxist
critiques of Emerson's "Wealth" and "Power," but you're
probably ready to write about what you might think while reading those
two works.
Assignment Description
It's time for us to drop the crutch of writing about ourselves, and to
try to have our writing do the work of entering a scholarly conversation. I'm going to
suggest approaching this task with a specific strategy. We'll
first read a work of literature closely.
Close reading means that you don't simply skim (or "raid") the text,
but write down quotes or ideas that seem particularly interesting to
you (hang on; we'll break from writing about ourselves in just a
second). You might take these notes on another sheet of paper, or
you might write in some marginalia as you read. We'll practice
close reading in class.
As you're reading, you'll notice ways to connect the different ideas
that you've noticed while reading. We'll call these "overarching
themes," or subjects that the author returns to again and again.
These might be images from the work, or it might be a topic that you do
find personally important that would benefit from being brought into
contact with this piece of literature.
Assignment Requirements
For this assignment, we're going to write a sustained paper of
approximately nine pages and 3300 words on a scholarly work which will
be introduced in class.
To be overly clear, this will be a paper of at least nine pages in
length and 3300 words of Times New Roman, 12-point font. Margins
should be no more than one inch for the top and bottom and one and a
quarter inches (1.25") for the left and right margins. Text
should be double-spaced, as this allows for easier editing by reviewers
both when printed and when comments are added electronically.