Writing Center

Ariadni Kertsikof, ’22 is majoring in Social and Cultural Anthropology and pursuing a certificate in Cognitive Science. Her time is best spent in the company of close friends, and listening to the stories of callers to a local hotline. She is always one way or another focusing her attention on the dynamics of everyday encounters, which is why this essay is so dear to her. She wrote this essay as a junior.

Natalia Zorrilla, ’23 is a Philosophy major from San Diego, California. Outside of the Writing Center, she serves as co-president for the Princeton College Democrats, competes on the Princeton Debate Panel, and writes puzzles for the annual Princeton Puzzle Hunt. She also advises high schoolers with the nonprofits Matriculate and HomeFront NJ, and she researches with the Concepts & Cognition Lab. In her free time, she winds down by solving crosswords and watching cheesy rom-coms. She wrote this as a sophomore.

Evidence, Spring 2021

Searching Inside a Cut: Ethnography as a Lens to Examine Emergent Relationalities

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In a Tortoiseshell: In her essay, Ariadni Kertsikof weaves together evidence from several ethnographic works to argue that ethnography allows us to discover truths about the world through attending to relationships. The following excerpt focuses on the importance of relationships in Savannah Shange’s ethnography Progressive Dystopia. Through exceptional source orientation, Ariadni contextualizes her evidence in light of Shange’s argument. She then selects and summarizes a specific example from Shange’s work, effectively illustrating not only the author’s point but her own.

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Spring 2021, Thesis

The Hypocrisies of Wonka’s Chocolate World: Flipping Dahl’s Story Inside Out

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In a Tortoiseshell: In the following introduction and excerpted body paragraphs from her final Writing Seminar paper on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Paige Min adopts an against-the-grain argument. She complicates the mainstream understanding of the text, namely that good children like Charlie who resist capitalistic temptations are rewarded while bad children who succumb to their desires are not. Paige frames her motive and thesis by orienting the reader to this common argument. Based on a close reading of the text, she argues that the story actually normalizes dangerous elements of capitalism and teaches children to blindly accept authority. Continue reading →

Evidence, Spring 2021

“Does it have to be complicated?”: Technologically Mediated Romance and Identity in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People

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In a Tortoiseshell: In this close-reading of Sally Rooney’s work, Julia Walton’s junior paper explores the role of technology-aided communication in complex romantic entanglements. This excerpt deftly engages with evidence to provide compelling analysis on the significance of mirrors and photographs in Rooney’s Conversations With Friends.

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Narrative, Spring 2021

Agents of Change: Hollywood Agents and Gatekeeping

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In a Tortoiseshell: In her Junior Paper, Jacy Duan explores the role of Hollywood agents in perpetuating a lack of racial diversity among actors. She carried out seven interviews with agents, which she draws on here in order to explore whether agents recognize their role as gatekeepers controlling the presence (or lack) of diversity in the industry. Jacy establishes a strong motive in her introduction and then weaves together the individual opinions of the agents into a broader narrative about diversity in Hollywood. Jacy’s treatment of narrative ensures that her argument is both accessible and engaging.

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Evidence, Spring 2021

The Futile Female Fight

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In a Tortoiseshell: In a paper for the Humanities Sequence, Noori Zubieta strikes a balance between carefully working through her evidence, orienting her reader, and building to a nuanced thesis in a close reading of a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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Non-textual sources, Spring 2021

The Feminized Male Lead Dancer: How Chinese TikTok Dances are Redefining Gender Roles

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In a Tortoiseshell: In her essay, Julia Zhou uses an unconventional primary source to argue that while male-led Chinese TikTok dances engage in gender subversion, they do so by operating within an artistic framework that welcomes innovation. To help readers engage with her analysis, Julia carefully describes key choreographic techniques, then orients readers to the significance of each technique. Having made the dances legible to her readers, she then engages in a rewarding close reading of their choreography.

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Spring 2021, The basics

Limits of the “blowfish effect”: Exemplar variability outweighs atypicality to support basic-level generalization during word learning

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In a Tortoiseshell: In the concluding section of her final project for Cognitive Psychology, Kennedy Casey adeptly discusses her research on generalization during word learning. She clearly summarizes her findings and their limitations, while also defining her contribution to the scholarly conversation and calling attention to her global motive. Continue reading →

Narrative, Spring 2021

Pedagogy in the Playhouse: The Role of Hans Krása’s Opera Brundibár in Modern Holocaust Education Through the Arts

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In a Tortoiseshell: In this paper, written for a Freshman Seminar, Julie Levey demonstrates how a powerful sense of narrative can enliven an academic paper and make it both convincing and compelling. As she build towards her thesis, she presents varied and conflicting perspectives and pieces of evidence before presenting her own view.

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Cross-disciplinary analysis, Spring 2021

Quantitative Analysis of Intensity, Saturation, and Hue in Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings

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In a Tortoiseshell: In her paper, Maya Chande pairs mathematical and historical analyses in order to provide a possible explanation for the higher concentrations of yellow in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. By conducting a cross-disciplinary analysis based on van Gogh’s letters, biography, and a mathematical examination of van Gogh’s use of color, Maya concludes that the higher concentrations of yellow can be attributed to shifts in van Gogh’s personal life. This excerpt highlights the way Maya weaves together scholars from various disciplines in order to create a clear scholarly motive and then skips to Maya’s conclusions. Continue reading →

Spring 2021, Thesis

Monstrous Consumption and Resistance in The Vegetarian and “Eight Bites”

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In a Tortoiseshell: In her final paper for a class called Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: Ancient Plots, Modern Twists, Paige Allen examines two texts, a novel and a short story, to explore the intersection between consumption, humanity, and monstrosity in the context of restrictive eating. As she orients her reader to the central ideas of her argument in this introduction, she explains the ways consumption habits have a long cultural history of being linked to “human nature.” The claim of this essay, that the texts in question present instances of something Paige calls “resistant monstrosity,” is a strong example of the lexicon term thesis. Continue reading →