There are four pages here to help you think about writing. The third is about some common writing problems.
Problems
There are certain things you should not do. Here are the top problems with student papers that I receive. This list hasn’t changed much teaching at Berkeley, Michigan, William & Mary or Illinois, by the way:
1 no clearly identified argument
2. too much plot summary, not enough analysis
3. too much quotation, not enough original thought
4. no evidence to support the argument
5. confusing, ungrammatical writing with illogical connections and nebulous phrases
I’ll talk much more about arguments on the next page, but for now, consider the following types of reading:
• Aesthetic or emotional appreciation:
Did you like the movie? (It was great/beautiful/descriptive/sad/boring…)
• Reading for the plot:
What is the book about? What happens in the story?
• Reading for the characters:
Who are the main characters? What are they like?
• Reading for moral lessons:
What lesson did the hero learn in the book? What did you learn?
• Reading for therapy:
How did this book relate to your life? How did it change you?
It’s not that these aren’t important questions—but they’re easy ones that require little or no interpretive ability or critical thinking. None of these is commonly used in college writing. At more length:
Personal therapy: or ‘How this book made me realize I was oppressed by / co-dependent with /angry at my father.’ There are (at least) two problems with this approach from my perspective: (1) Most often, what seems like a deep realization to you may not mean much to me, simply because I don’t know you the way that you do. More importantly, (2) I have no way of grading such a paper—I’m hardly in a position to grade your self-revelation, am I? (Would I give one student an ‘A’ for a “better” insight, and another a ‘C’ for a mediocre insight? Wouldn’t that be arbitrary, and perhaps a little cruel?) Just as importantly, I can’t offer constructive criticism (‘Good job, but I think you ought to look at your self-destructive relationships with women as well!’). We’re here to talk about books and movies—not us, the readers and spectators.
Psychoanalyzing the author: this means, simply put, trying to figure out what Hemingway’s repressions, desires, fetishes, fantasies, etc. were. That’s all well and good for Hemingway’s biographer, but we’re interested first and foremost in the book, and what it means—the author is only a distant second. Also, how can you prove what Hemingway thought, let alone what his unconscious wishes were? (I can’t even figure out what my unconscious wishes are!) Always remember, we’re here to talk about books and movies—not authors and directors.
Speculation: This is one of the worst, and most common, mistakes that students make. Our goal is to intelligently analyze books and films in this class—not books and films that somebody could have or should have made, but the ones they actually made. From time to time I will get a paper that argues: ‘if Madame Bovary had not read so many romance novels, she would never have committed adultery’ or ‘Zeno Cosini should have made up with his father; that way, he would have found the true meaning of family.’ Well, Madame Bovary did read those novels, she did commit adultery, and Flaubert wrote it that way for a reason—you should always be asking why the author wrote something a particular way, not wondering how it might have been written differently.
Aesthetic appreciation and authorial congratulation: One of the great things about teaching is that I sometimes get to teach books that I really like. Pale Fire is one of my favorite books ever, for example, and I could tell you how great it is for hours—but you’d find your attention wandering after about five or ten minutes. Likewise, ‘what a great book!’ should be avoided in your papers and class discussion. It’s certainly worth noting that an author has tremendously vivid descriptions, or spare, lucid prose, or powerfully realistic and complex characters—but such comments should occupy at most one sentence of your essay. The same goes for congratulating the author (‘Nabokov is a genius, an amazingly good writer’). This prohibition has a flip side; it’s equally unproductive to talk about how ‘boring,’ ‘stupid’ or ‘irritating’ a book or an author is, unless you have a point to make (some people think that Proust wanted to experiment with his reader’s perception of time, and the title of his famous novel does refer to "temps perdu," which also means "wasted time" in French, so perhaps boredom is an important part of the Proust experience). Also, over time I have learned to be a little more humble. Perhaps finding the greatest novels of the last 400 years “boring” tells me more about you than about the novels. So I’ve learned that my dislike of Thomas Mann is probably not a sign of my superior taste and judgment, and more likely a sign that I am not as smart as I like to think I am. Perhaps I shouldn’t declare it publicly—at least not with pride.
Hallmark moments: One of the hardest things to avoid in writing is the trite, the banal, the commonplace. When we write, think, or speak, our first tendency is to fall back on what we know best. Frequently, that means repeating conventional wisdom, quoting pieces of famous movies or TV shows, parroting what we read in the newspapers, and so on. Unfortunately, those ideas are frequently the most worn-out, least effective ways of communicating: they’re often a way of avoiding thinking about a problem rather than confronting it critically. At the level of language, that often means we write using phrases that are trite or even proverbial: ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ ‘two sides of the same coin,’ or ‘ignorance is bliss.’ At the level of analysis, the dependence on conventional ideas can really warp the way students read a book or see a film. Some people can read very unhappy, pessimistic novels, and then write a paper that delivers a happy little moral homily, like ‘everyone needs their family,’ or ‘friends are the most important thing in the world.’ These little moral lessons are rarely the subject of great and enduring works of art—they are more likely to be found on kitschy china figures, needlepoint, inspirational posters or on a Hallmark card. Is the message of Casablanca, “love conquers all” or “love is all you need?” Indeed it is not—it is fact quite literally the opposite. “Sometimes you have to abandon true love because history imposes more important ethical obligations on you”—how does that sound on a Hallmark card? And yet it’s incredibly easy to think that Casablanca is a romantic film, even the romantic film. (Maybe it is!) How about It’s a Wonderful Life? A great film, in which George Bailey watches a hideous series of alternate realities, and in the end, renounces his life-long dream of traveling in order to stay in his small town. "Sometimes you have to give up on your dreams because other people depend on you." Worst Hallmark card ever. The Wizard of Oz is the story of an orphan who is intentionally left out of the storm cellar during a tornado (you don’t believe me? Watch that sequence opening again and see what really happens, not what you expect to see!) after her aunt and uncle agree to have her dog put to death (a fact which has not changed at the end of the movie, by the way). Saman Rushdie, the Nobel-prize winning author, noted that the actual message of the film, there's no place like home," is meant absolutely literally: Dorothy is an orphan, and she has no home anywhere. "There is no place that even vaguely resembles home for you" is yet another terrible Hallmark card. Even those texts that appear to offer heartwarming lessons generally do not—if they do, they are usually quickly forgotten, because such morals are trite, boring, and usually untrue. Love is not “all you need,” nor does it “conquer all”; ignorance is rarely, if ever, bliss; and so on. These sayings stick around because they provide comfort, not because they are true.
Ready to move on, and read about actual writing? Let's go to page 4.