Some Writing Tips for English 417

This file contains information regarding the following items:
 

The Exploratory Paper
The Analytical Essay
How To find a Topic
How To Create a Thesis
General Tips

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The Exploratory Essay

Focus on a central idea rather than on yourself

• Avoid sentimentalizing your experiences. (Instead of writing about general, Hallmark type emotions,   personalize your sentiment and make it specifically yours.  Your specific experiences should not be interchangeable with everyone else's).
• Use personal experience as a base for your reflections, not as the central focus

Create a "reflexive turn" in your paper

•  Move from your particular experiences to a reflection about their significance to you
           on a larger, more global scale

Move from the general to the specific or vice versa more than once, if possible

• Use specific information rather than abstract information to describe your events

Use distancing techniques to engage your readers

• Registers of language
• Writing as a participant or spectator

Shape your sentences for to match the pace of your discussion.

The analytic essay leads readers to a better understanding of a subject. As a mode of public thinking, the analytic essay asks you to:

• Investigate or inquire about a "subject"
• Emphasize "How" or "Why" something means what it does
• Focus on the subject, not on your responses to it
• Discuss the parts of the subject
• Carefully consider a subject
• Make your reasoning clear and public

How to Find a Topic

To find a topic and avoid stating the obvious, you might try one or more of the following strategies:

• Question why you have the responses you have about a subject? About why a certain film or icon grabs your attention?
• Question why the Director approaches the subject as she did.
• Question the implications of the camera's treatment of a topic.
• Question implicit assumptions, binaries, and false dichotomies in the play.
• Wonder how certain aspects of the mise en scene contribute to an effect.
• Think about how the camera involves you as a participant or spectator in the story.

Creating a Thesis

An analysis reflects a "close reading" of something. It pays attention to details, assumptions, and implications. The goal is for you to show your readers (often an instructor) how you arrived at a deeper understanding of a subject. The focus, then, is a demonstration of your reasoning skills. Consequently, you can only formulate a thesis after you have read and thought about a subject.  In other words, a thesis is "earned" and develops as you study, not before you begin to study.

One the best ways to think about a thesis is to consider it an idea or interpretation in progress.  It changes and develops as you read more and think more about your reading.  Often a thesis for your first draft of a writing will change during revision, as you clarify your ideas or realize your examples are leading you in a new direction.  Many people let their "theses" emerge as they write because they feel it necessary to shape their interpretation (thesis) as they go.  It is only in the final draft that some writers really clarify their thesis into a single sentence to guide their readers with a central focus. But the most important thing to remember is this: your thesis is your thoughtful perspective on a topic.

Thesis = topic + your idea, interpretation, or perspective

• Make sure your views are part of your thesis
• Make a claim based on evidence you have observed in the writer’s work. A thesis evolves after you've thought about something.
• Make sure your claim allows readers to ask this question: "Why would she think that?"


How to Rejuvenate a Weak Thesis

• Question your claim; ask "why" you believe it
• Complicate your claim by looking for more than one point of view on it




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Some Writing Tips

Title

• Be sure your title helps your reader understand your main point. (Do not sacrifice information for creativity). Think of your title as a lens that focuses on and clarifies your thesis.

Openings
• Create a context or framework for your discussion quickly. (If you need to use background information to orient your readers, do so briefly after your opening.
• Identify the works and authors you are analyzing.
• State your thesis in one sentence.


Discussion:

• Use more analysis than summary.
• Lead into quotations. Explain and connect quotations to your analysis.
• Make sure the first and last sentences of each paragraph relate.

Closing:
• Make your closing flows out of your discussion.
• Give your last sentence a rhetorical flourish that gives your reader a feeling of closure.