The comments below reflect patterns across at least 90% of the entire class. Whether or not you receive individual comments on your essay draft, it’s likely that one of the tasks below is something you need to look for as you revise.
Focus on these suggestions as you work towards your second draft of the Conversation Essay (due in the final portfolio). To train yourself to be able to locate and identify these issues on your own in the fall, I recommend going down the list one by one, first reading one bullet point, then double-checking your essay to see if it applies; then moving to the next bullet point, checking if it applies; and so on until you’re satisfied you’ve revised whatever needs revising from the list.
Bullet points are not necessarily listed in order of importance but to meet the parameters of this assignment, anything to do with claims, specificity, and conversation is essential. Always work on HOCs (higher-order concerns) before working on LOCs (lower-order concerns) when revising.
If you received specific comments (which is unlikely this round), refer to them after you’ve reviewed everything in this list.
HOCs
- Claim: Make sure to address what makes your exhibit a snap or a political/strategic use of anger (or the notable absence of either), how it manifested, and why did it manifest that way (or not manifest at all).
- Account for the differences. Your exhibit/claim differs from Ahmed’s and Lorde’s, so make sure to explain how their ideas connect to yours despite the differences. Detail what those differences are, especially regarding differences in privilege, and remember that we all have partial privilege: e.g., an experience as a Latino man = male privilege, racialized anger; as a white lesbian = white privilege, queer anger; etc. These differences are important in making sure you avoid flattening the authors’ ideas to “prove” or “support” your own. Support is better enacted when the differences are accounted for.
- Avoid being speculative. You are not a mind reader, and without interviews and outside research (neither of which you should be doing for a paper like this), you can’t really know what the people in your anecdote or incident are thinking. Phrasing that suggests telepathy includes “She/he/they think/feel/believe/etc.,” or phrasing that suggests that you know why the person behaved that way based on their beliefs or feelings (as opposed to the concrete actions you are examining). You don’t know what they believe or feel, so consider only the information in front of you, and stick very close to only that.
- Avoid praise or criticism. This comes off as “pure” opinion and is generally unnecessary in moving your discussion forward since you’re not convincing your reader of anything. Don’t waste space/time on celebrating the snap, or celebrating that you or someone else snapped in that moment. By that same token, don’t waste space criticizing the pressures that led to that snap. Most of this work can be done in a paragraph or less, if you must include the information, but be careful not to set it up like a series of Chekhov’s guns/red herrings the reader keeps waiting for you to analyze.
- Avoid hypotheticals. Your exhibit should be something concrete, not a hypothetical scenario. If you’ve made it up just to fit your essay, your reader will feel as though the essay itself doesn’t really say anything worth applying to their life or other lived experience, as it’s tailored to fit your purpose and not an analysis of real, subjective experience.
- Avoid art, literature, music, film. If you write about fictional characters or artwork or literature, you’ve now tacked on extra work: you must be able to engage in literary criticism, art criticism, historical analysis, and then also explain how you are able to apply Ahmed’s and Lorde’s ideas about real experiences to representations of real experiences which (even if they’re based on reality) are ultimately a simulation of reality, not real themselves.
- Exhibit. This tends to work best as your first paragraph, either its own paragraph or incorporated into the claim paragraph. Remember, your claim must be formulated around the exhibit, so think about the order in which the reader needs to see information. Keep this concise. Your essay is not a narrative, and so ultimately the reader is not interested in the full developed story or your feelings about that story, but how it serves as a manifestation of some of the ideas Ahmed and Lorde are describing. Put differently, offer the moment of the snap or the moment the snap didn’t happen, NOT the history or context that caused it. Critiquing social norms about feminine beauty is not a snap; the moment when your mother insisted yet again you apply Fair and Lovely and you poured the bottle down the sink and criticized Indian beauty standards as colonial and casteist — that is the snap, and that’s the exhibit. Limit yourself to 1-2 paragraphs in which you introduce and summarize the anecdote or incident. Include only the details you plan to reference and analyze throughout the rest of your essay. For instance, if a woman writer tells a story about snapping back at a sexist friend and recounts how this friend told her to know her place and that’s when she punched him in the mouth in public, the reader would expect 2 specific details to reappear and be analyzed later on: 1) why being told to “know her place” propelled the snap; and 2) how punching him in the mouth in public constitutes a kind of snap and/or transformative moment of anger. Try to think of it like every detail must come back. Thus, the more concise you are, the better.
- Create conversation. If you’re having trouble creating conversation, think back to our discussion of the Venn diagram, the nuances in each reading and the nuances that emerge when they’re placed together. After you introduce each essay separately, you should have at least 1 paragraph where an idea of Ahmed’s and an idea of Lorde’s coexist in the same paragraph. Imagine that they’re talking to each other like friends: how do their ideas build on each other? How does the result of that building or amplification apply to your essay? Try to do this as many times as works with your claim and exhibit.
- Sustain conversation. Make sure to keep referencing the conversation throughout the whole essay—whatever ideas you extract from the two authors in one paragraph could apply throughout your whole essay.
- Modify precis. Make sure to modify your precis to fit the essay. If you’re including unnecessary information that doesn’t fit the claim, it reads like you’re just pasting in information without caring or without seeing any real application between Ahmed’s ideas, Lorde’s ideas, and your claim. The transition sentence should indicate a connection to the claim/exhibit; the precis itself shouldn’t include any information that doesn’t matter to the reader—e.g., unless you’re going to spend time/space talking about their audience, there’s no need to say who the audience is. Avoid using their evidence—Ahmed talks a lot about film but unless you took the time to watch the films and plan to engage with them on their own, leave them out (a minimal mention is OK if you’re using one of the ideas Ahmed comes up with around the films). Lorde’s anecdotes don’t matter for your essay. Only their central claims and concepts do.
- Reduce narrative. Concision is an important art, and most academic papers don’t have space for extensive narrative unless you’re going to analyze every description, detail, line of dialogue, and sentiment you raise in that narrative. A 3-page narrative, then, would have roughly 4-5 pages of analysis, plus 2 pages of explaining the readings on their own, so that the balance favors analysis and critical thinking instead of storytelling.
- Organization. Make sure you tell the reader information in the order they need to hear it to understand the essay. You are not building suspense or using creative techniques here, so jumping around between flashbacks/anecdote and analysis/readings doesn’t really work for this genre of writing. A template order might be
- Exhibit
- Claim
- Precis for Reading 1
- Analysis of Exhibit using Reading 1
- Precis for Reading 2
- Analysis of Exhibit using Reading 2
- Conversation
- Analysis using Conversation
- …but it could also look like a permutation of the above:
- Exhibit
- Claim
- Reading 1
- Analysis
- Reading 2 + Conversation
- Analysis
- Reading 1 + Analysis
- Reading 2 + Analysis
- Conversation
- …and so on. Note that some building blocks tend to stay in the same order. For instance, it doesn’t make sense to spend a significant amount of time applying the snap before you properly introduce Ahmed’s claim and concept. The says/does we did in class, if you were detailed enough in looking at the purpose, might help you with this.
- Transition sentences. Your transition sentences (first 1-2 sentences in each paragraph) should signal an explicit connection back to the claim, so the reader knows why they are seeing that paragraph. It should be clear in each paragraph how the sub-claim presented in that paragraph connects back to the claim, whether that paragraph contains your critical thinking alone or one of the readings.
- Specificity. Be specific in all the details you offer, and keep working on specific connections between the readings and your claim.
- Avoid exact comparisons. Push for analysis beyond “Lorde/Ahmed say this too,” as it reads as simplistic and reductive. There are likely deeper nuances that could be extracted: e.g., if your snap is ghosting a racist relative until they become open to hearing about anti-racism, this isn’t an “Ahmed says this too” moment even though it is a snap—the specifics of this story are about silence and avoidance as resistance, as a turning the tables on the person exerting the pressure so that if they want to retain the bond, the pressure is now on them. Just pursuing this line of thought will give you a paragraph of more nuanced analysis.
LOCs
- Condense repetition, especially where a paragraph is spent repeating details about the exhibit. Choose the most specific version and delete all the others.
- Cut all rhetorical questions, especially if you know you have a tendency to use them a lot. If you’re asking a question you intend to answer, replace the question with the answer.
- Proofread. Make sure for your formal drafts you are naming author’s correctly, spelling correctly, avoiding fragments and run-ons, and using articles, prepositions, and other words correctly.
- Formatting. Be consistent in color, font size, font style, etc.
- Works Cited. Include a correctly formatted Works Cited along with in-text citations
