Essays

Guidelines for Essays

Submission, grading, and format: you will submit your essays and receive comments and grades back from me in electronic form. Please double-space your essays and format them in Courier New 12. Send them as .doc or .docx files (not as pdfs). (I know Courier is ugly, but its size makes it easier to work with than some of the alternatives.) I work in MS Word and will use the Track Changes and Insert Comment functions.
Lateness and extensions: Essays turned in late without prior approval will receive an F. I am happy to grant brief extensions, but you must contact me in advance of the due date to request one.
First page: Your essay doesn’t need a cover sheet, but at the top of the first page it should give your name, the class, and which topic you have chosen. It should also feature a good title and a pledge stating that the paper is entirely your own work.
Please number your pages.
Quotation: You will need to quote a good deal from the text(s) you are discussing. When you quote, follow your quotation with a parenthetical citation giving the work’s name (the first time; after that, if you’re quoting only one work, it’s not necessary to keep repeating it) and the page number. You don’t need footnotes or endnotes, or a “Works Cited” list or bibliography. Quotations of longer than 5 lines should be set in on both sides and should be double-spaced. They do NOT need quotation marks around them (the setting-in indicates that it’s a quotation). They don’t need an extra blank line before and after them. Quotations from poetry should reflect the line breaks in the quoted poem.
Revision: You will have the opportunity to revise your first essay. If you decide to revise, notify me as soon as possible after receiving the graded essay back from me. We will set up a meeting to discuss the revision. Bring the graded essay with you to the meeting and be prepared with specific questions and suggestions about how the essay might be improved. We will agree upon a due date for the revision. The grade on the revised version will replace the original grade.

Assessment of Writing

I expect written work of the same caliber as the work required in your other MIT subjects. This means carefully composed and proof-read (no sloppy errors), thorough, well thought-out, sufficiently supplied with supporting material quoted or paraphrased from the text(s).

In reading your work, I do not distinguish between “content” and “style” or “quality of writing.” How you decide to state something, how you assemble an argument, how you construct each and every sentence – these things constitute your argument and are indistinguishable from its “content.”

Advice on Writing

On the Use of External Sources

You should have no need to consult any outside sources when you write your essays for this class. The essays are opportunities for you to solidify and demonstrate your grasp of the material we have covered in class. You will draw upon our class discussions, your notes, your imagination and memory.

Topics for Essay 1

Review the sections “Guidelines for Essays,” “Assessment of Writing,” and “Advice on Writing”. Choose one of the following and write an essay of about 2000–2500 words. Make generous use of passages from the text to support your argument.

“Nothing can be done. Things are they are, and will be brought to their destined issue” (Jude the Obscure, 328). Jude quotes these words from Aeschylus’s ancient Greek tragedy Agamemnon. Write about how Hardy attempts in Jude to update the genre of tragedy for modern times. What forces work to give the novel an air of fatefulness or predestination?
“Done because we are too meny” (Jude the Obscure, 325). Write about the function of Little Father Time in Jude. How does his perspective resemble that of the novel’s narrator? What kind of perspective could have led him to do what he does? How does his perspective relate to the discourse of Political Economy?
In Conrad’s Lord Jim, why is it so important to Marlow to tell the story of Jim? What does he seek to accomplish by doing so? What has this got to do with the repeated assertion that Jim was “one of us”?
In Lord Jim, what does Stein mean by “in the destructive element immerse” (154)? Has Jim done that throughout the novel?

Topics for Essay 2

Review the sections “Guidelines for Essays,” “Assessment of Writing,” and “Advice on Writing.” Choose one of the following:

In Kipling’s Kim, the title character’s ability to mix unnoticed among various types of Indians makes him valuable to the British Secret Service. In what ways does Kim’s identity seem fluid and in what ways does it seem fixed? Make sure to write about Kim’s training with Lurgan.
In Ford’s The Good Soldier, is Dowell stupid? Or willfully blind? If the former, in what ways? If the latter, why?
In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how does Stephen learn to associate physical defilement and powerlessness with more abstract conditions of being under the power of others? Give plenty of examples of these conditions.
Describe the stages of Stephen Dedalus’s progress from childhood to departure from Ireland. Write about Stephen’s tendency to expect a once-and-for-all transformation from some pivotal experience. What becomes of such expectations? Does he finally achieve transformation to a condition a maturity and independence? What evidence from Chapters 4 and 5 best help you answer this last question?

Many of us probably think that writing works this way: You “have an idea” and then you “write it down.” I want you to question that assumption. In an important sense, you don’t really know what your ideas are until you’ve written them down and phrased them just right. Writing can be a process of discovering what it is you have to say, not just of communicating a prefabricated idea that’s sitting up there in your brain. As long as it’s up there in your brain, the idea doesn’t really exist in any form communicable to another. It exists, at best, in potential, but it hasn’t been subjected to the rigorous test of enunciating it. So use your writing to figure out what you want to say and how you should link each thought to the next. This may mean that, rather than making a complete outline of your argument and then filling it in with your prose, you simply start writing and see where you go. As you proceed, you may find (you’re likely to find) that you actually want to move in directions different from the one you originally imagined yourself taking. That’s fine. But when you’re done, go back to the beginning and make sure the introduction of the essay fits the directions you actually wound up taking.
I have little doubt that if I were to ask you merely to summarize the plot of a work we’re reading in this class, most if not all of you could do that in perfectly acceptable clear prose. I find, however, that when I add the significantly greater conceptual burden of requiring students to write argumentative essays that defend particular theses, the quality of many students’ prose declines markedly. Let’s appreciate the correlation: If a student is confused about her thesis or the proper way to argue for it, she is likely to write worse than she would if she were simply summarizing. A student arguing from a clear and cogent thesis, on the other hand, is much more likely to write well. Developing a worthy thesis statement is therefore crucial: You should try to present a one-sentence statement of the argument you will be making. (Sometimes the statement of your thesis may run to more than a single sentence.) Often this appears at the end of the essay’s first paragraph. The statement needs to claim something that it is possible to doubt (otherwise it would be so obvious that one wouldn’t need to argue for it) but that can be made plausible by careful marshaling of evidence. In this class, your evidence comes from the text(s) you will be writing about, so be prepared to quote a good deal. In keeping with point 1 immediately above, you may find (you probably will find) that you are not ready to articulate your thesis statement right away, but that you have to write a bit in order to discover what it is you want to argue. So give yourself time to discover your thesis, then put it where it belongs near the start of your essay.
Don’t assume that you can’t use the first-person voice. “I think” or “it seems to me” is Ok, as long as you have reasons to back up what you think. I’d rather have you sound like a distinct individual than an impersonal bureaucratic committee. This advice also applies to the passive voice: Make active voice constructions your default ones, and reserve passive for the rare times it really comes in handy.
Begin your work process by saying to yourself, “In order to assemble a persuasive argument about this topic, the passages in the work I’m writing about that would really need to be looked at are ….” In other words, make a list of all the potentially useful passages in the work that address the question you’re trying to answer. Then prioritize your list to focus on those that seem most important, i.e., least permissible to omit from a short essay. This exercise provides training in qualitative assessment of information. It can also help safeguard you against the criticism that you have omitted passages that might seem to contradict your argument.
Quote from and / or paraphrase portions of the text to support your claims as much as possible. Don’t think of your task as one of arriving at the tersest statement of a book’s “meaning”; think of it as one of engaging with some issue raised by the book in sufficiently satisfying detail. Occam’s razor doesn’t apply here. Back up and / or illustrate your assertions by showing how they are borne out by the work you’re discussing. More richly detailed essays, those that take the trouble to respond very fully to the text and to the questions posed in the assignment, will receive higher marks than those that give minimal or very general responses. And it never hurts to write more than the bare minimum number of words required, so long as all your words count toward enriching your argument and none of them is just there as filler.
In high school, many of you may have been taught the model of the “5-paragraph essay” (opening paragraph, 3 paragraphs of “body,” closing paragraph). That was fine then. College-level work takes on more complex subjects or looks more deeply into subjects you may have encountered earlier. This means that the 5-paragraph model, rather than helpfully providing structure, can become a cage, involving a boredom-inducing level of repetition (here’s what I will say, here I am saying it, here’s what I have said). You want to persuade your readers, not hit them over the head. Acknowledge the greater sophistication of your material, your approach, and your imagined audience by bidding the 5-paragraph model a grateful farewell.
Don’t write for the professor. Write for an imaginary reader who is somewhat familiar with the text you’re discussing but needs some reminding about what happens when and so forth. When you discuss a particular passage or incident in the text, make sure to contextualize it for this imaginary reader. When you move from one part of the text to another, help the reader move with you by providing a sufficient transition. Always be asking yourself if what you’re saying will be clear and persuasive to the imaginary reader.
Keep your opening paragraph focused on the specific claim your paper is making. Don’t begin with vast generalizations (e.g. “Throughout the history of Western literature”) when your real subject is something specific about a particular text.
People often think that academic writing is unlike the kind of writing they might need to do in the “real world.” But one way in which the writing in this class is exactly like the writing you might do in a professional context is that it is being read by someone busy who has a lot of other things to read and who will hold you accountable for what you present.

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Modern Fiction