Today’s Plan:
- Draft/Final Rubric
- Intros and Conclusions
- Scoring a Sample Paper
- Homework
Intros and Conclusions
Introductions have three primary objectives. Of course you know that they lay out the “argument” of a paper. I scare-quote argument because I want to highlight its range of meanings here. It doesn’t necessarily mean argue in our everyday sense. It means something closer to “articulate the purpose of.” This might mean contesting the meaning of a text, advocating for a policy, or contradicting a proposal. But it can also mean something less agonistic.
Introductions should also develop kairos, an ancient Greek term that translates into something like “opportune moment.” It is hard to translate kairos directly into English, because we don’t have an easily accessible sense of time as lived, felt, embodied experience. We tend to think of time as chronos, as measurable passing units. Regardless, an introduction needs to express to the reader why the “argument” you are making matters. And to whom it matters. Who *are* your readers? Why do they care? This is without doubt the hardest thing for me to teach you because doing this well is extraordinarily subtle and requires imaginative role play. I’ve removed it from the rubric this semester, but still call attention to it. In conferences, I asked many of you what your “problem” was and how you could point to evidence of that problem in the intro. That’s building kairos. But it doesn’t necessarily get at the intricacies of “audience.” That is something you will develop as you engage a professional field. Writing about video games in Education is very different than writing about video games in Women and Gender Studies or Cultural Studies or even in my field, Rhetoric and Composition. Each of these professional, scholarly fields has their own expectations, tendencies, accepted methodologies, vocabularies, list of prominent concerns, critical theorists and lenses, etc. etc. etc. This semester I have tried to expose you to a range of research methods, such that you should be able to navigate research and scholarship you encounter in any field. But the exact preferences and expectations will not only vary field to field but professor to professor, since we all can come from different schools of thought and career trajectories.
Now I need to write something about conclusions. I wish I had something really concrete to share, a formula you can follow (like the quasi-formula for an introduction above). Unfortunately, I don’t. I can recite the tired tropes you’ll find it you google “how to write a conclusion”: reiterate your thesis, summarize and point to your key evidence, etc. But that’s not going to produce a great conclusion. The thing about a great conclusion is that it is unpredictably and idiosyncratically tied to its argument. Sometimes it is best to pose a question for future research (although be careful with this strategy). Sometimes you close with an attempt to be prophetic and poetic–to stretch your research to the stars and across the cosmos. Sometimes you want to close emphasizing what the reader can/should *do* next, how to act on the information you have given them. Sometimes you end with a personal anecdote, explaining why this research is so important, why you felt compelled to conduct and share it. Sometimes you end by hoping your research can inspire a change. Sometimes you end with a warning, an attempt at a pathetic appeal for what the world might look like if we ignored this research. Sometimes you end with a different kind of warning, one that acknowledges the limits of your research.
Homework
For Wednesday’s class in the lab, we’ll be reviewing citation formatting. It will be helpful if you have access to a digital copy of your paper draft.
