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How To Get Good Grades and Influence People With Your Writing

All writing you do in this class should aim to be clear and interesting. You’re out to show a sympathetic reader how the text you’re analyzing means what you say it does. Think of the text as a patient spread out on the operating table, or as a big painting hung up right before you, or as a freeze-frame replay of a game: you’re showing how details and patterns are working together to convey some surprising or intriguing meaning.

A useful formula for digging into analysis, for getting beyond the surface, is often: "It may seem like X (for the following reasons), but actually it’s Y (for the following better reasons)." Useful questions for yourself, as you’re trying to broaden your claims to the level of an argumentative thesis, are: "So what? If my idea about Y is true, what does it matter? How should this change my reader’s understanding of the essay?"

The argument you’re making about the reading shouldn’t be ludicrous, and at the same time it shouldn’t be obvious. You avoid sounding ludicrous or random by planning an organized defense of an overriding idea, defending your claims as any good lawyer might by well-chosen pieces of specific, quoted evidence from the text. You avoid obviousness by staying away from mere plot summary, and by avoiding truisms so general or abstract, nobody could ever argue with them.

Always have your reader in mind, and respect his or her effort to follow the flow of your thoughts. Think of this reader as a friend, someone no more or less intelligent than you, who would be as bored as you would be by pretentiousness, clichés, incoherence, empty filler, or any other attempt to mask a lack of thought and effort. Assume this reader to be basically familiar with the essay you’re writing about, but unaware of the web of details and implications you’re helpfully pointing out.

A few more specific pieces of advice:

- Choose topics that really puzzle or bother or interest you.

- Keep yourself in the background. Let your thoughts speak for themselves, and don’t waste space recording the experience of having them.

- Keep the analysis in the present tense (‘this is how the essay works’). If you’re slipping into the past tense, it’s a good sign that you’re starting to fall into plot summary (‘this is what happened in the essay’).

- Stay within the boundaries of the text. The reading may well be dealing with important social and political issues, but your job in this class is to analyze those issues as they work inside the text, not generally.

- Use a title.

- Double-space, use standard fonts and margins.