Spring Semester 2006
Dr. Timothy James Scarlett
Assistant Professor of Archaeology
Department of Social Sciences
Office Location: 213 Academic Offices
Office Phone: 906.487.2359
Email: scarlett@mtu.edu
Office Hour:
10:00-11:00 Wednesdays
and by appointment on
campus or downtown
at the Motherlode over good cups of joe.
General Advice on Essays
1. You should always present professional-quality work. Unless
the assignment is to write in class, your work should always be
typed and thoroughly proofread. Professional work is clean
and sharp and shows that you respect yourself, your professor/TAs,
and the institution of MTU.
2. You should generally follow these
formatting guidelines:
-double space the lines
-one inch margins on
all sides, left justify the text to the margin.
-use a plain, standard
12-point font (Times or Ariel for example)
-on a one page essay,
always list your proper name and the date in a header on the upper
right hand corner.
-when the essay is multiple
pages, use a cover page with the paper title, your name, your
professor's name, and date of essay.
-use one staple in the upper left hand
corner. No plastic folder covers please.
3. Your essay, unless otherwise instructed, should follow the
basic three-section pattern: Introduction, Body, Conclusion
The Introduction should identify the film or event and provide
a road map to your reader, explaining what the sections
of your paper will cover. You should conclude this paragraph
with a thesis statement that explicitly states the point of your
paper. Be sure that your thesis statement connects to the
assignment's purpose!
The Body will usually include one major point per paragraph. You
should generally begin your paragraph with a topic sentence that
explains the point, then provide support for that point in the
next few sentences. Note that stating and explaining your
opinion is not necessarily the same as analyzing and supporting
an assertion with evidence. See more on this below. You
should generally provide at least two quotes, scenes, examples,
or whatever evidence to support each point you make.
The Conclusion will also be one paragraph, similar to the introduction. This
paragraph will summarize your main points and tie them together
with your thesis statement. You should not include new information
in your concluding paragraph under normal circumstances.
4. Generally you should use the
past-tense and active voice. You should also avoid the 1st
person in nearly all assignments. If the assignment requires
you to adopt another writing style, the instruction will likely
state this explicitly. I've listed tools below to help you
with these issues of grammar and style.
Evaluation Categories in the General Grading
Rubric
When you get back your paper, you will find attached a copy of
the evaluation rubric. You can also download a blank one here. Professors
and Teaching Assistants face challenges when trying to grade essays
consistently and with precision. Unlike a lab report or
a math problem where the answer is either correct or incorrect,
essays present much more complex material that must be ranked
and scored. A rubric is an explicitly designed evaluation
tool which greatly reduces the variation in each evaluator's assessment.
The rubric I have developed for my world cultures course asks
that you work toward writing for a social scientist. I've
defined rather specifically the style I'm asking you to learn
and use. The third person, active-voice, past tense style
will suit you well in your professional life, whether you are
an engineer writing proposals, a forester developing management
plans, or an anthropologist writing journal articles. There
are many other formats and styles out there- including lab reports
and the natural science styles.
Each student can study their weekly writing scores and work to
improve their writing. Below you will find each category
on the rubric with an itemized list of the elements of style and
mechanics contained therein. Under each explanation are
links to self-help material. You can also seek help at MTU's Writing
Center with a drop-in meeting with a Coach!
Mechanics
Mechanics refers to one's attention toward
the mechanical details of writing. Just as one can find
a mechanical machine design or software coding solution to be
more elegant than another, so one's attention to the craft of
writing can make your essays more crisp and professional. The
key elements of mechanics are spelling, grammar, and formatting.
Everyone in the class has access to computers and word processing
software in campus computer labs. All major word processing
software includes a spell checking function. In
the modern world, there is no excuse for accidental spelling errors. Such
errors indicate to a reader one of two things. Either the
author lacks the self respect to produce a professional product
that speaks well of them or the writer does not respect for the
reader enough to make such a minimal proofreading effort.
Details of formatting appear above and may be detailed more clearly
in each specific assignment.
Grammar can become your most powerful writing tool. Those
supervisors who oversee MTU's co-op students and interns often
report that writing skills are their biggest handicap. I
want you to learn this Social Science style because this specific
style will make you more professionally competitive. We find it
crisp, concise, objective, and efficient. I don't want my
students to think that I think this style is more important or
better than other English speaker's grammar and style. Many
other valuable writing styles exist and each can be a very effective
tool for expression and communication! As you hone your
writing skills at MTU, you should work to recognize when different
styles are most powerful.
The staff at Purdue University have compiled a number of helpful
advice pages for writing. You can find others on the web,
but I've linked to Purdue's On-line Writing Lab (OWL) throughout
this page:
Also note that "spelt chucker does ent clutch bong birds!" You
just can't replace a human proofreader!
For this class you should generally write
with short sentences. Each sentence should usually follow
a subject-verb-object structure. Good writers will vary
this from time-to-time, but strive to have short, concise, precise,
and clean sentences. Every word in the sentence should serve
a purpose so compelling that you could not remove it without dramatically
changing the meaning of the sentence.
This directory includes lots of advice and resources, including
fragments, hanging phrases and clauses, subject-verb agreement,
and sentence clarity.
You should generally write in the past
tense for this class. You've already watched the
film, the director made it, the author wrote it,
the events occurred, you analyzed it, and by the
time I read your paper, you wrote your ideas.
Supported Assertions
Not all opinions are created equally. Don't
misunderstand what I mean when I say this. Everyone is welcome
to have any opinion at any time and our freedom of expression
mostly guarantees your ability to publicly express your opinion
on almost any issue. When I give you a writing assignment,
I will require you to analyze something: a film, an idea, or a
song, for example. Your analysis is not the same as your
opinion. Consider what this means.
Say I ask you to write on this question:
"What is your
opinion about the morality of Puja's lie to her parents in The
Fast Runner?"
Here I've asked for your opinion and you
are welcome to answer however you'd like. I will almost
never ask you this type of question.
I will generally ask you this type
of question:
"What does
the film's director indicate about the Inuit perspectives on
lying and truth telling?"
You will read this and have an opinion
of an answer, something like "The director believes that
the Inuit don't like lying." That answer is just
your opinion and now you will need to find evidence that you can
indicate supporting what you believe the director says about Inuit
cultural practice in this particular film.
Do you see how these are different?
More help is here at
the Arkansas State University English Department's On-Line Composition
Manual:
Ideas
This is among the most difficult areas for a self-help guide
to engage. Creative and critical examination of an assignment
is difficult. My grade sheet includes a category called "WOW" that
permits me to reward particularly insightful thoughts with a +5%
on the final score. You might note that good grammar, organization,
and style are not required to earn some Wow bonus points, but
if your insight is obscured by dense and turgid writing, I may
not see your otherwise sharp insights.
Sometimes students struggle because they have something very
complex to say and they can't quite get those difficult ideas
onto paper. One good way to overcome this is to simply start
writing your ideas down. Ask someone to read them and then
ask them what they thought you meant. After you discuss
what you really meant in your writing, you will be able to go
back and revise your original text to more closely reflect the
difficult ideas you wanted to commit to paper.
Everyone gets writer's block at one time or another. I
get over it by smacking a small round ball of some type at another
person on a court while I consider what I really want to say. Other
times I will try talking to my friends about what I'd like to
say. When I'm totally stuck, I'll clean my kitchen very,
very, very thoroughly. Each of these things distracts
my conscious brain in some way so that I can shake loose whatever
clogged my writing. Here are some other strategies:
Purdue's Owl: Writer's
Block
From Michael Harvey's Nuts-and-Bolts
of College Writing:
Ideas
Organization
Organization is half the battle to solid
writing. Rather than starting your paper by simply trying
to type the finished version, start by creating an outline of
your argument. Begin by deciding your thesis statement--
what will you paper specifically say in reaction to your assignment?
Help with Thesis
Statements from Purdue's' Owl.
Once you've got a thesis statement, you should be able to develop
an outline of your paper's body. Think about it-- "What
do I need to say to support the assertion I make in my thesis?" Then
outline the essay's paragraphs that move from point to point in
support of that thesis.
Each paragraph in the body should begin with a thesis statement
that logically connects that paragraph to the one before. You
should cite a few specific examples in support of your point. Note
the big difference between a statement that supports an assertion
with an opinion ("Humans just don't like people to be cruel
because we believe mercy is a positive trait") and a statement
in a paragraph that offers examples germane to the essay ("This
film's director criticized the random violence of the conflict
in several scenes. The most powerful example included...").
More suggestions on organizing from Michael Harvey's The
Nuts-and-Bolts Guide to College Writing:
Introductions (including thesis
statements)
Body (Paragraph
structure, topic
sentences)
Conclusions (including
strong and weak conclusions)
Writing Style
I asked you to focus on developing your skills at a particular
writing style, that most appropriate to the social sciences. You
should try to develop your ability to write in a clear and crisp
manner, using energetic sentences and emphatic word selections. You
will be using a formal style of writing, so avoid contractions
and slang. "Don't slam out the stuff for your prof."
Active vs. Passive Voice
To write in formal but energetic
manner, strive to avoid the passive voice. Passive voice
sentences obscure the actor undertaking the action in the sentence. "An
improvised explosive device was detonated in Houghton, Michigan,
today." Who detonated the device? Did the
bomb build and explode itself? Of course not. The
passive voice allows a speaker or writer to explain that something
happened without saying explicitly who did what. Politicians
use the passive voice often: "A tax was levied" or "The
decision was made to raise tuition." Levied by
whom? Raised by whom? See how the passive voice works? You
can generally spot the passive voice because of an overuse of
conjugations of the verb "To Be": is, was, were, will
be, are,...
Here are some web sites that help explain
the passive voice:
My favorite is Purdue's'
Owl page here.
You'll find more advice from Nuts-and-Bolts here,
including a great figure explaining verbs and the passive/active
voices.
Don't worry about the passive voice
while writing your first draft. I can't write a draft without
using the passive voice extensively! Once you've written
the draft, you can take a red pen and go through your work underlining
all the To Be verbs. Then rewrite each sentence to use an
action verb clearly identifying who does something and what they
actually did:
"Ideas were
good and progress was made by the group."
Becomes:
"The design team generated good
ideas and made progress in both their design and business plan."
First Person, Second Person, and Third
Person
You should avoid the first and second person in my class and
in most academic or scientific writing. This means avoiding
I, Me, My, You, Your, Our, We, and any other term which indicates
yourself or your reader. "But wait!" you may cry, "You've
used I, Me, You, and Your on this web page!" That is
true, but this web page is not a formal piece of academic writing. I've
intentionally chosen to write informally because I hope it makes
this material less stuffy for my students to read. You'll
notice that I've used contractions, another trait you should avoid
in academic writing.
You write in the first person voice
when you say something like:
"I believe
that the three aboriginal girls escaped their boarding school
using their extensive knowledge of the environment."
Think about the Actor
in that sentence. You, the author, provide the action because
You Believe. The paper, however, is not about you. It
sounds like this paper should be about the three girls, so why
isn't your sentence about them? Rewrite that sentence in
the third person:
"The three aboriginal girls escaped
their boarding school using their extensive knowledge of the
environment."
You might be tempted to protest-- But that sentence was my opinion! Now
in the third person it seems to be self-evident fact!
Exactly!
This is how many writers create their authority when they argue
their opinion. Your opinion will be evaluated based upon
the evidence you marshall to support your third-person assumption
(which in this case would make an excellent topic sentence for
a paragraph full of examples!)
Nuts-and-Bolts suggestions are here.
Wow Factor!
The Wow factor category grants each reader the flexibility to
reward truly creative, insightful, or brave analysis. It
is impossible, philosophically speaking, to write a perfect essay. Therefore
the best possible score is 95% or 19 out of 20. The grader
keeps the last five percent for when he or she reads a paper that
makes them sit back, gulp some coffee, and say "Whoa!
I never expected someone to say that." Or perhaps, "Wow,
nobody else in the class had that insight." Maybe
even, "Huh. I don't agree with that, but it was
a difficult point to argue. I'll award three percentage
points for guts."
One may earn a poor grade due to bad mechanics or style, but
still earn a Wow. Bad editing will tend to obscure your
brilliance, however, as tarnish dulls a silver platter.
Putting it all Together
Don't try to fix all your writing at once. Work
through drafts. Every masterwork of writing comes from authors
who used drafts-- from Martin Luther King to Outkast, Amy Tan
to Stephen King.
Outline your thoughts and write your
paper. Then worry about the active
voice, first person, strong thesis statement, good topic sentences,
precise and abundant support, and a tidy conclusion. Take
your draft through one rewrite at a time and ask a friend or writing
center coach to help you with particular rounds of editing. Writing
is hard work, but everyone can improve their ability. You
will amaze yourself. I promise.
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