Writing Center

Rebecca Kahn ’18 is a senior from Cincinnati, OH. She is a Sociology concentrator pursuing certificates in Portuguese, Creative Writing, and Entrepreneurship. Her interests include identity formation, behavioral economics, and social innovation design. Her senior thesis concerns the formation and maintenance of political beliefs of Midwesterners in the Trump Era. At Princeton, Rebecca has spent her free time volunteering with the Pace Center, working at the Center for Jewish Life, and traveling as much as possible. She is part of the Behrman Undergraduate Society.

Ryan Vinh ’19 is a junior in the Philosophy Department. He has been a Writing Fellow for the past two years and thinks writing pedagogy is pretty swell.

Student Reflections on Service: Cultural and Socioeconomic Variations in Motivations for and Valuation of Volunteering

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In her junior paper, Rebecca Kahn explores the influence of socioeconomic status and cultural context on undergraduate students’ conception of service work. One of the primary strengths of this paper is its literature review: by summarizing and pinpointing shortcomings in the research around her topic, Rebecca ultimately solidifies the importance of her contribution to the greater body of scholarship concerning service work.

Continue reading →

Orienting, Spring 2018

Modeling the Model Minority: Does the Immigrant Health Paradox Apply to Asian Migrants’ Mental Health?

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In her paper about the immigrant health paradox, the notion that foreign born, recent arrivals of a given ethnic group typically have better health than their American born counterparts, Diana Chao positions the reader to appreciate the nuances of her argument, that the immigrant health paradox does not apply to Asian migrants, by effectively orienting the reader. After first providing the reader with concise definitions for key terms which are necessary to understand her thesis, Diana proceeds to give a comprehensive outline of the scholarly conversation surrounding her topic, which feeds directly into her motive.

Continue reading →

Motive, Spring 2018

A Dangerous Affair: Lady Susan’s Seductive Power in Love & Friendship

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In this junior paper on Love & Friendship, a film adaptation of Lady Susan by Jane Austen, Megan Laubach’s motive is multi-faceted. Her introduction begins with in-text motive as Megan notices that Love & Friendship, despite being narrative in form, feels like an authentic adaptation of a novella written as a collection of letters. Then, Megan situates her in-text motive in a larger scholarly debate within film criticism about narration, leapfrogging from scholar to scholar in order to both disagree with them and insert her own voice into the conversation: this is scholarly motive. Taken together, Megan’s introduction is an excellent example of how to motivate a larger research paper topic on the orders of both primary and secondary sources.

Continue reading →

Methods, Spring 2018

Light and Fire in August: Violence, Body, and the Dichotomy between Spiritual and Savage

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In this paper on Light in August by William Faulkner, Nina Wang argues for a new reading of Christmas’s character that focuses on the dichotomy between the spiritual and savage. The strength of Nina’s argument lies in its effective structure, as she uses clear topic sentences to ensure that each body paragraph only argues one idea at a time, but links them together in an effective way that allows her to move through three complex sub-arguments in a short six-page essay.

Continue reading →

Conclusion, Spring 2018

Donelle Woolford: The Politics of Appropriative Parafiction – An Analysis of Craftsmanship and Collaborative Structure

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In this junior paper, Heather explores the multifaceted components of the Donelle Woolford project to interrogate the implications of race, authorship and ownership, and performance on the viewer’s experience of the artworks. This excerpt demonstrates a sophisticated, antithetical approach to effectively concluding a long research paper by wrapping up previous analyses and integrating a new theoretical concept.

Continue reading →

Literature Review, Spring 2018

Lit Review

BY Writing Center

What makes for a good literature review? The literature review section is an opportunity for students to show their understanding of the research that they have undertaken. However, it’s also an opportunity to enter the scholarly conversation. A paper’s literature review is a way for a writer to craft the ballroom of conversation that they are entering. What existing scholars are talking? Who agrees with who? Where are the disagreements? By establishing what dynamics exist in the ballroom, the writer can then establish how they are going to enter this conversation.

The possibilities for entering the conversation are endless. The writer can piggyback off of existing academic arguments by extending them and examining them in a new context. Or the writer can enter an argument between two scholars, taking sides with one of the scholars or acting as a mediator. The possibilities are endless, but the direction that the argument will be taking is dictated entirely by how the writer depicts these scholars interacting with one another in the lit review.

Example: Student Reflections in Service: Cultural and Socioeconomic Variations in Motivations for and Valuation of Volunteering by Rebecca Kahn

Motive, Spring 2018

Motive

BY Writing Center

Motive begins with a question or a problem. This can be in the form of a gap in the evidence, a puzzling passage, or a new phenomenon. Thus, motive is the driving force behind an essay’s line of inquiry or argument. It is the question to which the author hopes to provide an answer.

Without a strong motive, it is difficult for readers to grasp the reason for a certain paper’s existence. Even the most brilliant points can seem meaningless without an understanding of the posed question. Even then, motive must extend beyond just this initial question. The motive of a paper has to be compelling enough to imbue readers with a sense of that paper’s significance. It ultimately helps answer the question, “Why does it all matter?” It helps readers understand not only why a paper was written but also why they should care that the paper was written at all.

Example 1: Boys Beyond Binary: An Exploration of the Non-Identitarian Nature of Relationships in Umberto Saba’s “Ernesto” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name” by Bes Arnaout

Example 2: A Dangerous Affair: Lady Susan’s Seductive Power in Love & Friendship by Megan Laubach

Close Reading, Spring 2018

Close Reading

BY Writing Center

It’s not unusual during one’s academic career to be assigned a close reading of a passage from a novel, story, poem, or even a song. But what exactly does “close” mean? What distinguishes a close reading pedagogically from other types of reading?

To answer this question, let’s briefly consider what a close reading is not: musing on an idea for a couple of pages, comparing a passage of one author to what another author said (or might have said), or even critiquing the author’s idea from your own perspective. These are all important tasks, no doubt, but ones for later occasions.

Essentially, what a close reading aims is is isolating the nuts and bolts of the passage selected. In order to reconstruct what the author is saying, we must first look at how the author says what they say. It is important to note, however, that—while a close reading creates real opportunities to experiment and play with different interpretations of the text—a close reading is no excuse to merely list one’s observations about as they occur in real-time; it will not be untethered to a thesis. Instead, close-reading means going back and filing each the recognition of each new detail as another installment in a cumulative story about the text. The thesis of a close reading, therefore, must be capable of housing a claim that evolves based on details which meaningfully accrete.

Methods, Spring 2018

Methods

BY Writing Center

Method refers broadly to the system of principles, ideas, and theories that undergird any substantive scholarly project. Academics often refer to a set of methods as a methodology, which refers more specifically to any number of research conventions typical of a particular field or discipline. For instance, under this framework, the close reading of written texts, the distinction between primary and secondary sources, and the use of archives for the discovery of primary documents all comprise distinct methods. Taken together, they represent part of the methodology of history as a field of study.

Method is thus crucial to most scholarly works because it allows readers to position the papers that they read in a recognized category. In humanistic disciplines, methodology often manifests as an analytical framework for the understanding of evidence. In the social and natural sciences, methodology enables authors to provide strategies for reproducible results.

Though methodology is often bound by understood conventions and systemic methods familiar to academics within a certain field, it is also possible to discern a range of methodologies in scholarly projects that adopt interdisciplinary approaches to answer their research questions. By employing the analytical frameworks from a range of disciplines, these projects can propose bold arguments with unexpected implications. The papers excerpted in this section are emblematic of this approach.

Example 1: Light and Fire in August: Violence, Body, and the Dichotomy between Spiritual and Savage by Nina Wang

Example 2: Reducing Invasive Species Establishment in the U.S. via the Pet and Horticulture Trades by Sonia Howlett

Orienting, Spring 2018

Orienting

BY Writing Center

Everyone wants to make an argument that matters—literarily, artistically, historically, politically, socially, culturally… the list goes on and on. For undergraduates just beginning their academic career, however, this is no easy task. The “so what?” factor is always looming over us, whether we’re writing a ten- to twelve-page research paper during freshman year or a several hundred-page thesis.

What’s the significance of my argument? What does it add to the scholarly conversation? How is what I’m saying new and exciting, not just to a scholarly audience, but also to the world? Orienting tackles all these questions. It’s the art of contextualizing your argument in some broader sense that makes it fresh, meaningful, and perhaps even vital. But orienting, although its proportions can be gigantic—in some cases changing the world and our understanding of it—is actually a very delicate process. Orienting pervades almost every aspect of the well-written essay. Some common aspects include the orienting of key terms and context, the motive of the argument, and an extension of the thesis. But for all this theoretical ideating on what framing is and where it surfaces, it’s easiest to see how and where orienting works when it’s in action.

Example 1: Modeling the Model Minority: Does the Immigrant Health Paradox Apply to Asian Migrants’ Mental Health? by Diana Chao

Example 2: Thaw-Era Portrayals of Mental Illness: Realist or Socialist? by Leora Eisenberg