FAQ: Dealing with open-ended essay/assignment prompts; looking over drafts

I’ll happily look over drafts of assignments in progress — whether for my class or for a different class! — but only in real time, during Office Hours, never by email. Bring two printouts if you can (so we can both look at once), but I’ll also look at screens and tablets. We probably won’t get through more than a couple of paragraphs in the time we have available, but we’ll work with the time we have.

All of my assignments, including essay prompts, are available at the primary course website (see links in the menu bar at the top of this page!) from the very beginning of class. I do not circulate any further prompts than that, though I’ll usually bring up upcoming assignments in the weeks before they’re due. Deadlines, guidelines, and specifications are all included at the course we. Read the assignment description at your course website, in full, before posing any clarification questions.

My essay assignments are always open-ended; I am evaluating you based on your ability to generate an innovative and rigorous solution to that open-ended problem.  There can be no single “right way” to do that.  There is no further prompt beyond that.  As long as you adhere to the instructions in the prompt, anything else is fair game (and you may be able to bend the instructions too, if you talk to me about your ideas in Office Hours).

My prompts often allow each student considerable leeway in choosing a topic. While I’m not going to choose your paper topic for you, I’ll gladly offer some tips on how to make that choice yourself:

1. Find something you actually care about, not something you’re writing about as though you cared. Part of the basic skill set of the literature undergraduate is learning to care and learning to see what matters. Find something you’d be willing to chat about in a pub for hours. Condense that passion into the word count. If you’re stuck choosing between two topics, choose the one you’re most excited about, every time.

2. Use what you know. Consider looking at the text by means of expertise you’ve already honed. Some of the best student work submitted to me has been a violinist’s study of a poet’s musicality, a scientist’s critique of a playwright’s use of scientific terms, an activist’s dissection of a text’s gender politic, and so forth. My own published work in early drama studies centers largely on my practical experience in the performing arts. You’ll always need to defer to authorities in any field (your own anecdotal experience is never enough), but your own expertise often provides the best starting point.

3. Choose a topic whose size matches the scope of your assignment. You can’t, in a 1250-word paper, actually write about “Women in Shakespeare.”  Tighten your scope to something very specific so you can explore it thoroughly in the time allotted.

4. Examine the lens, not just the specimen. Sometimes, by using a theoretical or critical lens to deeply analyze a class text, you come away learning something groundbreaking or mindblowing about the lens— something that might cause us to “recalibrate” it. Don’t be afraid to dismantle your tools as subjects of study in themselves.