Some words on thesis statements, response papers, and citations

I was recently asked to define and explain a few basic elements of paper writing, and I liked what I had to say. I thought it might be productive if I put it up here. Expect some further tips and tricks in the future:

On thesis statements:
These are like the initial punch of a one-two combo: you need the thesis statement to open up things decisively to get to what you really want to get at, and the better you are at writing one, the better the eventual thing you want to write about will be. Their nature, of course, depends on what you're writing about, but they do several things generally. There are a trillion formulas for this, and everyone says they know the real way to do it. The point is to do what works for you and what will give you the result people can understand clearly. For me, the best definition of a thesis statement is just that it is the argument seen as the answer to a question, one that is brief and provocative. The thesis asks, What is the question I'm asking in what I want to say, and what is the answer I give? If you can show how what you want to say is opening up a problem, something openended, but also definite and precise and provocative, and then give some sense that there is an answer to this question, suddenly what you are going to write becomes clearer in like fifty different ways. You give some sense of the scope of your argument, the stakes, and its possible resonance. And you get right to the center of what you're trying to say and why you're saying it.

On (literary) response papers: 
Like mindfulness for reading, response papers do two things: they organize your reactions to a text and showing how they can inform the text for other people, and they connect your own reactions to the larger issues surrounding the text itself. You gather yourself together, and you link yourself to the general discussion. You do this by bringing the work itself into connection with your thinking, taking a passage that was a particularly poignant node in the text for you and actually looking at its linguistic makeup. You employ, during this, a certain simple attentiveness to language, and an attentiveness to your own feelings, and an articulateness about both. This can be extremely fun, and is also extremely useful: your response paper can usually serve as the raw material for an essay that you can write up later in the semester.

On citations:
Citations are often a pain, but they are also important. This isn't just because they "show evidence that you didn't plagiarize." It's because it puts your work into dialogue with other work. Becoming good at citing and knowing how to cite adds a whole different dimension to your paper: suddenly you're not all out on your own, just saying what comes into your head, but you're actually joining a conversation, showing how what you have in mind actually is the product of reading a lot and trying to figure out what the consensus is on an issue, and whether that consensus is good or whether the discussion needs to be changed. So it's not just that you need to show you got information from a source. It shows you got SPECIFIC information from a SPECIFIC source, and that your conclusions build on what is being said THERE, or challenge what is being said THERE. Learning how to cite well is learning how to discuss and argue well--and if you know this, it makes the fundamentals (all that formatting) really interesting and crucial. Good citations are really appreciated by your readers--you appreciate them, don't you? when you read a book?--and change the nature of your argument depending on how you do them. So doing them right is a worthwhile task.

Peirce and pragmatism

I'm going to try and write a few posts on William James in the next few weeks, since I've been reading him.  I've been a bit busy so there's not been much going on here, sorry about that. But, like I say, that'll change.  In the meantime, I'm thinking through Charles Peirce's classic "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," and will have a few things to say about it, maybe also a little bit about Timothy Williamson too.  For now, here's a link to a good online version.

Recent reviews

Not much up here lately, but a lot in the background going on.  I give some links to recent reviews at my main site, mike-duffy.com, and I'll reproduce them here:

A review of Professor Borges for the Los Angeles Review of Books,

A review of J.M. Coetzee's strange new novel The Childhood of Jesus, for The Millions,

and a review of Jay Neugeboren's novel for Moment Magazine.

I also have a take on Julian Barnes' new work Levels of Life (or, rather, a take on the takes), at my site.

There are more reviews in the works -- a short little solid one on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" being the next.  You can keep up to date with my work by checking out my twitter feed or page.

Here, I plan on getting into some Wittgenstein, perhaps, as I'm making my way through the Logical Investigations lately (more like, finally -- I should have gotten around to it long ago), among other things (perhaps Sense and Sensibilia by J.L. Austin, too).

As usual, nothing too new probably to say on this front--certainly nothing as new as other blogs will have to say.  But I console myself by reflecting that philosophy is only new anyway when you dip back into it, ask the old questions and try to bring some life into them.  That is, when you do something, when you get going and put it into action.  If the results are obvious, the process of going about attaining them will--if you've done it right--not have been.  And, if you're lucky, never have been.