[FAS] Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 49: The Medieval Imagination

• Seven general tips for writing strong papers
• Tips on writing comparative papers
• Tips for editing papers

Sidenotes:

• Using quotations 
• The MLA Citation Style
• Sample paper
  

Quotations are absolutely essential to any convincing analysis of literary texts. It is necessary to provide evidence for claims made in a paper, and the use of quotations is the best way of doing this.

Quotations may be embedded within a sentence of your own prose, included in the body of your writing after a colon or set off as a block quotation. The decision to represent a quotation as a block quotation normally occurs with longer portions of quoted text, usually over five lines long (prose or verse).

Quoted text must always be analyzed in the paper. Simply quoting the text is not sufficient to prove a complex argument, especially if the quotation is a long, block quotation. 

The texts we are reading in this course are often ambiguous and require interpretation. Your work is to read closely and learn how to perform this kind of interpretation in the service of a larger argument.

Avoid summarizing quotations. Showing how the text communicates something other than its most obvious, immediate meaning is always a sign of a good literary analysis. 

Antonio da Fabriano II, St. Jerome in his study (1451), Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, Maryland).  Image available in ARTStor

For papers in the humanities, the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, now in its 7th edition, is the standard citation and style guide.

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides an excellent, authoritative introduction to the essentials of MLA style and is available here.

The Harvard Guide to Using Sources, helpful in general on all aspects of college-level writing, provides good information on (and illustrations of) MLA citations, too.

1.  Include a clear, concise, and arguable thesis statement in the first paragraph or on the first page of your paper; don’t make the reader wait too long to understand the stakes and significance of your paper.

2. Strong arguments must be supported by textual evidence. Quote the text and explain how your quotations constitute textual evidence in support of your argument.  Cite the text so your reader can easily refer back to it.  See the sidenote on quoting in this section for more information. 

3. Be sure to define the key terms of your argument.

4. Think about potential counter-arguments, acknowledge them in your paper, and refute them or incorporate them into your argument

5. Organize your argument into discrete units, and put one unit into each paragraph. Signpost these units with clear topic sentences.

6. Construct clear and thoughtful transitions between paragraphs.

7. Discuss (usually in the first and/or last paragraph) the implications of your argument. Why is it important? How does it enrich our understanding of the text(s) in light of the tradition and major questions our course is exploring?

Your first paper for the course will be a short comparative paper of approximately 5 pages. Writing a comparative paper is similar in many ways to writing a paper on a single text. The rules about close reading, textual evidence and interpretation of this evidence hold true. However, in a comparative paper, there are a few other factors to keep in mind:

• Integrate analyses of the two texts at hand. Do not simply write all about one text for three pages and then finish with two pages on the other text. Make sure that the basis for comparison of these texts is clear from the outset of the paper and discuss the two texts thoroughly side by side, referencing both of them as often as possible and keeping the discussion always relevant to both texts.

• Take into account dissimilarities as well as similarities. A comparative paper is not simply a reading of how two texts are alike. It is also a reading of how two texts might be in conflict, or seem to be in conflict but actually are not. A good comparative paper sheds new light on the relationship between texts. 

For example, you might show how Plato’s view of imagination in “Myth of Er” and Aristotle’s view in On the Soul are not as diametrically opposed as they may seem at first. Or you might write about the ways in which Pecock subtly disagrees with Aristotle about the function of the imagination.

• Be careful about making comparative claims about texts that are historically impossible. In this course, we are covering materials from the fourth century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Occasionally, you may lose track of who is writing before or after whom. 

When you write a comparative paper, make sure you know when the authors wrote in relation to each other to avoid making claims that are ahistorical. Even if you have established that one writer wrote after the other, be sure to check whether it is known that the later writer read the earlier writer’s work before claiming direct influence.

How do you do so? Some resources that can verify claims and confirm historical accuracy are identified in the sections on contextualizing tools and interdisciplinary and extratextual sources.

Remember: it is possible and encouraged to form comparative arguments without claiming direct influence of one author on the other, but if you do decide to mention direct influence, make sure you have historical evidence for the claim.

1. Take some time away from your paper directly after writing it and before proofreading it. Anywhere from several hours to several days (if you have time!) is highly recommended so that you can return to your writing with a fresh and critical eye.

2. Ask someone to proofread your paper. It is often difficult to catch grammatical and other errors on your own. 

3. Read your paper out loud. Sometimes hearing the paper read helps you notice writing that needs to be reworked more effectively than reading silently does.

4. Try to vary sentence structure.  In the case of long sentences, make sure that their meanings are clear. 

5. Use the verb “to be” thoughtfully and the passive voice sparingly, unless you have a good reason for doing so.  For example, “Avicenna’s theory of divine inspiration depends on direct contact between the imagination and the divine world” is preferable to “Avicenna’s theory of divine inspiration is dependent on direct contact between the imagination and the divine world.”