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The Seminar Paper
A good seminar paper fulfills two important functions. First, it reflects the author’s development in the course for which it was written. It demonstrates the author’s intellectual progress and meets, as closely as possible, the professor’s expectations for a term paper. Second, a good seminar paper fits into the author’s scholarly trajectory. However relevant to the individual’s specialization, it should generate ideas, skills, research, and questions that contribute to his or her overall scholarly project. Though these functions point, as it were, in opposite directions, they arise from the necessary assumption that seminars constitute the foundation for all future academic work. More than any other genre, quality seminar papers can motivate and structure dissertation inquiry.
A Rhetorical Situation
We can’t avoid the rhetorical nature of seminar papers. Like most academic activity that counts for something, these essays come with certain expectations, many of which the professor, the primary audience, determines. Thus the basic characteristic of a seminar paper is that there are no consistent characteristics but only a set of variables contingent upon each professor’s understanding and agenda. Though we might bemoan having to adapt our (obviously brilliant) ideas to the demands of a particular reader or readers, it’s worth remembering that academic life consists wholly of just that kind of adaptation.
It may seem silly to specify the expectations of a given professor, but doing so provides a structure within which an essay’s ideas can develop. Common conceptions of seminar papers include those thought of as
- a nascent version of a future publication, complete with thorough knowledge of secondary criticism, footnotes, and bibliography;
- a highly informed and detailed exploration of a single primary text; a glorified close reading;
- an application of the skills and knowledge the seminar is intended to transmit, referring to the texts, theories, or approaches covered during the semester;
- a very specific type of paper with a pre-defined structure or purpose (e.g., an application of a particular theory to a particular text);
- an opportunity to pursue individual inquiries, however unrelated to the course’s topic.
Each of these various conceptions entails necessary practical steps. If a professor expects mastery of a body of secondary criticism, for example, then it’s wise to survey that criticism and keep notes, perhaps even formalized annotations, on the materials you read. That way, when you sit down to write the essay, you have already established a critical context in which to begin your own inquiry.
The funny thing about seminar papers is that although it’s easy to distinguish the different sorts and to approximate which sort a professor has in mind, a truly excellent seminar paper could fit into every sort. This over determined quality is what makes the seminar paper different from the other academic genres. The best seminar papers, in other words, manage to do whatever their reader expects them to do, regardless of who that reader is or what s/he expects the paper to do.
For the Future
That peculiar, Protean quality makes it difficult to see any real value or purpose in writing seminar papers. A paper that does everything, it seems, does nothing. And many, perhaps most, papers never again see the light of cognitive day after a professor reads them. They quickly enter the realm of vague, barely retrievable reference, so that years later you’ll find yourself saying to students, “I think I wrote a paper on Moby Dick once.”
You can avoid this miserable middle age only by striving to make use of seminar papers, or rather, to let them do more than simply earn a grade. They must somehow contribute to your intellectual development and future work, but that contribution needn’t be anything specific. Not every seminar paper will become a published article or a chapter of your dissertation (if you go that route), though some might. You could use a paper to
- complete research, either primary or secondary, that you will use later. You might, for example, write a paper on modern British poets in order to familiarize yourself with the library’s resources.
- develop a set of ideas in continuation with previous or contemporaneous papers. You might write an essay on Stoicism one semester and Neostoicism the next.
- experiment with or develop new methodologies. Perhaps you only tried Marxism as a joke in college and want to see how it really works.
- get a good idea of the scholarly conversation around certain texts.
- read, think about, and write about texts you would not have otherwise attended to. Maybe you’ve always wanted to read Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and just couldn’t find the time.
- develop an idea for a conference paper. This is an especially useful purpose if you’re confident in an idea but not confident enough to submit it for publication.
- think toward your master's thesis or dissertation.
- start a relationship with a professor. Visiting office hours wouldn’t hurt either.
- write a draft of your MA Thesis, an especially advisable purpose if you don’t feel confident about writing the entire Thesis in a single semester.
Whatever you do in a seminar paper, it’s important to do something with it, to make it do something for you.
Practical Advice
Below is a series of practical tips for writing excellent seminar papers, even in difficult semesters.
Start early: If you start your essay the week before it’s due, it will fulfill neither of its main functions. Though you may be an excellent writer of last-minute papers, you won’t be able to craft your inquiry to satisfy the professor’s requirements fully and completely, nor will the essay aid your overall progress. It will simply take up space on your hard drive. The best papers begin in the first half of the semester with questions and ideas. In-depth primary and broad secondary reading progress together in the two months before the deadline, and outlining and drafting takes place over the last month of classes. Occasionally, professors will ask for paper presentations in the weeks before the deadline, still another reason to begin early.
Set time goals: Accordingly, give yourself artificial deadlines. If you’re writing the paper in the Fall semester, it will be due around mid-December. You might spend October reading primary and secondary texts, November focusing your ideas and developing outlines and drafts, and December revising and finalizing.
Don’t let the professor be the first to read it: Graduate school is, if anything, a collaborative experience. Make a point to discuss paper ideas with your fellow seminarians. Trade drafts and outlines as you work on them, soliciting feedback from your peers before you seek it from the professor. It makes little sense for the professor, the person who will grade it, to be the first to see a paper.
Have ONE idea with purpose: Many of us mistakenly try to take up too large a topic for a single 20-30 page essay. Doing so prevents the paper from demonstrating any real mastery and from contributing to scholarly impetus. Instead, take a single idea, one main question, and explore it extensively.
Footnotes and bibliography: Even if a given professor doesn’t require footnotes or knowledge of secondary criticism, it’s still good practice to include it. Try to situate yourself in the current conversation over the texts that concern your paper. That way, when you do try to turn the essay into an article or chapter, that essential component will already be built in.
Be honest: All but the least rational professors understand the pressure each semester presents, and they recognize that you are teaching and writing two other papers at the same time as you’re writing one for their course. It’s safe to be honest about the limits of your time. If, for example, you recognize while writing that you need to cover a certain text but don’t have time to do it well, include a footnote to explain the situation, stressing what the section would do if you had time to do it. Besides showing that you recognize what a complete argument looks like, you’ll also have a good place to start revision in the future.
Reflect the learning of the course: Even if your essay diverges widely from the course’s topic, it should somehow gesture in that direction, perhaps in footnotes.
Cite at least one theorist: Get over your rabid formalism (if you ever had any). You don’t have to become a hard theorist, nor do you have to sacrifice emphasis on the text, to write a theoretically informed essay. Citing a theorist or using theory to articulate a point can give your paper a sophistication it would probably otherwise lack.
Academic Writing
“A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length, and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the connection in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and irrelevant. It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the expression to the idea, that clinches a writer's meaning.” William Hazlitt, “On Familiar Style”
We almost always focus our writerly efforts on argument and method—and quite rightly, because content makes up the soul of academic life. But we often emphasize argument at the expense of clear, strong prose, mimetic as it can be, active and exact, self-conscious and purposeful. Poststructuralism correctly taught us not to rely on the relationship between words and things, yet that relationship is still the only means for signification (or significance). Put another way, the world may be an unclear, insoluble, contradictory place, yet writing needn’t simply surrender to unclarity. Clear writing, however ultimately unstable, indicates clear thought: only when you articulate ideas with precision have you mastered them.
Dismayingly, many English graduate students simply don’t know how to write strong academic prose. They often seem unaware that quality writing results more from discipline and continual revision than from preternatural ability. Far too many first drafts, far too little revision. Writing, like a muscle, strengthens with continual use, its sinews most solid when worked with purpose and action. You owe your ideas the service of your best writing, and those who will judge your work—professors, fellowship and award committees, journals, university presses, tenure review boards—will perceive your ideas through the medium of your style. To be sure, the ideas cannot exist but within the medium.
Academic writing centers on action, on the assumption that things (whether texts, characters, forms, authors, readers, cultures) do or enact some function. Richard Lanham, author of Revising Prose (see below), encourages writers to ask “Who’s kicking who?” to specify what action the elements of a given sentence perform. This action provides the backbone, the foundation, of a sentence or piece of prose. For example, we might reword the static sentence, “The seven books of the Harry Potter series have intriguing effects on readers emotionally” to specify the action taking place and, as a consequence, the subject and objective complement: “The Harry Potter books intrigue the reader’s emotions” or “The Harry Potter books affect readers emotionally.” What seemed like one idea in the original sentence we reveal to contain two distinct ideas, and the author can choose which action s/he was trying to convey. In this way and much more generally, academic writing revolves around verbs, and thus the choice of verb, the action around which the sentence (and the argument) builds, becomes the most important a writer makes. You should, as Hamlet rightly says, “suit the action to the word, the
word to the action.”
Other stylistic habits—the good to be practiced, the bad to be shunned—appear below, adapted from a list titled “Suggestions for the Writing of Acceptable Essays,” given to this handbook’s authors by Professor John Rumrich:
- Eliminate weak and extraneous words, such as very, quite, rather, total(ly), somewhat, and the like.
- Never use the passive voice if you can avoid it.
- Avoid vague and wordy approaches to sentences, such as,
o There are…
o It is…
o Another example of…is when…
o It is important to note that…
- Do not dangle modifiers; do not write such sentences as this one: “After presenting a scene of darkness, the boat sits quietly on the Thames.”
- Do not stack up great bunches of prepositional phrases; avoid such sentences as this one: An explanation of the status of mankind with respect to the overall plan is followed by a consideration of the passions.
- Do not use for, as, or since when you mean because.
- Do not use the pronouns this, these, that, those, which, or it unless they have clear and unmistakable antecedents.
- However should not come at the first of a sentence; place it deeper in the sentence: e.g., The irony in The Rape of the Lock, however, grows more complex than one might expect.
- Semi-colons should be used in sentences composed of two independent clauses that are not connected by and, or, for, nor, yet, but.
- Typed dashes are made of two hyphens and no spaces: Shelley—or rather the speaker—begins the stanza with an imperative.
- Avoid vague and static sentences built around the verb to be. Instead of “Hamlet is representative of a new kind of character,” write “Hamlet represents a new kind of character.”
Below is a helpful excerpt from Gerald Graff’s “Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty.” PMLA 115: 5 (October 2000), 1050-1.
Do's and Don'ts for academic writers
1. Be dialogical. Begin your text by directly identifying the prior conversation or debate that you are entering. What you are saying probably won't make sense unless readers know the conversation in which you say it.
2. Make a claim, the sooner the better, and flag it for the reader by a phrase like “My claim here is that [. . .].” You don't have to use such a phrase, but if you can't do so you're in trouble.
3. Remind readers of your claim periodically, especially the more you complicate it. If you're writing about a disputed topic (and if you aren't, why write?), you'll also have to stop and tell readers what you are not saying, what you don't want to be taken as saying. Some of them will take you as saying that anyway, but you don't have to make it easy for them.
4. Summarize the objections that you anticipate can be made (or that have been made) against your claim. Remember that objectors, even when mean and nasty, are your friends--they help you clarify your claim, and they indicate why it is of interest to others besides yourself. If the objectors weren't out there, you wouldn't need to say what you are saying.
5. Say explicitly—or at least imply—why your ideas are important, what difference it makes to the world if you are right or wrong, and so forth. Imagine a reader over your shoulder who asks, “So what?” Or, “Who cares about any of this?” Again, you don't have to write in such questions, but if you were to write them in and couldn't answer them, you're in trouble.
6. (This one is already implicit in several of the above points.) Generate a metatext that stands apart from your main text and puts it in perspective. Any essay really consists of two texts, one in which you make your argument and a second in which you tell readers how (and how not) to read it. This second text is usually signaled by reflexive phrases like “I do not mean to suggest that [. . .],” “Here you will probably object that [. . .],” “To put the point another way [...],” “But why am I so emphatic on this point?,” and “What I've been trying to say here, then, is [. . .].” When writing is unclear or lame (as beginning student writing often is), the reason usually has less to do with jargon or verbal obscurity than with the absence of such metacommentary, which may be needed to explain why it was necessary to write the essay.
7. Remember that readers can process only one claim at a time, so there's no use trying to squeeze in secondary and tertiary claims that are better left for another book, essay, or paragraph or at least for another part of your book or essay, where they can be clearly marked off from your main claim. If you're an academic, you are probably so eager to prove that you've left no thought unconsidered that you find it hard to resist the temptation to say everything at once, and consequently you say nothing that is understood while producing horribly overloaded paragraphs and sentences like this sentence, monster-sized discursive footnotes, and readers who fling your text aside and turn on the TV.
8. Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese—you sometimes need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in the vernacular as well. You'll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is), and you're led to new perceptions.
9. Don't kid yourself. If you could not explain it to your parents or your most mediocre student, the chances are you don't understand it yourself.
None of what I have said in this essay should be mistaken for the claim that all academic scholarship can or should be addressed to a nonacademic audience. The ability to do advanced research and the ability to explain that research to nonprofessional audiences do not always appear in the same person. To adapt a concept from the philosopher Hilary Putnam, there is a linguistic division of labor in which the work of research and that of popularization are divided among different people, as Friedrich Engels was rewrite man for Karl Marx. Yet even Marx's most difficult and uncompromising texts have their Engels moments—Engels could not have summarized Marx's doctrine if they did not. In short, it is time to rethink the view that the university is not in the “gist business.”
Many other books and aids have proven useful in improving academic style. Below are just a few:
Griffith, Kelley. Writing Essays about Literature: A Guide and Style Sheet. Boston: Thomson, 2006. Griffith’s study provides a nice introduction to writing on literary texts, though the guide speaks primarily to undergraduates.
Lanham, Richard. Revising Prose. New York: Longman, 2000. Lanham’s book is a classic guide for making prose dynamic and clear. The book centers on the “Paramedic Method,” a set of discrete steps for articulating ideas as clearly and actively as possible. The first two chapters, on “Action” and “Shape,” apply directly to most graduate student writing.
Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. New York: Longman, 2003. This guide offers a counterpoint of praxis to Lanham’s gnosis.
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