In your papers for this class, you will offer critical analytical readings of a text. What do I mean by critical reading? Foremost, your paper will be an exercise in reading. That is, you will struggle to make sense of and explicate a particular facet of a given text. By critical, I mean that above and beyond explication, you will say something about the text. The something you say will be a product of concerted wrestling with the text and will be about the text you are writing about. You might point out unacknowledged presuppositions on the authors part, the unintended consequences of a particular idea if taken to the limit. You might point out holes, inconsistencies and breakdowns in the story your selected author is trying to tell.
How does one go about writing a paper of this sort?
Choose a text. To get started, I would recommend returning to a passage (or passages) that produced in you a strong reaction. Where a text made you surprised, or outraged, or defensive, or even desperately confused, there likely lies a nugget of a thought worth developing. You may make supplement use of texts not studied in this class, but they should be of scholarly quality and not the main focus of your analysis.
Take some notes documenting your critical intuitions about the text. Then look back through the text to determine whether or your intuitions bear out. Allow your thinking to evolve as you reencounter the text.
Eventually, it might be before youve written a draft, it might not be until after youve written a draft, you will have something like a thesis. The thesis contains the clearest and most comprehensive declaration of the thing you want to say about the text. It is conventional but not obligatory to state your thesis in the first paragraph.
In settling on your thesis, be creative, be contentious, but be modest. Remember: in 5-6 pages, it is possible to compellingly and coherently say something of value about a text. It is near impossible to say something of value about the world or how things really are.
Use textual evidence to make your case. Draw passages from your text to argue your case. In presenting your evidence, dont merely transcribe these passages or describe them. Do those things, but also present it. That is to say, show the reader what to see in them.
Show your work. That is, try to articulate all the steps in your thinking. Even if you dont realize it, at the point where you stumble upon the thing you want to say, you will have already done a great deal of critical thinking. Excavating and explicating these precipitating thoughts is a huge part of writing a paper like this.
Define your terms. In the course of your paper, you will find yourself using words like religion or ritual. Wordsespecially abstract onescan mean a number of different things, and the reader does not have access to your inner thoughts. In figuring out what precisely you mean by a given term, the first place to turn to is the text you are writing about. If youre writing about religion in Bellah, you should probably figure out what religion means for him. If the critical term youre using is not central to the text youre writing about, then its up to you to stipulate for your reader what you mean by it. Dont offer dictionary definitions. Simply say, By religion, I refer to
Do not brush problematic evidence under the rug. When you encounter evidence that seems to create problems for your argument, take the opportunity to further refine your argument.
You may write as if your reader is familiar with the text youre writing about. Summarize only when it is necessary for the particular story youre trying to tell about your text.
You might try making an outline before you start writing. Or if you dont write that way, you mayonce youve got something on the pageretrofit an outline. At that point you might review each paragraph and determine what exactly it is trying to do. If and when it doesnt do it just right, tighten it.
There is no one way to write. If you find yourself enthusiastically following a rabbit of some sort down a hole, dont worry that it might be the wrong rabbit. Just keep going!
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the thing that comes out of you onto the page is only a draft. Editing and/or rewriting is an essential stage in the process.
Form and style (and grammar) count. A confused reader is a reader that wishes s/he were doing something else. To see how your paper flows, you might try reading your paper out loud.
Your paper should be around 1500 words in length. Longer is fine; shorter is not.
Title your paper.
Number your pages.
Again, you may use any citation style you are familiar and comfortable with. However, if there is no particular style you are familiar with, you may use Chicago Style. Examples for how these citations work (as footnotes, not in-text citations) see below.
Book
One author
(First time citing in a footnote): Michael Pollan, The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99100.
(After the first citation or first in-text citation): Pollan, Omnivores Dilemma, 3.
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