Writing Lab: Your First 3 Pages
For this writing lab, you're going to bring to class the first three pages of your seminar paper, and you will work with the same partner you did on your perfect paragraph. Please print out two copies of your first three pages and bring both copies to class.
At this point, your essay will have some meat to it. Your thesis will be refined, focused, specific, and arguable. You will know the approach you're taking to the essay, and you will have done a significant amount of research on the topic. You will have read a number of articles and/or books or parts of books on your object as well as on its genre or form; you will also have read more sources on the approach(es) or methodology(-ies) you are using in your investigation of your object. The best papers will cite only rarely if at all from PW or RR; they will instead refer to the works referred to in PW and/or RR. So, for example, if you're investigating discursive constructions of gender and madness, you will no doubt have looked at signifiant portions of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization; if you're examining ideological paradigms, you'll certainly look at Louis Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy, etc. In short, make sure you acquaint yourself as thoroughly as possible with the methodology(-ies) you're using.
There isn't any recipe for how the first three pages of your essay should look. To help guide you, though, you should consider looking at how skilled writers accomplish the task of introducing their topics. Beth Newman's essay on The Turn of the Screw, for example, is a skillfully constructed and rhetorically effective piece. Look at how she introduces her material by introducing the components of the novel she will be considering and informing her reader of how and why she'll be using particular approaches and methodologies.
Judicious use of secondary sources can really make a paper stand out. They can also help organize your thinking. As we've discussed in class, you're going to want to research your object itself, of course; but you'll also want to make sure your understand the form of your object, and perhaps how it might have changed or been used in the generations or so immediately preceding your object. That is, are you sure you've fully considered what your object is, formally? Remember to look at it, and not just through it.
Reading different perspectives about your object can dramatically nuance your own thinking. So make sure to look at as many articles (not found on the web) pertaining to your object. Sometimes you'll find that you so vehemently disagree with one critic's view of your object that you will find a whole new way of thinking and talking about it. The number of secondary sources you cite in your paper will vary wildly, of course, but it would surprise me to find a good paper that cited fewer than eight sources on the object itself, and two or three each on the form and on the methodolgy(-ies) you employ.
Remember the power of topic sentences as you write your first three pages.
And above all remember: focus on the nature and consequences of representation in your object.