ENG 281: Collaborative Scholarly Paper (CSP)
The published essays you will read in ENG 281 extend across many pages, single-spaced, in peer-reviewed journals or collections. Essays like these tend to emerge first, however, as double-spaced printouts of 8-10 pages – as conference papers.
In the final weeks of class, student volunteers from each tutorial group will present a conference-length scholarly paper of 8-10 pages, and then all the authors will field questions from fellow students.
These scholarly papers will be written by YOU: each paper will be produced in collaboration by a different tutorial half-group (that is, one half of your tutorial group, working collaboratively as a group of 6-8 students), who will work on it throughout term. And each member of your tutorial half-group will receive the same grade for this assignment (assuming that each member shows up to the collaboration sessions reasonably well-prepared and ready to contribute – in cases in which a TA determines that a student has repeatedly failed to do their part, the TA may recommend that the student receive a proportionately lower grade than the rest).
Some of the work on the Collaborative Scholarly Paper will be done during tutorial, but each half-group will be responsible for planning and executing the writing of its CSP outside of class. I recommend meeting on your own, weekly, in real-time weekly, and using a Google Doc to allow for group-based editing and co-writing. Know ahead of time that some students will do more work than others; some students will learn best by being carried along by the momentum of other students. No one, of course, will have to do more work than is usually required for an English class — that is, to write one paper. The trick is not to get too precious about all this: remember, we’re process-based.
Your TA will guide you, and sometimes collaborate with you, on the CSP as it develops through the second half of term — your group of 6-8 students will have six weeks to work on it together. During the second half of term, Prof. Sergi will read and comment on an abstract for each paper; then, in Weeks X and XI, he’ll offer each half-group an opportunity to workshop a draft during our full-class meeting.
The prompt for this essay is very open-ended:
Choose any one of the following texts:
- Carson’s “Wildly Constant,”
- Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,”
- Soutar’s Seeds,
- Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar,
- Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,”
- or any of Shakespeare’s first 20 Sonnets.
Choose one small but significant element of your text to focus on — one that will yield, after in-depth reading and consideration of previous criticism, a compelling new way to look at part of (or all of) the text. Execute a close analytical reading of that element that is ambitious, risky, complex, deep, and non-obvious enough (especially in relation to prior research) that a scholarly argument is required to explain and defend it. Return to that element or passage again and again, deepening, making changes, and engaging with research as necessary. Articulate your argument as an 8-10 page analytical essay, which communicates a coherent, complex, innovative, urgent, well-crafted thesis in a logically organized, thoroughly researched, and rigorously focused way. The style, tone, and formatting should be straightforward, professional, and mature. Include no information that is not immediately relevant to your primary focus. In short, your job is to convince your professor, after a single read-through of your essay from beginning to end, of something that they did not know or believe before about your text of choice, which will change forever the way they understand (and teach) that text. Pro-tip: you should attach most of this prompt to ANY humanities essay assignment you receive in the future.
Your TA will improvise or modify the writing process for this project to best fit the needs and strengths of your particular tutorial half-group – but that said, the assignment will likely break down as follows:
1. Initial development of ideas/subject matter. Choose the text and topic your tutorial half-group will focus on. It’s likely the best choice to identify a text in which multiple members – and especially the TA! – are already engaged or invested. Each student will be expected to contribute ideas and opinions to these discussions.
2. Hypothesis and abstract. Each student will be expected to come to tutorial ready to articulate a plan of approach, based on initial scholarly research into the topic, then to contribute to the collaborative writing of an abstract – a formal paper proposal.
3. Further research into your subject. The class will compile a draft bibliography — a list of promising sources, with citations that are clear, consistent, and clean;
4. Receive feedback. Prof. Sergi will send each group extensive – I mean extensive – commentary on their abstract and bibliography, with critiques and ideas for further development.
5. Drafting of the paper can be done in multiple ways. Perhaps individual paragraphs and topics can be assigned to students to write outside of class (possibly with access to the draft online). Perhaps one student will initiate an early partial draft, then pass it to another student to expand and revise, then another student, relay-race style. There will be opportunities for collaborative writing, revising, and harmonizing in class, led by the TA, but student half-groups should also meet independently in real time to hold their own sessions. It is up to the TA to organize these different modes of drafting according to the particular needs of the paper and the group.
6. Workshopping: In Weeks X and XI, Prof. Sergi will allow each group to present their work-in-progress in class; he will provide each group with more extensive commentary on their draft, with critiques and ideas for further development. Take this feedback very seriously.
7. Be sure to allow time for the final revision and proofreading of the paper, both in order to work through Prof. Sergi’s feedback and to ensure that the final copy is near-perfect in terms of proofreading and tone.
8. Each half-group will be assigned a presentation day and time in our final week of classes. Each group will also be responsible for emailing a final copy of their essay to the TA and to Prof. Sergi at least half an hour before their presentation begins.
9. How your group fields questions after the presentation will be taken into account for your final CSP grade — it can only improve the grade, though (it won’t bring it down). The quality of questions that each student asks other groups will also be weighed significantly for each student’s Engagement and Participation grade (again, it can only improve that grade).
10. Evaluation: After classes have ended, Prof. Sergi will email you one last round of in-depth comments on and critiques of your final paper, as well as a numerical grade (which will be shared by your whole half-group); we’ll discuss the best way to receive comments, critiques, and grades in our discussion of Process. The criteria for Prof. Sergi’s evaluation will be, naturally, your paper’s Specificity, Clarity, Rigor, Innovation, Precision, Tone, Focus, Economy, Stakes, Complexity, and Depth. Be sure to consult the lectures/handouts for ENG 281’s 12 Criteria as you work.
Note: This is a collaborative exercise, not an exercise in perfectionist egalitarianism! It is inevitable that different students will engage with the paper project in different ways, and with differing intensities. Get used to the possibility that you may be putting in more energy or time than someone else on your team – if that’s so, then the someone else may have a lot to learn by working alongside you, and that’s the point. Encourage your fellow students to get their voices heard (your TA will do the same), but don’t begrudge fellow students the process that feels most comfortable to them. You may find that some of your colleagues surprise you: different collaborators may be more or less inclined to shine at different stages of the process.