argumentation

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Literature but Were Afraid to Ask the Saturday Evening Post: or, How Literature is Like Math

by Mayumi Takada, English
I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote…In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.

An Epic in Miniature: Collaborations on a Thesis

by Lael Gold, Comparative Literature
Despite in-class instruction and a detailed handout on the subject of thesis and essay construction, the first batch of essays from students in my comparative literature course on literary depictions of woman warriors shared some fundamental shortcomings…I aimed at remedying [their] writing problems in a manner that would simultaneously deepen our engagement with the work presently under consideration, the fantastical Renaissance crusader epic Jerusalem Delivered.

From Description to Analysis

by Andrea Zemgulys, English
The skill of analytic writing is not only difficult for students to learn, but difficult for the teacher to communicate without suggesting that students douse their work with high-faluting or apparently argumentative words (such as “hence”). My aim is to show students how the thoughtful use of simple language can transform descriptive sentences to analytic ones.