Today’s Plan:
- The Time of the Drafting Has Arrived
- Revisiting the Paper Outline
- Writing a Lit Review
- Working with Sources in the Text
The Time of the Drafting Has Arrived
An annual tradition, Toothpaste for Dinner. While I have seen drafts of the methodology and progress in your worklogs, it is likely time for a little panic. Conferences are next week, which means paper drafts are due Saturday or Monday night. This week, we write.
The Paper Outline (and Some Specs)
Specs:
- Generally speaking, I do not like giving length requirements for these papers. They are as long as they need to be to do all the things. If it comforts you, then I would say that papers are generally 10-16 double-spaced pages in length. While some will be longer than that, it is *very* difficult to complete the assignment in fewer than 8 pages. Some of your methodologies will be 4 pages long!
- Papers need to be in MLA, APA, or Chicago Style format. The University (and the State of Colorado) require that I grade papers for this. We’ll be working on paper format a bit Wednesday.
- Rather than impose a source minimum, I’ll say that papers need to supply evidence for claims and contain a thorough lit review or build a comprehensive lens.
- The paper has to use sub-headings. See below.
- Papers should have a title that does not suck. We will review this Friday the 17th.
Questions?
Revisiting the Paper Outline
This semester I have emphasized the typical research paper outline:
- Introduction
- Literature Review
- Methodology
- Findings
- Discussion
- Conclusion
That outline won’t work for every project. But understanding what those subheadings do can be helpful for organizing your material. I also want to talk about other potential subheadings.
Okay, let me start with those headings above:
- Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Lays out some context: why discuss this now? why is this research valuable. Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions. You write this last so that you can preview what the paper *actually* proves instead of laying out what it hopes/aims to do.
- Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles.
- Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
- Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. I don’t think that any of you are working on these kinds of projects, except for those who are extending our race and gender projects. In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
- Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).
Before I go on to talk about writing up a literature review, let me discuss how this might change for a more interpretive, humanities-based paper (like, say, a Sicart paper).
- Introduction
- Lit Review / Background Info On a Game [if, say, this is too long for the introduction; this might be a lit review of previous scholarship on the game and/or some background information about the game–its characters etc. Whether you describe the game in the introduction or in a separate section is up to you. I tend to prefer a separate section, but it really depends on the game’s complexity]
- Building a Critical Lens
- Lens Element #1
- Lens Element #2
- Lens Element #3
- Conclusion
Or
- Introduction
- Background Info On a Game [if, say, this is too long for the introduction; this might be a lit review of previous scholarship on the game and/or some background information about the game–its characters etc. Whether you describe the game in the introduction or in a separate section is up to you. I tend to prefer a separate section, but it really depends on the game’s complexity]
- Building a Critical Lens
- Scene #1
- Scene #2
- Scene #3
- Conclusion
Like a massive 5 paragraph essay, both versions above assume that your critical lens has 3 elements (like, say, player complicity, wicked problems, and forced reflection). Please note–while I use “5 paragraphs” as a reference here, each of these ideas will likely require several paragraphs. Note that it doesn’t have to be 3 elements either. It could be one. It could be two. It could be six.
Note, too, that, like a 5 paragraph essay, my second version above assumes you will analyze 3 different scenes or decisions. It could be two scenes. It could be five.
What is important here is that you determine how to structure your analysis. Do you want to move through one “critical lens” concept at a time, discussing how it appears in several different scenes in a game? Do you want to, for instance, talk about player complicity all at once?
Or do you want to organize your material by specific scene, discussing how each of the three elements does (or does not) operate?
Writing a Literature Review
In short, a literature review is summary of previous research and findings on your topic. This is pretty clear gut for the female protagonist sexuality / body image folks, because you are building your work off of previous studies, and there’s a bunch of other similar studies that you can summarize.
This will likely be tricky for the other folks. If you are writing about Undertale, then, cool! There’s a bunch of other studies about Undertale, but I don’t think they are necessarily doing what either group in here is trying to do. You still have to summarize them. You have to acknowledge that you have done the work and surveyed previous scholarship. One reason this is important: in your discussion section, you can put your work in conversation with that previous scholarship. So flushing out a literature review helps you write a smarter discussion section (no matter what kind of paper you are writing).
I would focus my literature review on the game you have selected. Save any research on Sicart or ethical decision-making (the Ryan et al) for the lens section. Make sense?
Writing a Literature Review
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I co-wrote a research article on multimodal artist Maira Kalman. The article reported on a multimodal project I developed for a Digital Video course on how Kalman’s approach to art echoed “radical” rhetorical theorists on the unpredictable nature of creative invention–on how we cannot teach creativity, but we can teach habits, practices, approaches, that might allow something creative to happen.
The original outline of that paper looked like this:
- Introduction
- Surveying Theories of Choric Invention
- Gregory Ulmer
- Thomas Rickert
- Byron Hawk
- Jeff Rice
- Sarah Arroyo
- Colin Brooke
- Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic
Our reviewer feedback was tough, but fair:
On a similar note, the theoretical chops of this article come forward as relatively unconnected blocks. In the ULMER section, we get a block on Ulmer, interspersed with several others, but then it becomes a set of legos: a green block (Rickert [and Rickert and Kristeva]), then a red block (Hawk), then yellow (Brooke [and Brooke and Barthes]), then blue (Arroyo [and Arroyo and Deleuze and Guattari]), then purple (Rice [and Rice and De Certeau]). Each of these feels strangely disconnected and underdeveloped, particularly given the potential connections between Kalman’s work and each of these authors (as well as the theorists they are working in relation to).
Essentially, we had walked through our literature, or research, one source at a time (even if each of those sections often involved multiple sources). What we didn’t do is cut across all those sources to identify the most important ideas they have in common. We didn’t synthesize our sources.
Our second outline looks like this:
- Introduction
- Synthesizing Theories of Choric Invention
- Prioritizing Space
- Juxtaposing Subjective (Affective) Experience Alongside Objective History
- Resisting Synthesis
- Resisting Codification
- Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic
The difference here is essential: moving from talking about one source at a time to explicating an idea. The Prioritizing Space section has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Juxtaposing Subjective.. section also has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Resisting Synthesis section has references to Brook and Arroyo. The Resisting Codification section has references to all of them, and brings in Rice and Shipka. I put this section last because it was the one idea that runs through all of the stuff I read.
Now I had a clear structure in place (four elements of choric invention) to read Maira Kalman’s work (and then to ask my students to consider in creating video remediations of their experiences in historic/affective spaces).
The point of the long story is this: whether you are writing a social/scientific research paper or a humanities scholarly analysis, you need to organize your lit review around ideas, not around names or articles (and researchers and scholars have names. Don’t write “this article” in an annotation or research paper).
Working with Sources in the Text
First, some review. I shared this way back in the beginning of class, but, as you prepare to draft your papers, it is likely time to revisit it.
