Writing for English

Writing in this discipline is as a form of thinking and discovery, a means by which you can understand yourself as a thinker. The purpose of writing for English is to interpret a text, and interpretation depends on your own individual clear and close thinking.

• Good Writing in English

  Writing in English is different from most other forms of writing in college. We are not trying to prove our points, but rather to present one reading of a text while remaining conscious that many other readings exist. Changing the reader’s mind is not the goal, but instead explaining your interpretation in a way that allows the reader to understand, and perhaps appreciate, it. Ask yourself, when writing, what might change for the reader, about this text, once they see it in the way you're asking them to?

  Therefore, good writing in this discipline pays clear attention to the language of the text you’re interpreting and to the linguistic choices the author made. When quoting, pay close attention to the nitty gritty components of your quotes, rather than simply quoting a few sentences and then saying, “As this quote shows…”. There are two reasons for this:

  • Don’t assume the meaning of a quote you’ve chosen is obvious to your reader. If it’s worth quoting, its interpretation is likely debatable, and your job is to show your reader how you interpret it and to make convincing arguments to support that interpretation.
  • Such treatment of a quote ignores the different components inside the quote. You should pull the quote apart, explaining why you believe the author uses this metaphor, or that turn of phrase.

  Tip: Freewrite about moments in the text that get under your skin, especially when you don’t know why. If it means something to you, it often means something. Freewriting for 10 minutes about the passage will help you figure out why it means something to you, and this will help you persuade other people of your interpretation.

• Structure of an English Paper

  Ironically, although your high school English class is likely where you learned to write a 5-paragraph essay, the English department is one of the departments for which you will rarely write such an essay.

  Think of the 5-paragraph essay as training wheels on a bike. It is developmentally useful because when you learned it, it gave you a framework in which to think and develop arguments. Now is the time to remove the training wheels and understand that a framework like this will limit your freedom of thought. Think of writing an English essay as a way to enter a conversation with other people who care about this text—people who may not see eye to eye with you, but from whom you can learn and exchange ideas.

  Instead of thinking in terms of overall structure for the whole essay, write sentence by sentence. Each sentence leads you to discovery, and to the next sentence. If you’re writing to discover what you think, you can’t map out the paper in advance.

  Tip: You should not be able to rearrange your paragraphs and have your essay still make sense.

   

  There are several possible structures to a final draft of an English essay. One might lay out the thesis in the first paragraph, or at the end of a several-paragraph introduction. Another form is to start with a question that’s nagging at you, and to—after some exploration of that question—arrive at a realization about it; the realization becomes your thesis, and the interpretation you hope to persuade your reader to consider. Alternatively, maybe you want your reader to be surprised by your thesis, as you were when you wrote it. In this case, the thesis can come at the end—if it answers the question you established in the introduction.

  Tip: Write for yourself, so you might surprise yourself as you write. Writing is a form of self expression and self realization; as long as you’re interested in what you’re writing, your essay will be interesting to read.

• Can I Use I?

  This type of writing almost requires use of the first-person pronoun. That said, not everything you learned in high school was wrong: if you’re writing in your own voice, you don’t need to write “I think” or “I believe,” because it’s clear this is what you think. You should, however, use the I when it feels right and necessary.

  If, on the other hand, writing in the first person is uncomfortable for you, there's always "As one can see...." or "We begin to understand how ..." Lean in to the voice in which you feel most comfortable and confident writing.

• Citation style
  MLA