A Guide to Undergrad English
Introduction: Higher Learning
This Guide to Undergrad English aims to help students do the type of analysis required for courses in both university-level Literature and university-level Academic Writing (as I explain below, the two are quite different). The material I use has been gathered from 30 years teaching English at universities and colleges in the Vancouver area.
After these introductory pages, I explain and illustrate Six Categories you can use to analyze literature. I then provide sample analysis and essays for Hamlet, The Quiet American, & The Year of Living Dangerously. Finally, I look at Academic Writing in 1. Rhetoric and 2. Evaluation (this final section isn’t online yet).
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Literature vs. Academic Writing
At almost all post-secondary schools there’s a big difference between literature courses and academic writing courses. While both encourage critical thinking and structured writing, literature courses emphasize cultural and historical contexts out of which rich, complex writing emerges. Academic writing courses, on the other hand, tend to focus on sociological, pyschological, and political debates about contemporary subjects. Literature courses often attempt to get at the subtleties and ambiguities of good writing, while Academic Writing strives for deep understanding of sources and perspectives.
Often students take undergraduate English courses because they’re required to, yet they aren’t clear about the reasons behind this requirement. I’ll use excerpts from the film Higher Learning to illustrate three of these reasons: 1. to improve critical thinking, 2. to deepen understanding about culture and society, and 3. to improve the ability to write clearly, concisely, and convincingly.
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Higher Learning
While Higher Learning (1995) isn’t an acclaimed film, it provides a dramatic context in which we can see the importance of critical thinking and organized writing.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking requires that you respond more than just subjectively to a text (or film, TV show, documentary, etc.). It requires that you distance yourself from your own views and that you see how a text fits into a larger context of rhetoric, reason, emotion, media, culture, politics, and history.
This can be difficult, partly because in high school you’re often asked to say how you feel about a text, or to paraphrase the meanings of a text. In the post-secondary context, this is necessary yet it’s just the first step. You also need to analyze how, why, and in what context a given piece of communication operates.
In many ways, critical thinking paves the way for original thinking. Once you start to see how any given idea has a larger context, you can expand and refine your own ideas about that context. In other words, you can develop a theory or thesis about it. In Higher Learning Professor Phipps (played by Laurence Fishburne) urges his students to think critically by getting them to come up with a political argument based on their gender, background, and life-experience:
Prof. Phipps: Your assignment for the semester is as follows: to formulate your own political ideology. This will be dictated by your sex, background, socio-economic status, personal experience, etcetera, etcetera. This course will be like anything in life. It will be what you make of it.
Phipps’ assignment is geared to a Political Science course, yet throughout the Humanities and Social Sciences instructors want students to examine their own assumptions and come up with their own ideas. This may seem rather demanding, yet the originality required here isn’t that of a deep study or Master’s thesis, and it doesn’t require years of expertise in a field. Here, originality means an insightful argument backed up by reasons, examples, and, if the assignment requires it, research.
Some students may see exercises in critical thinking and original thought as impractical because these exercises may not have immediate application to their discipline or to what they’re studying at the moment. Yet which discipline doesn’t require — at least at the upper levels of the discipline — re-thinking, new perspectives, and constant re-appraisal? Also, as you receive new information in your studies, this information may challenge what you already believe. Negotiating between old and new perspectives is in itself a form of critical thought.
Another reason educators and policy-makers want you to improve your critical thinking is to create a more aware and sophisticated society. In Higher Learning, critical thinking is explored in both negative and positive ways: the alienated Remy (Michael Rapaport) uncritically accepts Neo-Nazi arguments and agrees to kill African-Americans, whereas the hesitant Kristen (Kristy Swanson) experiments with sexuality and gets involved in student politics. Both cases illustrate Professor Phipps’ point that education should be about more than just learning information, more than just recycling “dates and facts from the past.” It should also be part of a larger process that encourages students (and teachers) to analyze, question, and confront the world. To explore the use of language within diverse contexts is part of this larger process.
Later in Higher Learning, Kristen discusses her essay with Professor Phipps. I’ve put three of his key points in bold — 1. make a clear line of argument, 2. take a stand, and 3. develop an original argument:
Prof. Phipps: I am afraid it is unclear.
Kristen: But... I don't understand.
Prof. Phipps: Miss Connor, you don't appear to take any kind of position in this paper.
Kristen: I thought that, when you write, you're supposed to be as objective as possible.
Prof. Phipps: That is a rule of journalism. It is often taught and very rarely practised. This, however, is a political science course. If you wish to write about objectivity write about its use in modern politics in your view.
Kristen: That'd make a good paper. I'll write that down.
Prof. Phipps: Oh, Christ Jesus.
Kristen: What?
Prof. Phipps: In future, Miss Connor, please find your own thesis. I am looking for evidence of original thought. You are not here to simply recycle dates and facts from the past. One's primary purpose at university level should be to learn how to think.
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Connections Between Rhetoric, Evaluation, & Research
In English courses you need to make original arguments, that is, you need to advance new points of view and then back them up with reasons and examples. Also, your essays will be increasingly original and contextualized, which is why courses often go from rhetoric to evaluation to research. Rhetorical Analysis requires an original analysis of structure and strategy, yet it doesn’t require you to use a large outside context. In rhetorical analysis you ask, How does the author make the point? In evaluative analysis you ask, How convincingly or effectively does the author make the point?
For instance, if you’re doing a rhetorical or structural analysis and the author uses comparison, you’ll ask: For what purpose does the author use the comparison and how, in specific detail, does the author use it to achieve that purpose? In an evaluative analysis, you'll try to distance yourself from the strategy, and ask a wider range of questions: Is the comparison appropriate, that is, does it help to clarify, or does it distort and obscure? Would the writer be better off using a different comparison, or using logic or examples instead?
The main differences between evaluation and research essays are that research essays require a more rigorous use of peer-reviewed sources and a stronger consideration of counter-arguments.
In general, evaluation and research essays are more complex than rhetorical analysis essays, yet one can use a limited amount of evaluation and research in a rhetorical analysis, and one needs to use an understanding of rhetoric in making evaluations and doing research. In the chart below, the thick purple arrows indicate the main focus, the medium-sized pink arrows indicate main influences, and the thin red arrows represent a more limited influence:
The bright green line is worth noting: it indicates that although evaluation often comes before research in an English course, research is often a fundamental aspect of evaluation. The main exception to this is when doing an aesthetic or literary evaluation, that is, one which examines how well the elements of rhetoric (or art) come together. For instance, one doesn’t need to compare Michelangelo to Botticelli in order to explore the beauty of the Sistine Chapel. One doesn’t need to study Nigerian history and myth in order to appreciate the rhetoric of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. In both cases, however, such research can deepen one’s appreciation and evaluation of the art.
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Essay Format
Deja [proofreading Malik’s paper]: Run-on. Run-on. Fragment. Fragment. Fragment. ls this a period or a comma?
Malik: That's a lot of red ink.
Deja: Do you want help?
Malik: I'm here.
Deja: Malik, you gotta get this to flow, and right now it's not flowing. Right here, that's a really good point but you gotta follow it up with a concise explanation […]. When you write an essay, you gotta follow a certain format. You start with your thesis statement and you have to always use transitional phrases. And don't use the same word every single time. Change it up. Professors hate that. You should use a thesaurus. And where's your outline? We got a lot of work to do.
Deja (Tyra Banks) and Malik (Omar Epps) are attending an American university, yet the thesis statement / topic sentence format is the same across English North America. Personally, I’m fond of the thesis / antithesis / synthesis format, yet I don’t teach this format because instructors in the Arts and Humanities across English North America expect students to use the thesis statement / topic sentence format.
The thesis statement / topic sentence structure is extremely logical. The title gives your reader a general idea about the topic, and the introduction takes your reader from a general state of awareness to your particular argument. The thesis statement tells the reader exactly what you’ll be arguing about your subject; it presents your overall argument in 1) a condensed form and 2) in a way that clearly links to your topic sentences. The topic sentences show your reader how each subsidiary point you are making advances your overall argument. The conclusion highlights your overall point, and either completes any scenario you developed in your introduction or suggests further avenues of enquiry.
Mastering the thesis statement / topic sentence format will help you whenever you need to write an essay in the Humanities or Social Sciences. Mastering this format is also an exercise in shaping your writing in a particular way to meet a particular goal. Once you’re able to shape your writing one way, you’re more capable of shaping your writing in another way. This is like learning general math principles: you can use them in physics, yet you can also use them in calculating your taxes or interpreting a graph in Psychology or Criminology.
This format can also be surprisingly practical. For instance, imagine that an interviewer asks you, “Why should we hire you for the journalist position?” You could rattle off several ideas: first, you’re good with words (you maintain a website); second, you need the money (you have a 25,000 dollar student loan to pay back!); and third, you like newspapers (you then tell a story about your involvement with your high school paper). Or, you could think of a response that contains an inherent logic and that emphasizes certain points and leave out others (as in the overall structure of an academic essay). In this case, you could choose a chronological order, which would help the interviewer understand your career development. You could list your main points quickly, so the interviewer could have a clear idea of what you’re going to talk about (as in the introduction and thesis statement). You could then go into detail about these points, stressing why each is applicable to the job in question (as in the topic sentences and the body): first, you were the editor of your high school paper (suggesting ambition and practical editorial skill); second, you took writing courses in college, where you also contributed to the college paper (indicating familiarity with the day-to-day operation of larger, adult-oriented papers); and third, you run a site that receives about 200 hits a day (indicating fluency with online media). You could then quickly summarize your strongest points, underlining how all of this makes you ready to work as a journalist (as in the conclusion). This response mirrors the format of an academic essay: it’s unified (in this case, along chronological lines), it builds a case, and it highlights only the things that are important. This organized, coherent way of thinking and communicating will impress any interviewer, whether the job is in journalism, nursing, police work, or academia.
Deja also says, “that's a really good point but you gotta follow it up with a concise explanation.” It’s crucial that you back up your assertions with reasons and proof.
If you want a good mark, try to remember Deja’s words:
… you gotta follow a certain format. You start with your thesis statement and you have to always use transitional phrases. […] And where’s your outline?
[…] you gotta get this to flow.
In the film Deja sees that Malik hasn’t done an outline and then gives him a disgusted look — which is worth a hundred words! Initially, you may think of an outline as superfluous, yet it shows the core of your argument and then juxtaposes this core in an easy-to-see way with the arguments you use to advance it. In this sense an outline can greatly increase both coherence and flow. For a more detailed explanation and samples, see Outlines.
The one thing Deja says that I disagree with concerns the use of a thesaurus. In creative writing, repetition of a word may serve a creative effect, yet generally it creates monotony. In academic papers, however, repetition is generally a good thing, since it enhances clarity and continuity. If you mean the same thing, use the same word or phrase. Otherwise, your reader will wonder why you switched words. Writers who aren’t advanced will often use a word that appears to have the same meaning but in fact has a slightly different meaning. Being well-read, instructors are acutely aware of these subtle differences. For instance in Apple’s thesaurus kinship is listed under analogy. Yet kinship has a more intimate or personal connotation, since the word is usually associated with family. If you wrote, The writer draws a kinship between steel and iron, the sentence would be awkward both idiomatically (something has a kinship; someone doesn’t draw a kinship) and in terms of sense (it’s odd to think of metals in terms of family ties).
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