Most of you will be crafting a close reading or research paper for your final projects. As I have said before, if you are looking for general guidance about what I tend to look for in such a paper, remember the Four Habits of Argumentative Writing which we discussed in a lecture early on in the class: 1. Have a strong clear thesis (a strong thesis is defined as one for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition), 2. Define key or idiosyncratic terms and use those terms in a way that remains consistent with your definition, 3. Support your claim with evidence (from the text itself if you are producing a close reading, and remember, a page without a quote has often lost its way, but a quote too long confuses your point, so always quote just what you need and never more), and 4. Anticipate and attempt to circumvent key objections to your claim. A handout on the Four Habits is available on our blog in case you want a more detailed discussion. There is a link to a version of that handout on the sidebar in the Course Resources section.
The following workshop was designed to help you turn general observations and impressions about a text or a topic into the beginnings of a paper that exhibits all the Four Habits of Argumentative Writing. Doing the full workshop in a classroom setting as I usually do it, takes about two hours, and I recommend you set aside a couple hours to go through these exercises on your own as well. The Thanksgiving break provides a great opportunity to go through these exercises on your own. I am including elaborate instructions for each of the many steps, and I hope you will continue to use these exercises in the future to help you with writing in other courses or in other contexts in which you seek to offer complex arguments for sophisticated audiences.
Exercise 1. BRAINSTORM (20 Minutes)
The first exercise of the Workshop is a straightforward brainstorming exercise. In it, I ask you to set an alarm to give you between 15 and 20 minutes. In that time, you should write down between 20 and 30 claims about your chosen text, topic, or question. Don't worry whether the claims are "deep," but it IS important that you only write down claims that you think are both TRUE and INTERESTING about your text. Do not lose patience with the exercise. Continue through to the end of the time. You should never stop writing during the brainstorming process. Don’t let yourself drift, keep writing or tapping at the keyboard. Don’t censor yourself, you may be surprised by the connections and observations you find yourself making. Try out various forms of the same claim, some stronger than others. Try on different ideas for size. Experiment a little, don’t be afraid to contradict yourself at this stage. If you start feeling bored, it is because you are being boring. You could spend a year making observations about a box in your cupboard, you can surely fill a page with truthful observations about a complex text that interests you! There are no mistakes. Let yourself tell yourself what you didn’t notice yourself noticing before.
Exercise 2. EDIT (20 minutes)
You have 25 or so claims before you. Look them over. Do you actually believe all of them to be true? Some more than others (if yes, what does that tell you)? Are some more important than others (if yes, what does that tell you)? If some of the claims say similar or related things, place them together and think about the strongest versions of the claim. Some of the true observations you make may seem like candidates for a thesis you could argue for in the paper, other claims could become a thesis if they were sharpened a bit. Other claims may be more like data or evidence you could draw on to support a larger thesis. Think about this for a while. Often, you will want to edit your brainstorm, add a few claims that hadn’t occurred to you at first, change a few claims, either making them stronger or more qualified or even changing your mind and altering a claim more substantially. After you have done all this, PICK THE THREE BEST THESIS CANDIDATE CLAIMS from your brainstorm and edit and then write them down in their best, clearest form, 1, 2, and 3.
Exercise 3. ANTICIPATING OBJECTIONS (10 minutes)
Now, for each of the three thesis candidate statements you have chosen and polished up in the last exercise, I want you to come up with the strongest or most obvious objection to each thesis claim. Of course, it is easy in a way to come up with a forceful objection to ANY claim: simply deny the claim by claiming exactly the opposite. This should always be an available option – but of course, sometimes claiming the opposite of your claim will simply lead to a nonsensical utterance. Remember, if you can’t imagine an intelligent or even sane objection to your claim, then it probably is a claim too obvious to require a close reading in a long paper in the first place! Often, though, the best objection to your claim won’t be an outright denial of its truth, but an objection that the truth is more complicated that your claim or maybe that there are far more interesting things to say about the text that your claim distracts us from.
Exercise 4. PONDERING OBJECTIONS (20 minutes)
Take a look at your three strongest thesis candidate statements and at the objections you have proposed to each. Which of the three excites you the most? Are there exciting elements of the text that are overlooked if you focus on supporting your chosen theses and objections? Can you think of a different thesis that would take you closer to the issues that excite you? Does this new thesis generate a strong objection? (Sometimes, students actually come to realize they are more excited by the implications of an objection to a thesis than to the thesis itself – if that happens to you, rejoice! Just change your objection into a new thesis candidate and craft a new objection to it. It often happens that doing a workshop exercise will change your mind about the text you are exploring – that’s not a mistake, that’s a good thing, a discovery!) It is important at this stage that you be absolutely honest with yourself. This is where it is best to do this workshop in a group setting! Be very vigilant about your favorite thesis claims and their best objections – be sure you are honest about whether a real person, a person you consider to be intelligent and sensitive, would propose the objection you have crafted to your thesis. If only a mad-man or complete ignoramus would make the objection you have proposed, this almost always means that your claim is too general or too obvious in its present form to be sufficiently strong to hold a long argumentative paper together. That tells you to make your claim more specific or to dig a bit deeper into your impressions.
Exercise 5: CHOOSE! (10 minutes)
Pick the strongest thesis and its best opposition and write them down.
Exercise 6: OUTLINE (25 minutes)
Identify three key moments in the
text that seem to you to support your claim or to provide a context for talking
about the salience of your chosen thesis claim. And then identify a key moment
in the text that would enable you to circumvent the objection you have chosen
for that claim. Ideally, you can come up with many examples of each and you
will have to think deeply about the reasons to pick just three or so really
powerful moments of textual support and one really interesting circumvention of
a key objection. Notice that the results of Exercises 5 & 6 provide you
with a first rudimentary outline for your paper, like so:
Chosen Thesis:
1. (textual/data support)
2. (textual/data support)
3. (textual/data support)
Opposition:
(textual/argumentative circumvention)
Exercise 7: DEFINITIONS (5 minutes)
Are there words that keep coming up over and over again during the workshop? Some of these may be commonplace words with widely accepted meanings already, but you may have found yourself using the terms in a more specific technical or idiosyncratic sense of your own. Especially if these are terms on which your reading ultimately turns, it may be necessary for you to define your usage of the terms explicitly to avoid confusion for your readers. Of course, one can’t define EVERY term without making a text unreadable, so this is an exercise about determining the few key terms you actually depend on and ensuring you are as clear as possible about what they convey.
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What follows is a copy of the actual physical form of the worksheets I use during the in-class version of the Workshop. By all means, make copies and use it in future coursework or future argumentative writing!
Final Paper Workshop Worksheet
Final Paper: Close Reading and Research Paper Workshop Worksheet
Your Name: _______________________________________________________________
The Assigned Text (or object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument:
__________________________________________________________________________
BRAINSTORM! Take 15 mins. or so to write down 20-30 claims about your chosen text, topic, or question. Don't worry whether the claims are "deep," just write down claims you think are TRUE and INTERESTING. Be as clear and specific as you can.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
Continue on the back of the page if you like. The more claims you have to work with, the better.
End of page one. * * * *
Final Paper/Close Argumentative Reading Workshop Worksheet (PART TWO: In Class)
Your Name: _______________________________________________________________________________
The Text (and/or Object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument: ___________________________
I. In groups of three: Discuss your BRAINSTORM and then PICK THE THREE BEST THESIS CANDIDATE CLAIMS and write them down in their best, clearest form here (Twenty-Four Minutes):
1.
2.
3.
II. Now on your own, for each of
your three thesis candidate claims COME UP WITH THE STRONGEST OR MOST OBVIOUS
OPPOSITION TO EACH THESIS (Ten Minutes):
1.
2.
3.
III. In NEW groups of three: Discuss your thesis candidates and their
OPPOSITIONS and write down the results, reconsiderations, and re-edits here
(Twenty-Four Minutes):
1.
2.
3.
IV. On your own, pick the strongest thesis and its best opposition and write them down in the template below (Five Minutes):
V. In NEW groups of three discuss your text/topic, thesis, opposition, and quotes/data that may support the thesis or provide a means to circumvent its objection. Also, determine whether any key terms need definitions (Thirty Minutes):
Thesis:
1. (textual/data support)
2. (textual/data support)
3. (textual/data support)
Opposition:
(textual/argumentative
circumvention)
