I may reference some of these in my individual comments, so they're numbered. By no means are they equally important; I'm just writing them in the order I see them. Oh, and thanks to all of you who submitted drafts early... I may even sleep tonight!
0. I have no expectation that you will address every comment or suggestion I make on your paper. I want you to consider all of them and make thoughtful choices that reflect your priorities and the bounds of your time and energy. I am also not saying, "Do X because I say so" (punishment power) or "Do X and it will get you a good grade" (disciplinary power). At the draft stage I am trying to be your editor/teacher and suggest things that I think could help you develop your essay and your writing. Not all of my suggestions will actually work. (Again I submit the question, what name do we give this form of power?)
1. If you see SQUARE, TRIANGLE, ANGLE, or LINE somewhere on your paper, this is my way of explaining how far along your draft is without creating some kind of implied contract between us about what grade you're going to get next week. Imagine an essay with basically no "dimensions" of thought as a single point. Imagine the (impossible) perfect essay as a circle with an infinite number of "sides." The other ratings give you values in between. By the way I got this from a book I read when I was a kid, which I highly recommend.
2. It can be difficult to retain control over the separation between your language, the language of critics/intellectuals, and the language of Wire dialogue. There's a chapter on this later in They Say I Say.
3. This is the nittiest nitpick ever, and not something I'd ever factor into a grade at ALL but because I'm the writing teacher it's due diligence for me to tell you. Suppose you have a parenthetical citation (Winter 24). See how the period goes after. Even if, "The quotation itself has punctuation!" (Winter 24). But again, this is very minor, and indeed to quote from a senior year term paper written by a certain young man, "Don't take this the wrong way Dr. Cotton, but if I ever come to the point of actually caring whether the period goes before or after the parenthesis I think I might just kill myself" (Winter 2002). Oh, the arrogance of youth. The corollary of this is that if it's "just a quotation with no parenthetical citation," any punctuation "goes inside."
4. As a "they" move and a way to establish the bounds of reality and fiction, when discussing character movement, expression, etc. more of you might want to credit actors by name. Likewise you guys often talk about "the camera" but do not cite episode directors, who would be the ones who chose those shots. Not that citing, say, Simon (or Simon & Burns) is necessarily wrong, but you do have alternatives.
5. Some of you are setting up the Article Analysis as a review of the article. I can see why you're trying that, but it's still up to you to provide a purpose or context to why you're writing the essay and why your reader is supposed to be reading it.
6. The Wire or alternately The Wire. Not "The Wire," not The Wire. Apologies for being lazy about this myself sometimes, but "the game" tells us to do this in formal writing just for clarity.
7. Never reference a person by "that." People are "who." Things, places, conditions, etc. are "that." The rule distinguishing "which" and "that" is more complicated, and I think much less important. (Likewise "who" vs. "whom" which is rapidly evolving out of our language.)
8. Be careful with using sequential progression in the episode or article you're analyzing as a transitional device for your own essay. The reason is similar to the reasons for not overquoting or surrendering leverage points to quotes. It's usually much better to use your own claim or concept as the transition at the beginning and/or end of a paragraph.
9. I always find this tricky to explain, but another one of those rules of the game in the humanities is that we favor the present tense when discussing fictions about invented people or intellectual ideas we are actively considering even if they were written by dead people. So it's always "Harvey argues that" and "Herc calls the Baltimore Sun" and so on. Now you may say, but what if I am trying to create a temporal sequence? Like before Harvey there was Darvey and before Herc made the call he became frustrated. For the former, it's still "Darvey argues that" unless the idea is considered 100% laughable and defunct. For the latter, use a present tense variant like "Herc has previously become frustrated." More examples. We say, "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet." But we also say, "Hamlet is having trouble getting his shit together." And we also say, "Shakespeare leads us to consider the relationship between free will and destiny."
10. I see a lot of eagerness to define disagreement with Brooks, Klein, etc (and sometimes Simon/Burns). Which is great, except some of you are actually saying things quite similar to them, or disagreeing with them just partially, but then making it out as if some grand opposition is present. Remember, not every they say I say is a 100% disagreement. Pay close attention to the recent chapters on "yes but" and "no but" moves. What I'm saying is that it matters less whether or how you relate to the they, than it matters that you properly convey what their view is and clearly/honestly indicate your relation to it.
11. If I have more than one friend, I have friends. If my friend owns a cow, it is my friend's cow. The thing that confuses me about this pattern is if it comes from the influence of text messaging, shouldn't all the apostrophes be dropping out? That would make sense and represent something like a linguistic evolution. Yet more commonly I see people putting apostrophes where they don't belong, in plural words. (A less common case: If I have more than one friend and they collectively own a cow, it is my friends' cow.) I've yet to find a compelling theory that explains this; some people say that it's because we're so accustomed to words made from acronyms; others say that when in doubt many of us are so confused by grammar rules that we will always opt to be wrong in the direction of being too fancy rather than wrong in the direction of being too simple, making this a variety of action bias. But I'm just not sure.
12. You guys are doing really well with selecting and incorporating quotations. Hooray!
No comments:
Post a Comment