#  Aphorisms on the Kinds of Academic Writing 

 



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There are a great many forms of academic writing – too many to list – but most of them fall under one of three general categories: a single-source paper, a multi-source paper, and a research paper.

Note that none of the categories listed below is something like “take a position,” “choose a side,” or “advocate a policy” because those are things that can be done in any of the below kinds of essays. Those are kind of *arguments* rather than kind of *essays*. Thus, any of the kinds of essays listed below could be analytical/philosophical on the one hand (concerned with explanation) or ethical/political on the other (concerned with advocacy). The below typology of academic writing is organized not by purpose but by the fields of evidence that come into play.

*The Single Source Paper*: An analysis of a single text (or idea, event, object, etc.) that identifies and discusses some interesting or problematic aspect of that text (or idea, event, object, etc.).

- *The Close Reading*: An interpretation that shows how a text was made and/or how it works.
    - An interpretation of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in Shakespeare’s *Hamlet*.
    - An interpretation of the advisability of the United States entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
- *The Theoretical Statement*: The presentation of an abstract statement through the discussion of a particular example.
    - A theory of “the self” based on Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in *Hamlet*.
    - A theory of the social causes of crime based on a case study of East Garfield Park in Chicago, IL.
- *The Archival Essay*: The presentation of new historical material not widely available.
    - A discussion of an eighteenth-century reader’s marginal annotations on the “To thine own self be true” passage in a book archived in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
    - A presentation of skin diseases as drawn in ninetieth-century medical textbooks housed in the Yale Library.
- *The Empirical Report*: The presentation of new data gathered through controlled observation.
    - A discussion of the frequency of the word “self” in each of Shakespeare’s works.
    - A report on how often medical personnel at the hospital in Salina, KS washed their hands during an observation period.
- *The Book Review*: A summary and discussion of someone else's book.
    - A review of Stephen Greenblatt’s book *Renaissance Self-Fashioning* (1980).
    - A review of Jordan Ellenberg’s *How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking* (2014).

*The Multi-Source Paper*: An essay that brings two or more texts (or events, ideas, objects, etc.) into conversation on the basis of some common ground.

- *The Historicist Essay*: A consideration of a text in light of historical circumstances relevant to the way it came into existence.
    - A discussion of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in the context of the adages in William Lily’s Latin grammar textbook, *Rudimenta Grammatices*, which Shakespeare would have studied as a student.
    - An argument that the Republican party has mobilized conservative social issues to get Kansas farmers to vote for conservative fiscal policies that aren’t in their own best interests.
- *The Comparative Essay*: A consideration of similar texts, ideas, events that come from different contexts.
    - A discussion of the treatment of the self in the sixteenth-century English playwright William Shakespeare’s *Hamlet* and the nineteenth-century German philosopher’s G.W.F. Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Mind*.
    - An illustration of how Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s different views of “nature” led them to support different forms of government.
- *The Lens Essay*: The use of one text or idea (usually philosophical or theoretical in nature) to unpack and explain a particular example or set of data.
    - A reading of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech from the perspective of the American sociologist Erving Goffman’s book *The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life* (1959).
    - An argument using Darwinian theories of evolutionary biology to explain dating in American high schools.
- *The Test-a-Theory Essay*: The use of an example or data set to evaluate (and potentially improve or disprove) a general philosophical or theoretical idea.
    - A consideration of whose theory of tragedy – Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, or Miller’s – best explains Shakespeare’s *Hamlet*.
    - An essay asking if the ISIS attacks in Paris in November 2015 support Martha Crenshaw’s “rational choice theory” of terrorism.
- *The Presentist Essay*: The use of a historical text or idea to unpack and discuss a recent text or idea.
    - A reading of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech as a way to discuss the difficulties of parenting in the increasingly global world of the twenty-first century.
    - A discussion of the “classical style” of Roman writers like Cicero designed to convince academics to write essays with less bloated language.
- *The Meta-Analysis*: A collection and synthesis of several studies on a related topic in an effort to draw some more stable or general conclusions.
    - A synthesis of seven studies of the self in seven different US populations in an attempt to establish a general theory of the self.
    - A consideration of the past twenty years of research on the relationship between poverty and lottery ticket sales.
- *The Review Essay*: A discussion and critique of several recent studies on a related topic designed to ascertain the state of a field.
    - A critique of recent studies of the self in Shakespeare’s drama by John Lee, Bridget Escolme, and Mustapha Fahmi.
    - A discussion of the status of race in higher education admissions based on the arguments in recent books by Franklin Tuitt and Julie Park.

*The Research Paper*: A special kind of any of the above essays that cites, discusses, and advances previous scholarship on a given topic. In other words, an original contribution to an ongoing field of academic inquiry.