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
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.
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
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
In a Tortoiseshell: In the final paper for her Writing Seminar, “Gamification,” Theresa Lim argues that gamified elements of the MyFitnessPal app push users towards the unhealthy end of the eating behavior spectrum. Her cross-disciplinary analysis creatively combines scholarship in psychology, nutrition, and game theory. By carefully defining relevant key terms from these disciplines, and by clearly illustrating how the concepts she defines intersect in the MyFitnessPal app, Theresa arrives at a nuanced argument and makes important contributions to the scholarly conversation. Continue reading
In a Tortoiseshell: In her essay on Jesmyn Ward’s Men we Reaped, Cassy uses a clear and evocative prose style to convey her motive, using key words and well placed quotations to construct incisive analysis. Through her essay, she convinces her readers not only of the depth and texture of Ward’s original work, but also that academic writing, when done well, may possess a strong argument and thesis without wholly giving up the lyrical poignancy of a creative piece. Continue reading
After all these years, it still haunts my nightmares. Black eyes stare beadily; a garish red tongue pokes out of a slivered smile. Moldy green fingers grasp at air. Clouds cover the sun. And one phrase traces itself in an ancient script: “graphic design is my passion.”
In July of 2014, Tumblr user Yungterra posted the very first version of the “Graphic Design is My Passion”meme. Would this image bring shame upon any self-respecting designer? Absolutely. But it’s tough to pinpoint what exactly makes “Graphic Design is My Passion” so awful. Some viewers have blamed its use of the hated font Papyrus. Others have found fault with its aggressively unedited clipart frog. I have sympathy for both of these claims, but I don’t think that either quite captures why I loathe the image.
No, what bothers me most about “Graphic Design is My Passion” is its structure. In my extensive (fine, highly limited) design experience, I’ve learned that creating a graphic is quite like writing an academic essay. The designer has a key idea that she wants to convey to her viewer, and she uses her text, images, and backgrounds as evidence for that key “thesis.” These components of her graphic, much like the paragraphs of an essay, need to fit together in a particular way. In essay writing, this concept is sometimes called “arc”: an essay with a strong arc has paragraphs that build upon and blend with each other. Even as each paragraph makes a unique contribution to the thesis, it also hangs together with the paragraphs before and after. A graphic may not have an arc in the same way an essay does, but the best graphics do seem to have a kind of structural harmony. The text and images are individually compelling, yes, but what makes the graphic work is the way those elements fit together. In an ideal graphic, the text supports the images and the images the text.
Unfortunately, “Graphic Design is My Passion” displays no such harmony. In fact, it seems designed to ensure that no viewer could unearth even the ruins of an underlying structure. Consider the frog. Neon-green and cartoonish, it is the exemplar of modern Internet clipart. Why, then, would it be paired with Papyrus, a font meant to mimic ancient writing? Perhaps the red text and green frog are meant to form a complimentary color combination— but then why include a dissonant gray sky in the background? Thematically, the frog and sky don’t match up either; amphibians are creatures of the land and water, not of the air. If anything links these disparate components of the graphic, it is far from obvious.
If a harmonious graphic is like an essay with a strong arc, to what might we compare the chaos of “Graphic Design is My Passion?” I suspect that the best analogue is the standard five-paragraph essay. Of course, most five-paragraph essays don’t have body paragraphs that actively disprove their thesis. Papyrus was my favorite font as an eight-year-old, for instance, but nobody with a “passion” for graphic design would share that opinion. Still, when I hear a professor or a peer take issue with a five-paragraph essay, the complaint is invariably that the essay lacks an arc. Even if each body paragraph adds to the thesis, it is unclear what connects the arguments in each paragraph. The reader is left to ask herself why the sky paragraph comes after the frog paragraph—and if changing this order would make any meaningful difference in the essay. Many five-paragraph essays are thus undermined by the same lack of harmony as “Graphic Design is My Passion.”
Next time you consider this cursed image, then, spare a thought for your own writing. Ask yourself what you can do to make your arc more compelling. When you have a sky paragraph and a frog paragraph with no discernible connection, consider how each paragraph’s ideas relate to the next. If you can’t find a relationship, it may be worth rethinking your structure. Yes, compared to worries about thesis and evidence, these concerns about arc may seem minor. But as “Graphic Design is My Passion” reveals, a strong arc can make an essay a dream; a weak one can make it a nightmare.
— Natalia Zorrilla, ’23
After finishing my senior thesis on Russian opera last week, I was relieved to have the chance to read something that was in English and didn’t have a meter. For a break, I turned to Marie NDiaye’s novel Three Strong Women (originally published in French as Trois femmes puissantes), a gift that had been sitting on my shelf for months while the wildly unrealistic chapter deadlines I imposed on myself came and went. When I finally starting reading, the wait turned out to have been well worth it.
I’m still engrossed in NDiaye’s novel, but while flipping through it, I was also struck by the collection of blurbs in the book’s front matter. Together, the blurbs, each only a few sentences long, present a unified thesis: NDiaye is a talented writer and anyone reading the blurbs should buy the book (they were selected, after all, by the novel’s publisher). Many of the blurbs reiterate the overall thesis in some form—”A writer of the highest caliber,” “A great read”—but each one also offers a unique piece of evidence in support of that thesis. Different reviewers refer to NDiaye’s “clearsightedness,” “willingness to broach essential subjects” (New York Times), “range,” “precision” (Guardian), “impressive forensic detail (Independent), and more.
The choice and arrangement of the blurbs mirror the structure of an academic paper. The publisher of Three Strong Women clearly scoured reviews from around the globe, identified useful excerpts, and arranged them carefully to support the overarching thesis, tying each piece of evidence back in to the overarching argument. Likewise, after doing research, selecting evidence, and articulating a thesis, a writer arranges her evidence in support of that thesis, always making sure that the value of each piece of evidence is clear. It helps if your thesis is as compelling as that of NDiaye’s publisher, but whether you’re promoting an excellent novel or trying to structure your D1, the essential process is the same.
– Rosamond van Wingerden, ’21
Throughout my time at Princeton, one significant change I’ve noticed in my writing is in the way I think about motive. Like many people coming into Writing Sem., I was initially confused about motive and especially about the relationship between different kinds of motive. Once I had a stronger grasp on these lexicon terms, I focused mainly on in-text and scholarly motive in my writing. Over the years, though, personal motive has taken on a more and more important role in my papers. More often that not, I choose topics for my papers because my personal interests and experiences draw me to particular elements of a text, and I want to explore these elements in my own close analysis of the text and in my engagement with the scholarly conversation surrounding it. Writing on topics in which you have a personal investment— and which may even be triggering— can certainly be challenging, but I have also found these projects to be some of the most rewarding I have undertaken at Princeton.
I am currently working on my second junior paper, where my personal, textual, and scholarly motives are very much intertwined. In fact, I was motivated to choose my topic in part because I got angry with a scholarly source! For my JP, I am writing on patriarchal violence in Euripides’ Medea and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and examining how the female characters of each text resist this violence through language. To give a brief summary of the myth recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Hades abducts Persephone, and Demeter (her mother) manages to get her back from the underworld. Yet because Persephone has eaten a pomegranate seed, she must return to live with Hades for one-third of every year. One piece of evidence in the hymn that has become important to my analysis is Persephone’s account of how Hades forces her to eat the pomegranate seed. As I read it, this scene stands in for another penetrative violation that Persephone does not describe. But because Persephone’s narrative conflicts with an earlier account of the same events (focalized from Hades’ perspective), many scholars have discounted it as falsehood. For example:
In 372 (“ἔδωκε φαγεῖν”) nothing is said of the compulsion on which Persephone here insists. Plainly Hades did not use actual force or compulsion of any kind, especially as Hermes was present. Persephone only means that she had no wish to eat, and could not refuse the food. Nor would it be unnatural for her to overstate the case, from a desire to avoid blame for her thoughtlessness.
Allen and Sikes n413
In my opinion, interpretations like this one are really just victim-blaming masquerading as scholarship, and the assumptions they make aren’t grounded in morality or the text.
My personal motivation for “picking a fight” with these scholars pushes me to be especially rigorous in how I engage with this passage of the hymn and these secondary sources. I have tried to reframe my strong emotional response to my sources as observations and questions that can form the basis for my textual and scholarly motives. There is clearly a tension in the text between how the pomegranate incident is described earlier in the hymn and how Persephone describes it to her mother. Is there a way to explain this tension without discrediting Persephone’s account? (Answer: yes!) How have other scholars accounted for this discrepancy? What assumptions do their interpretations make? How do these assumptions hold up to a close analysis of the text?
Obviously, I can’t treat such personal topics in all of my academic writing — and I’m sure it would be exhausting to try! But it is deeply satisfying whenever I can do scholarly work that is important to me at an emotional as well as intellectual level. Motive can be about what motivates you to write, about the unique perspectives and experiences that each of us brings to our writing, and about how your voice can change the stories we tell and how we tell them.
– Meigan Clark ’22
Works Cited
Homer, Thomas W Allen, and E. E Sikes. The Homeric Hymns. London: Macmillan, 1904.
I recently turned in a midterm exam for my Choral Conducting course. It was not quite like any exam I had taken before. The first question asked me to imagine that I was standing on the podium, about to conduct some piece of my choosing, and to describe what I would do in the seconds before the opening measures of the piece. What signals would I give with my face, hands, and body to show the choir what sound quality I was aiming for?
Due to social distancing measures, I have yet to stand on the podium in front of a physical choir. However, I imagine that the intimidating silence right before a piece began would be akin to the rather hollow feeling that accompanies writing introductions for my academic papers. I find introductions difficult partly because they precede the main argument of a paper. Just as it is tricky to conduct the beginning of a piece, when there is no sound for you to respond to, in an introduction you have very little evidence, quotations, or analysis to work with. Even so, the first few moments of a piece are crucial in engaging your singers (or readers) and preparing them for what is to come.
My conducting class has taught me that when you’re standing on the podium, you should never actually approach a piece from square one. Your choir may be singing the piece for the first time, but it is crucial that you have thoroughly analyzed the entire score beforehand. The type of cue you give your singers will depend on the piece’s style and on its structure as a whole, right down to the final measure. This is why I recommend that you do some analysis of your academic sources—or even write your body paragraphs and conclusion—before beginning your introduction. That way, your opening sentences will align perfectly with the rest of your argument.
Last week while conducting by Zoom, I made a mistake that I often see in even the best students’ introductions: forgetting to provide orienting information. I was so nervous about the piece we were workshopping that I began conducting almost immediately after I was called on—it took me a few measures to notice that the student who was supposed to be singing had been caught off guard, and hadn’t even come in. My “preparatory gesture,” which is supposed to act as a cue, had been too sudden and unexpected.
Conducting provides a useful analogy for how to go about orienting your reader. A preparatory gesture should not only help singers enter on time, but also communicate the tone, dynamics, and tempo of the opening measures. Telling your reader what topics you will be cover is not enough: you should also tell them how you will be covering them. What is your “tone”—are you arguing with or against the grain? Are your claims bold and new (forte) or are you subtly adding nuance to another scholar’s argument (piano)? Will you be speeding through a plethora of sources, or slowly analyzing one text? With such questions in mind, writing an introduction does not have to be an ordeal. Your introduction can be short—a mere flick of the hands—and yet seamlessly guide your reader into the body paragraphs.
– Frances Mangina ’22
