On paper, a muddled sentence is indistinguishable from a muddled thought. There is just no obvious way for your reader to discover what you know or think apart from your expression of it. In that limited sense, the content of your thought is generally inseparable from the form of its expression.
Some people would go even further and argue that thought and expression are practically the same thing. One thinks in words, after all - especially when one is thinking about intellectual matters - and so the way a thought is worded, goes the argument, is precisely the thought itself. Cast the thought into other words and it becomes, subtly or blatantly, a different thought.
In that larger sense, a muddled sentence may be regarded as the result of a muddled thought, and your expression of what you know or believe can be seen as a primary mode of knowing or believing itself. That is, you actually discover what you think by speaking it or writing it down.
The epistemological complexities of this argument need not concern us here. Whether your expression is literally equivalent to, or merely difficult to distinguish from, your knowledge, the notion that a reader can separate what you know from how you say it - judging the content apart from its form - is a kind of nonsense, and most of your instructors will quite properly give your written work just a single grade reflecting both.
That you may feel you know more than your papers and exams reflect - that you are sure you understood something but couldn't say it well - is, sad fact, just not relevant.
Thus, of all the skills taught in Freshman Studies, none is of greater practical importance to you than writing.
For better or worse, you are going to be judged throughout your college career by your performance on term papers and essay-type exams, and those judgments (that is, your grades) will inevitably reflect the quality of your prose as well as the extent of your knowledge.
Of course, a small number of freshmen arrive at Lawrence with highly developed writing abilities. If you are among them, your papers will always be clear, well-organized, insightful, error-free, and sometimes even elegant. You will consistently receive top grades in your Freshman Studies assignments, as well as in your other written coursework, and much of what we will say here need not particularly concern you.
On the other end of the spectrum is another small number of freshmen who have severe mechanical deficiencies in their writing. They may be victims of inadequate high school preparation, they may suffer from some sort of learning disability, or they may not have English as a native language - for whatever reason, they will have great difficulty meeting even the minimal standards for satisfactory written work at Lawrence. For such students, more substantial help than we can offer in this guide is available. They should enroll immediately in the Writing Lab and begin receiving the tutorial assistance they require.
The great majority of freshmen, however, fall into neither of these extreme categories.
If you are part of that majority, your first written work in Freshman Studies will probably come back to you with lots of marginal scrawls and criticisms, some of which you may think are niggling or unfair, and perhaps a far lower grade than the ones you used to receive in high school. Do not be dismayed. Your instructor's criticisms should be seen as an indication that you are going to be held to much higher writing standards at Lawrence than in high school, and that learning those standards, and the habits of thought that produce them, will be a significant part of your education.
It should encourage you to know that most Lawrence seniors manage to produce far better written work than most Lawrence freshmen, and to remember, as you struggle with your writing, that in a few years you will be one of those seniors.
To put that another way, much of what you will learn about writing at Lawrence will come as part of the larger process of your education as a whole. Good writing, as we've already suggested, is born of close reading, clear thinking, and attention to detail, and the entire curriculum at Lawrence is meant to foster those skills. Good writing also is a result of having something substantial to say, and your collegc education is meant to increase your personal stock of substantial things to say. In addition, your writing will improve in particular disciplines because part of what you will learn from your classwork and readings are the appropriate models for written work in those disciplines.
In short, the writing you will do in Freshman Studies is meant only as the beginning of the long process of learning to write well, and that process is, in a sense, your education itself.
But still, one must begin.
What follows is meant to help you begin and to focus the efforts you will have to make.
FUNDAMENTALS
There is no such thing as good writing in the abstract. There are only particular pieces of writing, each with its own demands and procedures, each more or less successful in accomplishing the writer's intent. Even the best writers in one mode may flounder whcn they attempt another. The formal objectivity that makes for fine writing in a lab report, for example, may not produce a satisfying analysis of a novel or a sonnet, nor does one go about writing a philosophical essay and a job application with quite the same scrupulous rigor. Thus, you are not seeking to master a single skill called good writing; rather, you are trying to produce various types of good writing one at a time.
All successful pieces of writing, however, have a few fundamental qualities in common.
Consider a form of writing that most Lawrence students can accomplish quite successfully: a letter written home to a parent to ask for more money.
What are the conditions that make writing such a letter relatively easy even for students who find academic writing agonizing and unrewarding?
First, they have something specific, important, and personal to say. The letter has a clear and definite purpose, and success in achieving that purpose is easy to measure - by the size of the check that arrives in the return mail.
Second, they know their audience. That is, they know what sorts of things their audience will be interested in hearing and what forms of persuasion are most likely to increase the size of the hoped-for check.
Third, they write their letters more or less naturally. They do not need to pretend to be smarter or better-read or more intellectual than they actually are by, for example, using high-flown rhetoric in an attempt to sound profound. Trusting their audience to appreciate them for what they are, they are free to write in their own most comfortable way. They don't think about "style" as they write, but they have a clear sense of what sorts of words and phrases are appropriate to the occasion, and they simply trust that sense.
These, then, are the fundamental conditions for good writing:
* having something to say,
* knowing your audience,
* and writing naturally.
To write well for any occasion all you have to do is approximate those conditions. Good writing follows from them. Poor writing, conversely, is often a result of a failure to meet those conditions. Too often students attempt to write papers when they have nothing much to say, little notion of what is expected by their audience, and little faith in their own ability to write in a style that their audience will find pertinent or interesting. The result is often a paper filled with apparently mechanical "writing problems" - vagueness, poor organization, verbosity, grammatical errors, carelessness, typos, and all the rest - even though the true fundamentals of writing have little to do with mechanics. After all, it's awfully hard to write well when you are addressing a vacuum and saying nothing in a voice that is not your own.
HAVING SOMETHING TO SAY
Stop reading for a moment and look around. You are, we will suppose, in a room somewhere. Your assignment is to describe that room completely. Question: how many pages will you have to write to fulfill the assignment?
It should immediately occur to you that a room consists of thousands of details and that to describe even a simple room completely would encompass all of them; thus, a thorough-going description of the room would fill hundreds of pages.
Some of those pages would note the physical characteristics of the walls and floors and ceilings, their sizes and shapes, their cracks and blemishes, the materials they are made of, and so on. Other pages would be devoted to a full description of each of the myriad contents of the room: furniture, rugs, decorations, windows, lamps, knickknacks, pictures, dustballs, molecules of air. Still other pages would convey the emotional qualities of the room, the feelings it generates at various times of the day, and the various things (objects, colors, tricks of lighting) that produce those feelings. Still more pages would give a moment by moment account of the history of the room, how it was built, what has happened in it, the larger building to which it belongs.
The task, in fact, is endless. You just can't describe a room completely.
Before you can even begin to fulfill the assignment, then, you will have to know what specific aspect of the room is to be described, and what purpose the description will serve. Then, of the thousands of different details available, you can choose the few that are most pertinent.
All right: describe the room for someone who is coming to paint it.
That assignment is simple enough. You measure the walls, you note the obstacles, you judge by the height of the ceiling the size ladder that will be needed, and so on, and you write these details down in a fairly straightforward listing.
Now describe the room for a health inspector who is interested in its chemical hazards and radioactivity levels.
A bit more difficult, perhaps, but, with the proper equipment and training, you can analyze the chemical and radioactive properties of the room and its contents, and complete the assignment.
Now describe the room for a friend who has never seen it. That's more difficult still, but again the job consists of choosing from among thousands of possible details the few that are important for your purpose.
One can easily imagine dozens of other different audiences and purposes for your description. The important thing is that in every case you begin with many details and you fulfill the assignment by selecting the most pertinent ones.
In short, the basic unit of writing is the detail - the small, concrete observations that make up your experience of any complicated object - and the challenge of writing is to choose from among many possible details the few that serve a particular purpose, and then to arrange them in a suitable order.
Substitute a book or a work of art for the room and the challenge remains the same. Again you are faced with a multitude of details; again you will have to select from those details according to your purpose.
In Freshman Studies, the crucial stock of details with which you must begin comes from your close reading of the text and your discussion of it in class.
If you have not read the work closely and understood it, if you have had no observations of your own to contribute to the class discussion, then you will have no stock of details from which to draw. Your writing will then become the hopeless chore of writing about nothing.
But having a stock of details is not enough; you also need a purpose which guides your selection of the appropriate ones. That is, you have to have something to say.
In Freshman Studies, your purpose, guided by the particular assignments, is to contribute in some small, original way to the on-going general argument about the work at hand.
In short, you have to develop a thesis.
DEVELOPING A THESIS
A thesis is the particular argument you are going to make about some aspect of the work at hand. It is your way of joining in the larger argument that, as we have seen, surrounds any important book or artwork. It is your purpose for writing the paper and guides your selection of the particular details you will mention. If you have no thesis to argue, you have nothing to say.
A thesis can take many forms. It may arise out of your interpretation or understanding of a complicated thought or passage in the work; it may be your response to a writer's controversial idea or assertion; it may be sparked by an insight you have had about a work's overall structure; it may be a way of bringing parts of two different works together. You will learn, as you go along, to add many other kinds of theses to this list.
That Plato develops an ideal state in The Republic is not a thesis; it's merely a fact. That you believe Plato's ideal state is un-American is not a thesis; it's merely an anachronistic opinion. That Plato deals with the role of artists in his ideal state is not a thesis; it's merely a topic. That Plato's ideal state is built on principles of order rather than principles of freedom is a kind of thesis all right, but not a useful one for a short paper since it is too large and general to lead to specific, detailed insights. That Plato seems to argue that freedom is not important for artistic production is a thesis that, with further refinement, might be satisfactorily pursued.
How to pursue it?
First, by asking yourself what you know and believe about the relationship between freedom and artistic production. Does an artist need freedom to create art? Can art be created even if the artist's freedom is subordinated to communal order? Unless you have some thoughts about these matters, unless, that is, the question is of some interest to you, you will have no reason to pursue this particular thesis and won't be able to write seriously or convincingly about it.
Second, having come to your own tentative conclusions - your own contribution to the argument - you go to Plato's text looking for specific passages where the topic is treated. What does Plato actually say? Did you understand him correctly before or must you now change your notions of what he said? Which passages best state his opinions on the question? (Note them carefully; you'll probably want to quote them in your paper.) Do you agree with his arguments? Are his arguments sound, or does he contradict himself? If you disagree with his arguments, what sorts of arguments will you have to make to refute him? How will you find evidence for your arguments?
Notice that your thesis has given you a way of entering a part of the text and collecting the pertinent details and a pattern for assembling those details in a useful order. It wifl lead to notes and an outline. Now, with something to say, with details assembled and a tentative ordering of them at hand, you are ready to begin writing.
In writing your paper, you will want to introduce your argument by stating your thesis, which, in refinement, will probably say something specific about Plato's opinions about artistic freedom and suggest your attitude toward what Plato has said.
The body of the paper will then follow from the thesis and answer, in specific detail, some of the questions suggested above. It will contain a description of Plato's specific assertions on the topic, quoting him where appropriate, along with your own specific judgments about Plato's assertions.
In writing for Freshman Studies, of course, Plato's assertions will (and should) loom far larger than your judgments of them. It is primarily your clear understanding of Plato that is being examined. As your education proceeds and you acquire expertise, your own judgments will take on greater importance.
REACHING A CONCLUSION
Some high school teachers, and even a few college instructors, tell their students that the basic structure of a thesis paper is as follows - state your thesis, dcvelop your thesis, and, in conclusion, re-state your thesis. For fledgling writers, who may have trouble giving their papers a coherent order, that it reasonable advice. The circle is a simple, and thus useful, kind of form, and form of some sort is necessary in writing if the thoughts are to seem organized and orderly. But on a more advanced level, a higher form of order is needed. A good conclusion should actually conclude and not merely repeat. That is, it should reiterate the thesis in order to bring it to a higher level - think of it as more a spiralling than a circular effect.
Say, for example, your thesis argues that artists need freedom in order to produce art, and so the kind of art that Plato wants for his ideal state cannot be achieved; your conclusion might then state that, in similar fashion, people assigned other roles in society need freedom to perform those roles well, and that, as with the artists, limiting their freedom will undermine Plato's desired end.
Generalizing your thesis is, of course, only one of many ways to reach a suitable conclusion.
A NOTE ON ORIGINALITY
In Freshman Studies, you witl usually be asked to write papers based upon your own reading and experience of the various works, rather than upon secondary sources. That is, in some sense, you will be asked to be original!* A truly original idea, however, is a rare commodity. Even rarer is an original idea developed and made useful. Sooner or later most students go through the sobering experience of discovering that most of their own "original" ideas have been around for a long time and are the commonplace stuff of intellectual discourse - are often, indeed, cliches. This is particularly true of the largest sorts of ideas, the ones that seem to give such thrilling insight into the purpose of life, the nature of the universe, or the mind of God.
For example, most adolescents wonder at some point if the world is just a dream, or an illusion put into their heads by some higher creature, and their wondering is often charged with powerful emotions of self-discovery. For them to learn, then, that Descartes had wondered about such things in the seven- teenth century, had, in fact, built an entire philosophy around a response to such skeptical thoughts, may be dismaying. Similar examples can be found for practically all the large "original" thoughts college freshmen harbor.
Which is not to say that your own originality is unimportant. It is merely to suggest that true originality manifests itself most often in small ways - in the particular insights that come of close reading, for example, or the illuminations to be had from comparing particular aspects of things that others might not have thought of comparing before. To put that another way, originality is usually specific, seldom general; and when it is general (as in the powerful ideas of thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, or Darwin), it always rests upon a solid foundation of particularities and a solid knowledge of the old ideas against which originality must be measured.
It is in these small, but valuable, ways that your Freshman Studies instructors expect you to be original.
KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE
The primary audience for your Freshman Studies paper is your instructor.
We have already spoken at length about the importance of getting to know your Freshman Studies instructors, and understanding the particular roles they play in the course. As you prepare to write for them, think about their classroom methods, their approaches to the particular works, their prejudices and idiosyncrasies, and the sorts of theses that might most interest them. If you have any questions about these things, go to your instructor and ask. You are, after all, writing to be read and understood, and if you are not addressing your specific audience - if you write merely to please yourself, in your own private language, with your own private logic - nothing much can be communicated.
On the other hand, do not write merely to please your instructor either. If you do not believe in what you are saying, you will have no reason to say it well. Your task is to persuade, not pander. In all writing, your task is to communicate your own convictions and thoughts and insights in a language your audience will appreciate and understand.
Unfortunately, students too often fail to believe that any real communication is possible in a writing assignment. Their only goal is to "psych out" their instructors, or impress them, or tell them only what they want to hear. The essential dishonesty of this approach makes the writing of such papers - and the reading of them - an empty and tedious exercise.
If you can manage to address yourself to your instructors in a spirit of honest enquiry, with a sense of expressing your own truest insights (and confusions) to an audience that is open to new arguments and authentically curious to know what you think, then useful communication might just take place. At best, you might even reform your instructors' opinions or teach them something.
WRITING NATURALLY
If you want to become a great writer, someone once said, become a great person and then write naturally. Too often students make the mistake of thinking that success in academic writing will come if only they manage to sound like someone they're not, someone smarter, better read, more sophisticated, and so on. What that leads to in practice is writing that is filled with pretension in its literal sense: big words, often misused; ornate prose, often riddled with errors; the largest sorts of ideas, often misunderstood or inappropriately applied. Moreover, such papers are often unduly solemn, forgetting that lightness of tone and a bit of well-placed humor can often be useful in clinching an argument.
The solution is to be yourself and write in your own voice, for better or worse, about ideas you feel competent to understand and master, being serious rather than solemn.
On the other hand, writing in your own voice does not mean writing with excessive informality. As we have suggested above, you are writing for a particular audience - your instructor - and the voice you use must be appropriate to that specific and rather formal occasion. just as you do not talk to, say, your faculty adviser in the same tone as you use for your roommate, so you should not write a Freshman Studies paper in the "natural" tone you would use for a letter to your best friend. To do so, in fact, is unnatural in that it goes against both the nature of the occasion and your own nature as a multi-faceted, flexible being.
Seek, then, your own true voice somewhere in the middle ground between excessive pretension and excessive informality, saying what you mean as clearly and naturally as possible, trusting your authentic insights and understanding, and being prepared to learn from the feedback you will receive how to move in your own way toward those more sophisticated forms of tone and approach that produce the best academic writing.
COPING WITH A POOR ASSIGNMENT
Your writing in Freshman Studies will be guided, of course, by the particular assignments your instructors will give you. The assignments are designed to lead you toward a suitable thesis, but, instructors being human, some assignments will achieve their purpose better than others. Remember: the assignment is meant to be a help, not a hurdle or a straitjacket. If you do not like the assignment, or if it fails to suggest a thesis you want to pursue, there are several things you can do about it.
First, take a closer look at the assigmment. Usually it will be broad enough to induce a variety of different approaches, and if you think about it hard enough, you are likely to find a way to use the assignment to produce a thesis that interests you.
Second, if you remain unable to respond honestly to the assignment, if you want to write about a thesis that does not seem to fit it, go to your instructor and ask if you can ignore the assigmment and pursue your own topic. Obviously, this should be done soon after you receive the assignment, not the day before it is due. In most cases, if your own approach seems reasonable and not likely to lead you astray, your instructor will be happy to let you go your own way. After all, instructors may wrack their brains to come up with good assignments, but they are not always delighted with the ones they assign.
Third, in those few cases when the instructors are stubborn and insist that you write only what their miserable, boring assignment demands, use the occasion to learn something about writing. That is, even if you find yourself uninterested in what you are saying, retain your passion for the act of writing itself, letting the perfecting of your prose become an end in itself. Writing is, among other things, like music, wondrous for its purely formal qualities. How a thing is said, after all, is a large part, as we have seen, of the thing itself.
TURNING IN PAPERS
Your paper assignments will tell you precisely when your papers are due. Observe the due date! If for any reason you cannot have a paper in on time, be sure to request an extension from your instructor well before the due date.
Most instructors will announce their own policies about lateness and extensions on the first day of class or at the time of the first paper assignment.
Because there have been occasional problems with missing papers, papers should be turned in either in class, or to your instructor's mailbox, or to your instructor in person during office hours. (Do not slide papers under office doors or leave them in the little boxes outside the offices in Main Hall.) Individual instructors may have their own policies for turning in papers and other written work and will inform you of them.
SUMMARY
* Know what you are talking about. Prepare yourself for writing by understanding the details of the work you are discussing and the meanings of the idea covered in classes and lectures.
* Write as clearly as you can. Never sacrifice clarity because you are afraid of sounding simple-minded.
* Write as intelligently as you can. But don't try to sound more intelligent than you are.
* Mean what you write. Don't try to tell your instructors what you think they want to hear. Tell them, instead, what you know or at least believe to be the case.
* See the various appendices for particular kinds of writing problems and solutions.
Footnote:
* When you're not being original, you must be scrupulous about citing your sources (see pages 39 and 40 for some notes on plagiarism and citation).
