Unit 1: A Single-Source Paper

Overview

Objectives

This unit is designed to help you develop some skills of close reading, which is a fundamental skill required for academic writing in a range of disciplines. A single-source paper is an analysis of a single text (or idea, event, or object), a reading that identifies, presents, and discusses some interesting or problematic aspect of that text (or idea, event, or object) without recourse to any other texts. In a close reading, it’s just the writer and the text, and it’s the writer’s job to make sense of the text.

Readings

Assignment

Write a five-page paper about some aspect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Instructions

Your close reading should uncover and present something about the play that readers might not notice or understand when viewing or reading it themselves. In a single-source analysis, you are posing and responding to your own questions, not proving or reiterating the ideas of others. The ideas you offer should be your own, informed by your individual work with a text as well as our conversations in class and in office hours and conferences. No outside sources are required, nor should you consult any. 

Your work in class and in response papers for Unit 1 will introduce you to some tried-and-true strategies for close reading. These response papers will include:

  • Response Paper 1.1: Questions and Problems: After reading Hamlet, your will write three analytical questions you might be interested in studying further in an essay.
  • Response Paper 1.2: Evidence and Analysis: You will create a timeline, an explication, a conceptual map, and then a 300-word argument statement about the question or problem you’ve selected to write about for your first essay.
  • Response Paper 1.3: A Basic Outline: You will create a one-page outline for your first paper. 

For your Unit 1 Essay, a five-page close reading, you will draw upon the questions and analyses you develop in class and in your response papers. Your essay will allow you to refine and extend these thoughts and shape them into a coherent argument. In order to do so, your essay should:

  • Articulate your problem or question: Most good academic writing begins with a question, one that poses a challenging problem or issue to address or figure out, sparking an essay that analyzes rather than one that describes or summarizes. A good question calls our attention to a dilemma, quirk, quandary, wrinkle, confusion, ambiguity, or grey area in the text. Identifying such a question or problem for your readers makes sure that there is something “at stake” in your essay – i.e., that there is a reason your argument needs to be made.
  • Treat evidence with analysis: The success of your essay will depend on how carefully you use the specific details of the play to generate a lucid observation about that work. You will need to guide your readers through your evidence (the information you’re interpreting) and your analysis (your interpretation of that evidence) in support of an argument. Don’t assume (1) that readers know what evidence to look for, (2) that they'll read that evidence in the same way that you do, nor (3) that they'll draw the same conclusions as you do. Your analysis of the evidence should persuade your readers of the validity of your claims.
  • Include an argument and a thesis: Taken all together, your analyses should add up to your argument, while your argument should be represented by a thesis, a clear and concise statement of your central proposition that is given early in your paper. As noted in the “Elements of Academic Argument,” a strong thesis is “true but arguable.” It is a matter of interpretation, not historical fact (with which no one could argue) nor wild conjecture (which no one would take seriously). It should be specific enough to be supported with evidence, plausible but not obvious, and revealing for your readers.

Requirements

Your essay for this unit should:

Sample Papers

Response Paper 1.1: Questions and Problems

Objectives

This assignment is meant to help you develop skills of identifying problems and asking questions, an important early step in academic writing. An analytical question maps out a challenging problem or issue in a text (or idea, event, or object) that needs to be addressed or understood.

Readings

Assignment

Write three analytical questions about Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Instructions

In order to develop your analytical questions, you'll need to do some reading and annotating of the text first, and even some interpreting. That is, an analytical question is not something you ask before interpreting a text but after interpreting it. An analytical question is one that needs more interpretation beyond the initial pass. A good analytical question:

  • Speaks to a genuine dilemma or problem in the text: The question focuses on a real confusion, ambiguity, or grey area of the text, an aspect about which readers will conceivably have different reactions, opinions, or interpretations. 
  • Yields an answer that is not obvious: In a question such as “How many people does Hamlet kill by the play’s end?” there's nothing to explore: it's too specific and can be answered too easily.
  • Suggests an answer complex enough to require a whole essay’s worth of argument: If the question is too vague, it won’t suggest a sustainable line of argument (e.g., “Why does Claudius send Hamlet to England?”). The question should elicit analysis and argument rather than summary or description.
  • Can be answered by the text, rather than by generalizations or by copious external research. A question such as “Does the Danish court in Hamlet reflect Elizabethan courts in Shakespeare’s time?” is fascinating, but its scope isn’t suitable for a close reading of Hamlet.

Thus, an analytical question should be answerable, given the available evidence, but not immediately answerable, and not in the same way by all readers. Your goal is to help readers understand why a question is worth asking, why a feature of a text is problematic, and to send them back to the text with a new perspective or a different focus. Here are some additional tips about analytical questions to keep in mind:

  • How and why questions require more analysis than who/what/when/where questions.
  • Good analytical questions can highlight patterns/connections or contradictions/dilemmas/problems. 
  • Good analytical questions should also consider the implications or consequences of an analysis.

Requirements

The document you submit should:

  • Include three numbered questions;
  • Be written in MLA style, including proper in-text citations for any quotes, though the document can be single-spaced and no “Works Cited” page is needed.

Sample Papers

  • Sample Response Paper 1.1
  • Sample Response Paper 1.1

Response Paper 1.2: Evidence and Analysis

Objectives

This assignment is designed to help you collect and interpret evidence for an argument.

Readings

Assignment

Generate the evidence and analysis for your first essay by creating a timeline, an explication, a conceptual map, and then a 300-word argument statement that responds to the question or problem you’ve selected to write about for your first essay.

Instructions

In your first essay, you will offer a close reading of a text, which in this case is Hamlet. In your first response paper, you articulated three analytical questions about Hamlet. For the current response paper, which involves several steps, you should begin by selecting the question you want to address in your essay. Then complete the following four parts of this response paper in order:

  • Part A: Timeline. Before any interpretation can occur, the information that needs to be interpreted must be identified, collected, and organized. Create a timeline with at least 15 items related to the question or problem from Hamlet that you’ve selected to work with. It should be a bulleted list, a very specific list of events or "things that happen" in Hamlet. These events should be arranged in chronological order, which could potentially differ from the order in which events occur in the text (e.g., we hear of King Hamlet's murder in Act I, Scene v, but chronologically it took place before the play even begins). Your list should cite the places in the text that indicate the events, whether it's a line, a span of lines, or a longer passage or scene. For further thoughts, see my Aphorisms on Information.
  • Part B: Explication. Once you’ve completed your timeline, identify the single most important passage or scene (probably more than 10 lines but less than 100) related to the question you’re posing. Write an “explication” of this passage by making 10 observations about it in a numbered list. Each item in the list should be one- to three- sentence(s) long. You’re just looking for a list of "things you can say" or “points you can make” about the passage in question. The observations you make need not all be earth-shattering. In fact, because you're aiming for specific description of minute details, many of your observations might seem insignificant. Each item should (1) frame or situate some evidence; (2) present that evidence through quotation, paraphrase, or summary; and (3) briefly analyze that evidence (with, when appropriate, the formal terms of literary studies as you know them from your previous studies). Sometimes all this information can be easily covered in one sentence; sometimes it takes longer. For some strategies, see my Aphorisms on Explication. For some concerns and terms of drama, see my Aphorisms on Drama.
  • Part C: Conceptual Map. Looking at your explication, identify the point or set of points that you think would make for a compelling argument in your first essay. The next step is to generate that argument by creating a conceptual map. First, go through the passage or scene, and your explication of it, and list out the concepts that are in play. Next, start to draw out a conceptual map relating information (i.e., what happens in Hamlet) to analysis (i.e., your interpretation of what happens in Hamlet). A conceptual map weaves together facts and concepts in a sequence to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a story that relates not only what happened (in its use of facts/information), but also why something happened (in its use of concepts/ideas). For more information, see my Aphorisms on Analysis. For your submission for this assignment, you’ll need to scan or take a picture of your conceptual map and submit that file. 
  • Part D: Argument Statement. Usually, your conceptual map makes a lot of sense to you, because you made it, but it can be nonsense to someone else if you just hand it to him or her. Thus, you need to turn the visual representation of your idea in the map into a written statement. To do so, compile a 300-600 word “argument statement” by narrating the idea formulated in your conceptual map. Summarize the parts and progression of the idea from start to finish. See my Aphorisms on Arguments. 

Requirements

The document you submit should:

  • Include Parts A, B, C, and D (in that order in a single document, if possible);
  • Be written in MLA style, including proper in-text citations for any quotes, though the document can be single-spaced and no “Works Cited” page is needed.

Sample Papers

  • Sample Response Paper 1.2
  • Sample Response Paper 1.2

Response Paper 1.3: A Basic Outline

Objectives

This assignment is meant to help you develop skills of organization for a close reading essay and beyond.

Readings

Assignment

Create a basic outline for your first essay.

Instructions

Once you have an argument and a thesis that you want to write a paper about, the next step is to draft a basic outline for what that paper might look like. Begin this document with your thesis statement as it currently stands (probably in one to three sentences). Then write out an outline for the structure of your paper. Your outline should be no longer than one page. The exact format your outline takes is up to you, but it should clearly identify an introduction, body, and conclusion and use the Elements of Academic Argument to structure the information presented in each of those sections. Some of those Elements are discussed below; your job is to use those elements to identify the content of your argument and then figure out the best order in which to present your particular claims.

  • Introduction: Your introduction will probably be one to three paragraphs long. At the very least, it needs to include your problem, your text, any terms that are key to your argument, your thesis statement, and what’s at stake in your paper. 
  • Body: Your basic outline should identify (in only 3-7 words) the topic of each section in the body of the paper and the topic of each paragraph within each section.
  • Conclusion: Your conclusion will probably be one or two paragraphs long. It will probably begin with an argument statement, and then it might consider some counters before wrapping up with a discussion of the implications of your argument.

Requirements

The document you submit should:

  • Be single-spaced in outline form;
  • Be one-page long (or not much more); no “Works Cited” page is needed.

Sample Papers

  • Sample Response Paper 1.3
  • Sample Response Paper 1.3