• Introduction: “hook” the reader, give background information, state your thesis in one final sentence.
• Supporting paragraphs: take one subpoint, introduce it w/ a topic sentence, give 3 pieces of evidence, and conclude w/ a clear point.
• Conclusion: Restate thesis & main points. Never, ever add new ideas.

Academic writing is not so simply structured.

But this means it also allows for more flexibility.

And in some ways that makes the writing easier: the five paragraph essay is hard because it makes you start from scratch, like you’re the only one talking. Not so in most academic writing. Scholars usually start their writing by building off what others have said.

Try these approaches make your academic writing more connected

In the beginning

• Quote/summarize what other scholars have said about your topic (you can use the article you read in our book for this)
• Explain the background of the “academic discourse” (field) you’re writing in
• Explain why this topic is an important thing to study (this can be as simple as saying “This topic is relevant to explore because….”)
• Identify what the other scholars you quoted haven’t talked about
• Tell the reader what you plan to accomplish in the paper, and also what you’re NOT trying to do (this is different from a thesis statement)
• Examine (don’t just state) definition of key terms

In the middle

Free your paragraphs from the five-paragraph “subpoint” mentality. Instead divide your paragraphs more naturally. Write whole paragraphs devoted to:

• responding to points other scholars are making
• contrasting your topic with related topics
• exploring (not just listing!) the potential positives
• exploring (not just listing!) the potential negatives
• examples that illustrate your topic
• relevant history of your topic
• appropriate personal examples or anecdotes

Then tie all your body paragraphs together by relating your ideas & points to what the other scholars you quoted have said.

At the end

Feel free to bring up new ideas!

• Consider predicting the future: how will we think about your topic 20 years from now?
• What other related things should be questioned?
• End with a series of questions that encourages further scholarly research in the field.

Look at the shape of most academic writing. The actual shape on the page. Or rather: on the screen. Even now, when we read nearly everything on screens, when most online text looks like short sentences, frequent subheadings, and lists lists lists, most academic writing still looks like long, blobby paragraphs.

It doesn’t need to. Academic writing is missing an opportunity to be more accessible. Here are 3 layout techniques to make writing more readable: subheadings, short paragraphs, and lists.

1. Use Subheadings

Frequent subheadings are not a sign that the writer doesn’t have much to say on each topic. On the contrary, they help the reader (and the writer, I suppose) better understand how various paragraphs fit together. For long-form writing, sub-headings are a necessity.

How do I write good subheadings?

• Pose a question that the subsection will answer (“Why is Cheating More Prevalent in Large, Anonymous Classrooms?”)
• Simply state the topic of the subsection (“Moral Implications of Cheating for the Workforce”)
• Don’t use simply a one-word subheading

2. Make paragraphs shorter

In the academy we get into the habit of writing long paragraphs. But a bigger paragraph doesn’t mean the writer has more to say. It just means they’ve spent less time thinking about organizational strategies.

For one, breaking paragraphs into shorter chunks helps the reader see the writer’s thought process as more discrete steps. And it looks more welcoming.

Or use the trick of picturing written text as a spoken conversation. When we speech we naturally take pauses to let the listener process our ideas. Paragraph breaks can serve the same purpose.

Guidelines for paragraph length

• Don’t think that every paragraph needs a topic sentence, details, quotes, and commentary are good practice. That’s just an arbitrary rule some teachers give to simplify writing.
• Don’t wait to make a paragraph break until you’ve ‘finished’ an idea. A paragraph break within an idea can move that one idea along, indicating a clarification or a summation.

3. Use numbered/bulleted lists

Putting one item of a list on a line is obviously easier to read than if all the items are jammed together in a sentence. However, unless someone tells us we can do it in academic, we somehow forget common sense. Lists are completely acceptable in academic writing.

Here are 7 sequential fixes to make your writing sound more academic – and more important, have more substance.

Let’s say you’re writing an academic film analysis on The Dark Knight (2008). Your first draft sounds something like the “before” version, below, but you want it to sound like the “after” version.

Before

I think the way the Joker acts is different from all previous superhero villains. He doesn’t care about money or revenge or anything, really. He just does immoral things because he feels like it.

After

The Joker’s motivation to terrorize may, however, differ from most previous superhero villains. Unlike power-hungry and vengeful Lex Luthor, the Joker seems uninterested in wealth, revenge, or societal harm. Thus, he is not an immoral villain, but an amoral one. This change importantly suggests that today’s society sees good and evil as relative, imbricated, and even symbiotic.

The trick is getting there. The simplest way is to break academic style into steps.

1. Make your writing sound tentative & cautious

Tentative words to use:

• Possibly, one explanation of the event…
• The evidence seems to support…
• Teens may be more likely to…
• We might conclude that…
• This is perhaps a major factor for…
• Asian immigrants likely congregated in…
• The law is a potentially disastrous course…
• The protagonist’s action suggests that…
• The research indicates close correlation…
• Socioeconomic background could be a major…

Overgeneralizations to avoid:

• always
• all
• every
• really
• obviously

Rewrite with more tentative language:

I think the way the Joker acts is may be different from all most previous superhero villains. He seems not to doesn’t care about money or revenge or anything, really. I propose he just does immoral things because he feels like it.

2. Clean up casual words and phrases

I think the way the Joker acts may be different from most previous superhero villains. He seems not to care about money or revenge or anything, really. I propose he just does immoral things because he feels like it he doesn't care.

3. Make your language as precise as possible

The way the Joker actsJoker's motivation to cause terror may be different from most previous superhero villains. He seems not to care about money wealth or revenge or societal harm. I propose he just does immoral things because he doesn’t care is amoral.

4. Make the reader see why what you’re saying is important

The Joker’s motivation to cause terror may be different from most previous superhero villains. He seems not to care about wealth or revenge or societal harm. I propose he just does immoral things because he is amoral. This change is important because it suggests that today's society sees good and evil as relative, overlapping, and not always separate.

5. Shape your sentences to show comparison & contrast

The Joker’s motivation to cause terror may be different from most previous superhero villains. Unlike power-hungry and revenge-driven Lex Luthor, the Joker seems not to care about wealth or revenge or societal harm. Instead of an immoral villain, I propose he just does immoral things because he is an amoral one. This change is important because it suggests that today’s society sees good and evil as relative, overlapping, and not always separate.

6. Help show your flow of ideas with transition words

The Joker’s motivation to cause terror may, however, be different from most previous superhero villains. Unlike power-hungry and revenge-driven Lex Luthor, the Joker seems not to care about wealth or revenge or societal harm. Thus, instead of an immoral villain, I propose he is an amoral one. Ultimately, this change is important because it suggests that today’s society sees good and evil as relative, overlapping, and not always separate.

7. Finally, remove every unnecessary word, put in some discourse-specific vocabulary, and you’re left with this:

The Joker’s motivation to terrorize may, however, be differentdiffer from most previous superhero villains. Unlike power-hungry and vengeful revenge-driven Lex Luthor, the Joker seems uninterested in wealthor, revenge, or societal harm. Thus, instead of anhe is not an immoral villain, he is but an amoral one. Utimately, This change importantly suggests that today’s society sees good and evil as relative, overlappingimbricated, and even symbioticnot always separate.

Titles in scholarly writing follow a very clear pattern. They generally consist of 3 components (below). They should give the reader a good sense of what the scholarly paper’s substance is, and therefore are best settled upon near the end of the essay-writing process.

What pattern do you see in these academic titles?

How are they different from newspaper, trade book, or movie titles?

• “Female Consumerism and Household Authority in Early National New England”
• “Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich”
• “Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910-30”
• “Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education and National Identity 1863-1922”
• “The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarme” “Good Bye, Lenin! : Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism”

Compare titles for a work about sexuality in Nigeria:

• Newspaper article: These Are The Lies Nigerian Girls Tell
• Bestselling book: Everything in Nigeria is Going to Kill You
• Movie Title: B for Boy
• Academic article: The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21st Century

Academic Titles Have Three Parts

First componennt: A catchy “hook”

This, the least important part of an academic title, introduces the paper in a creative way.

• Strength through Joy
• Workers in the Wild
• The Emergent Queer

Second component: topic keywords

The “what” of the paper. This identifies concepts the scholar will be exploring. They and are present in the title both for humans scanning lots of articles and for search engine indexing.

• Consumerism and Mass Tourism
• Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction
• Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor

Third part: focus keywords

The ”where/when” of the paper. Along with “B”, these more specific keywords are vital so that researchers can drill down to specific articles that pertain to their research.

• …in Early National New England
• …in the 21st Century
• …in Mallarme

Put together A+B+C, and an academic-style title might sound like:

• Buy Me a Date: Consumerization and Theories of Social Interaction in 21st Century Online Dating Sites
• “Just Do It: Risk-Taking and Collaborative Learning Theory in Multiplayer Video Games”
• “Is That a Horseshoe in Your Pocket? Homosocial Male Archetypes in the the Cowboy Western”

Spin Bad Titles into Good

(Note how not only the words have changed, but you can imagine that the substance of these essays would be very different.)

• Topic: How important textbooks are in K-12 education
• Bad: “Textbooks in Our Schools”
• Better: “Necessary Tools: Lack of Textbooks in America’s public schools, K-12”
• Good: “Necessary Tools: K-12 Textbook Visual Accessibility and the Soundbyte Model of Information Theory”

While the first title could be arguing anything from the cost of textbooks to the poor information contained between their covers, the “good” title indicates a specific component of textbooks that will be examined, and on top of that, identifies the main scholarly theory that the paper will use to explore that component.

Below are a few words you should start using in academic writing. Some you’ll practically only find in university-speak. Others have specific meanings when used in an academic context, different from everyday usage.

Rhetoric/Rhetorical has both a general and a specific meaning in the academy. Generally, it can mean simply the language (or other communication techniques) a person uses to express herself. More specifically (and the original meaning of the word), rhetoric refers to the persuasive aspect of writing. If someone says, “You’re full of rhetoric,” he means you’re words are persuasive but empty of real meaning.

Margin/Marginal/Marginalize refers, in universities, to voices, texts, histories, or interpretations that are generally left out of discussion. For example, until recently, schools focused on teaching American literature as mostly a group of books written by dead white males. These would be called the dominant texts. Narratives by slaves, Native Americans, and other minorities were marginalized. You can also refer to things in/on ‘the margin.’

Discourse/Discursive in the world outside the academy means a discussion or conversation. Within the academy it more specifically means the language, structure, and thought-process used by a given ‘community.’ For example, academic discourse features a specialized vocabulary and rules for organizing and supporting ideas. There’s political discourse, popular discourse, minority discourse, marginalized discourse, etc.

Ideology is a term to refer to the way we look at the world. It includes our values, our sense of right and wrong, our feelings of human rights, and more generally our way of thinking. Everyone has their own individual ideology, derived from how and where they were raised, but we often share similar ideologies. The American ideology, for instance, could be said to include concepts of freedom of speech, capitalism, and equal human rights, among other things. The ideology of the academy might include the scientific method, documented thinking, and putting knowledge-gathering at the highest value.

Reductive comes from the word “reduce,” and in college is usually a negative term. It means simplifying complex ideas, and thereby leaving out important specifics. Academic thought is all about leaving in the details, you’ll find.

Binary/Dichotomy/Bifurcation all refer to being reductive in a way that you simply matters into an Either/Or context. For example, you’ll often hear professors talk about binary thinking, which means leaving out any gray area between two extreme possibilities. Some common binaries that are out of fashion in the academy include the gender binaries (something is either feminine or masculine), cultural binaries (civilized or savage) and racial binaries (white or non-white). The academy thinks matters are more complex.

Conflate/Juxtapose/Imbricate are fancy academic verbs that all basically mean ‘to overlap’ or ‘put side by side’. Sample: Dominant theory, Carroll claims, had been prone to several methodological impediments, among them a tendency to conflate film interpretation with film theory, in which theorists mistakenly assume that film interpretation can do the work of theory building.

A canon is a group of texts (or other media) that makes up a sort of whole on a subject. The Western literary Canon (note capitalization here) refers, for instance, to the books that are considered worthy of primary study in literary scholarship. Any canon is up to interpretation and always changing. Sample: I understand and respect snobbery, but making a canon, but excluding Spielberg entirely is such a total waste of time. The canon should include texts without which the study of the field would make no sense.

Criticism, in academic-speak, is not a negative word. It means more along the lines of close evaluation and interpretation. Thus movie critics, literary critics, and gourmet food critics are not in the business of saying how crappy things are. They give their expert analysis of things. This is actually truer to the word’s Greek etymological roots, which have to do with an ability to discern or judge.

hegemony (usually pronounced with a ‘j’ sound) is a word that comes from the Greek for ‘authority,’ and in its most general usage, simply refers to dominant power of one entity over another. For example, China exerts hegemony (or has hegemonic rule) over Tibet and Mongolia. More specifically, as theorized by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is a kind of dominance different from military force and coercion which persuades people to find the beliefs and practices of the powers that be natural and unquestionable. According to Gramsci, it is the media and intellectuals and entertainers who can exert hegemony.

heterogeneity is the opposite of homogeneity. It means many different things, usually coexisting or interacting, and is often used in discussions about multiculturalism.

heteronormative/heteronormativity is a concept from Gender Theory. Thinking ‘heteronormatively’ means assuming that human beings fall into two distinct gendered categories–male and female–and that there are normal ways that males and females are supposed to behave and that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation. Gender Theory usually thinks of it as a coercive (hegemonic) way of thinking that has come to seem normal to modern society but in fact constrains freedom of sexual expression to two very narrow options. In this way, critiques of heteronormativity are a type of feminism, as the termed is used above, because they seek to allow oppressed viewpoints/lifestyles/ideas to flourish.

hermeneutics means applying one method of interpretation (be it psychoanalysis, Marxism, Biblical allegory, etc.) to a text in order to understand it. To use the hermeneutic circle means understanding a text comes from how all its parts work together to make a whole. It assumes that every detail of a movie or novel or symphony is unified through one common meaning and that the interpreter must simply fit all the pieces together (without leaving out or ignoring any parts) to figure out that meaning.

Contextualize. To contextualize something means giving important perspective by citing similar examples or relevant background. More explanation on my page about contextualization and historicization

Historicize. To historicize something is to explain the topic’s social environment in history and speculate how this environment may have shaped the topic. More explanation on my page about contextualization and historicization.

paradigm/paradigmatic

Here are 9 things most scholars do in academic writing but which aren’t often discussed in classes on writing. These are largely derived from Gerald Graff’s article, Scholars and Soundbites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty

1. Be dialogical

Begin your text by directly identifying the prior conversation or debate that you are entering. What you are saying probably won’t make sense unless readers know the conversation in which you say it. Plus, it gives you authority as a thinker: it shows you’ve done your homework.

In a 2008 article in the Times Literary Supplement, scholar Lidija Haas argues that the romance novel has evolved from the days of “carefully examined feelings of young women” in the works of Jane Austen to chick lit novels where love means “a happy resolution after much drinking and shopping.” Indeed, Haas is not the only scholar to identify contemporary shift characterized by the dumbing-down of the definition of love…

2. Make a claim, the sooner the better

And flag it for the reader by a phrase like “My claim here is that […]” You don’t have to use such a phrase, but if you can’t do so you’re in trouble.

So, although love (psychologically or socially speaking) has not changed for humans, our perception of its meaning has, primarily because of mass media – specifically romantic comedy films and pop music.

3. Remind readers of your claim periodically

Especially when you complexify it. If you’re writing about a disputed topic (and if you aren’t why write?), you’ll also have to stop and tell readers what you are not saying, what you don’t want to be taken as saying. Some of them will take you as saying that anyway, but you don’t have to make it easy for them.

However, I am not arguing that the social role of love cannot change. Instead, research shows that mass media can change how we act and think, and thus it seems likely it can change our perception of a concept like love.

4. Summarize the objections that you anticipate can be made (or that have been made) against your claim

Maybe use a phrase like, “Of course, some may object that…” Remember that objectors, even when mean and nasty, are your friends–they help you clarify your claim, and they indicate why it is of interest to others besides yourself. If the objectors weren’t out there, you wouldn’t need to say what you are saying.

Of course, some may argue that popular culture is more diverse than ever before and that we are not seeing a “dumbing down” of love but rather an enormous diversity of definitions of what love means.

5. Say explicitly–or at least imply–why your ideas are important

Imagine a reader over your shoulder who asks, “So what?” or “Who cares about any of this?” Again, you don’t have to write in such questions, but if you were to write them in and couldn’t answer them, you’re in trouble. You might use a sentence setup like “Although some might think _____ is trivial, it is in fact crucial in modern society because….”

So why examine the meaning of love? We’re smart enough to realize the messages in movies and music aren’t real, right? In fact, if the studies of propaganda and advertising mentioned above show anything, it is that the human psychology is tremendously impressionable.

6. Generate a “metatext” that stands apart from your main text and puts it in perspective

Good writing consists of two levels of text, one where you make your point, and a second where you tell readers how (and how not) to read it. This second text is usually signalled by reflexive phrases like “I do not mean to suggest that […],” “Here you will probably object that […],” “To put the point another way […],” “But why am I so emphatic on this point?,” and “What I’ve been trying to say here, then, is […].”

When writing is unclear, the reason usually has less to do with jargon or verbal obscurity than with the absence of such metacommentary, which may be needed to explain why it was necessary to write the thing in the first place.

We might stop here and wonder whether an academic essay such as this does any good in countering the messages of love that we are bombarded by on a daily basis in pop culture. Is the solution to change pop culture (which is, of course, impossible)?

7. Remember that readers can process only one claim at a time

There’s no use trying to squeeze in secondary and tertiary claims that are better left for another essay or paragraph, or at least for another part of your essay, where they can be clearly marked off from your main claim.

If you’re an academic, you are probably so eager to prove that you’ve left no thought unconsidered that you find it hard to resist the temptation to say everything at once, and consequently you say nothing that is understood while producing horribly overloaded paragraphs and sentences like this sentence, monster-sized footnotes, and readers who fling your text aside and turn on the TV.

8. Be bilingual

It’s not possible to avoid academic lingo. Sometimes you need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academic-talk, try to say it in plain language, too. You’ll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is) and you’re led to new perceptions.

To put the point another way: we are what we eat. If we consume movies and music that portray love as “fun” and “easy,” they will necessarily shape our thinking.

9. Don’t kid yourself about the brilliant point you’re trying to make

If you can’t explain it to a layperson, the chances are you don’t understand what you’re saying yourself.

Read this interview with scholar Gerald Graff

Inexperienced writers pad sentences with official-sounding fluff. Unnecessary prepositions, passive voice and word nominalization cause it. Here’s how to fix it.

How do you react to this excerpt on vaccinations?

Historically, and where economically viable, vaccination has weighed in the favor of the masses and the benefit of mankind. Multiple previously terrible and debilitating illnesses have all but disappeared from western life as a result of the mandated vaccination for children at various stages of development, be it infanthood, school aged, or now, even teenage years. Why controversy has arisen with the development of an HPV vaccine that protects women from multiple forms of a disease attributed to 70% of cervical cancer alludes to a greater crux between modern public medical awareness and the moral and sociocultural stance of a generation. Perhaps due to the taboo nature of sex, as well as the age at which children would be recommended to receive the vaccination (between 9 and 16 years), parents are reluctant to admit that their child is at risk for sexually transmitted disease.

• (A) The writer sounds smart. They must know what they’re talking about.
• (B) I’m confused by terms like “economically viable” and “sociocultural stance”. I must be dumb.
• (C) The same thing could have been said more simply. Get to the point!

Hold on. Ever read something like this?

No person who has not attained the age of twelve years shall be competent to testify, provided that, if the court finds that any such person understands the nature and obligation of the oath, such person shall be competent to testify.

Why didn’t the writer just say this?

Every person above the age of twelve years is competent to testify, but a person beneath that age is also competent if the court finds that the person understands the nature and obligation of an oath.

Or this?!

Anyone older than twelve can testify in court, but younger people can also testify if judges think they understand the testifying oath.

Why say “No person who has not attained the age of” instead of “Anyone older than”?

Why say “shall be competent to” instead of just “can”?

Look at this example from vectrix.com’s FAQ page

Q: Does my weight affect the range of the scooter?

A: The Vectrix scooter at approximately 500 lbs (227 kg) plus a 180 lb (82 kg) driver equates to a gross vehicle weight of 680 lbs (308 kg). If you add 50 pounds (23 kg) of cargo the total weight you are attempting to move is 730 pounds (331 kg) or 7.3% increase in weight. If then you add a 175 pound (79 kg) passenger the total weight is 905 lbs (411 kg) or a total weight increase of 33%! The more mass you are pushing/lifting the more energy it takes to accomplish the mission. Avoid keeping unnecessary items in your scooter since it will impact your range.

Why didn’t they just answer my question with a straightforward yes or no?

Many people have noted this bad tendency of writers trying to sound sophisticated but really not saying anything more intelligent than plain language. UCLA professor Richard Lanham calls this type of writing “Official style.”

It’s like instead of saying:

She was hungry, so she ate spaghetti.

We write:

To satisfy her own need of hunger, the spaghetti was consumed by her.

Can we identify the things we do that make official writing obscure? Yes!

Compare the differences between the original and a plain-language rewrite.

Steps to make your writing clear and beautiful

If you start to smell “official style”…

1. Reduce prepositions (in, of, with, by, from, to, for, between, etc.).
2. Make your sentences active (look for passive cues like is, was, were, be, being, been, have).
3. Use concrete word forms (“vaccines” for “vaccinations,” “infants” for “infanthood”)
4. Use simpler words as long as they don’t obscure the meaning (“harmful” instead of “injurious,” “affordable” instead of “economically viable”)
5. Get to the point, damn it. (If someone asks “Does my weight affect range?” first say “yes” or “no,” then explain).

How to know how “readable” your writing is?

The Flesch Reading Algorithm helps quantify long sentences and long words:

• 90.0–100.0 easily understandable by an average 11-year old
• 60.0–70.0 understandable by 13- to 15-year old students
• 0.0–30.0 understandable by college graduates

Readability makes a difference. Many government agencies require a certain readability score. Compare these examples (provided by Bill Slawski):

But that’s comparing apples and oranges, you say. Can you make a legal document more readable without losing the whatsit that makes it legally binding? Yes!

Each party’s warranties take precedence over all previous warranties, whether those were documented or implied. This includes, but is not limited to:

• implied warranties of merchantability
• implied warranties of fitness for a particular purpose.

Neither party has liability for cover or setoff for damages that are indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, or punitive. This is true even if they have been informed about the possibility of damage.

Don’t be a fancy writing jerk

Try fixing “official style” yourself:

With respect to the 76-minute interruption of service on August 15 due to unexpected levels of user demand coinciding with scheduled maintenance of our backup systems and unrelated technical problems at our customer call center, apologies are offered to any of the company’s valued customers who experienced inconvenience as a result. There will be a $15 credit supplementation to customer account balances.

1. Highlight all prepositions (of, to, on, with, as, from, by) in the below passage and rewrite the phrases without prepositions
2. Underline all the passive verbs (is, was, were, be, being, been) and rewrite the sentences using active voice (“An example is provided below by Dr. Lanham” becomes “Dr. Lanham provides an example below”)
3. Find nominalized word forms and change them into action words (“information” becomes “inform,” “happening” becomes “happen”)
4. Tally the results. How many prepositions did you cut? How many words total did you save?

Two key ingredients of scholarly writing, found none too frequently in college essays, are contextualization and historicization. These techniques allow scholars to provide perspective on (and even self-evaluate) their claims and conclusions.

Ever wonder how scholars can write 20 or 30 pages (or a 400-page dissertation) on a topic that is so narrow and obscure that you feel you could squeeze out a paragraph at most, and even that would be an epic achievement?

If you read a scholarly paper, you’ll see that much of those many pages aren’t filled with specific details from the chosen topic, or even direct analysis of those details.

But don’t details and analysis make up the substance of any good academic essay, you ask? They do, but scholars feel there’s plenty else to do, too.

Scholars spend a lot of time “positioning” their argument, as they like to say, explaining why what they’re saying is important, and trying to see the bigger picture within that very obscure topic.

And to do that, they contextualize and historicize. To contextualize something means giving important perspective by citing similar examples or relevant background.

To historicize something is to explain the topic’s social environment in history and speculate how this environment may have shaped the topic.

Some techniques to consider using in your next scholarly paper:

• compare your primary topic of analysis to others like/unlike it (e.g., a film analysis of “Saw IV” could mention similarities and differences between contemporaneous horror films)
• expose how your social/economic/political background might shape how you look at the issue (e.g., growing up in a post 9/11 America, your analysis of Hugo Chavez’s governmental practices will likely differ greatly from a non-American born a generation earlier)
• explain briefly what historical circumstances led up to the topic you’re discussing (e.g., comic book creator of “Plastic Man,” Jack Cole, first started cartooning for Boy’s Life and the American Can Factory, which may have influence his style)
• explore how your analysis fits into a larger discussion about a field (e.g., what does your analysis of “The OC” contribute to how scholars should go about analyzing Orange County, California?)
• cite other scholars who have recently contributed to the field you’re working in (if you’re analyzing teen behavior in a film, cite a recent scholar in child psychology).

All of these things are contextualization and/or historicization, and they’re done by scholars all the time. Here’s how:

Contextualization

Look at this example from an essay that analyzes the development and trends of Disney films in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In the below excerpt, scholar Peter Kramer stops analyzing the films themselves and instead explores their financial context:

What about the performance of Disney’s feature films (as distinct from its theme parks and merchandising)? Even Janet Wasko, Disney’s most knowledgeable analyst, describes the 1970s as a period of crisis for Disney’s feature film division.

--Peter Kramer, “The Best Disney Film Never Made: Children’s Films and the Family Audience in American Cinema since the 1960s” (2002)

While Kramer’s focus in this section about the 1970s is on Disney films like Robin Hood (1974) and The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), he again pauses to mention non-Disney films and give the reader some perspective on Disney’s period of crisis:

With rentals of $10-20 million, Disney’s hits performed well below the blockbuster business of The Godfather (1972, 86.3 million), The Exorcist (1973, $82.2 million) and Jaws (1975, $121.3 million). Yet it is important to note that the studio consistently produced new hits.

The thing I want to draw your attention to is not just the historical research, snazzy statistics, or scholarly name-dropping, but the way those things connect to the point of the essay: Kramer follows the statement of earnings by films like The Godfather with “Yet it is important to note that [Disney] consistently produced new hits.” Kramer doesn’t provide history for history’s sake. He shows that the financial low-point of Disney films in the 70s didn’t seen to affect the studio’s popularity or creativity.

Historicization

This concept grew out of the feeling that many scholars analyzed texts and art in a vacuum, ignoring the important influences of historical situation. Instead of assuming that Shakespeare’s plays are full of universal, timeless themes, these new, historically-oriented scholars would say that Shakespeare was a product of his environment and would match themes in the plays to concerns and developments in Elizabethan England.

Take this example of historicization:

As Priscilla Wald recently reminded us, American Studies developed in the Cold War decades alongside other area studies, such as Middle East Studies or Eastern European Studies, and, like those, took upon itself the production of specialists with a broad knowledge of a particular region or nation’s language, culture, history, and political, judicial and economic systems.

– “Foreigners Within and Innocents Abroad: Discourse of the Self in the Internationalization of American Studies,” Milette Shamir (2004)

Here, Shamir is historicizing a few things. He mentions that Wald “recently reminded us,” pointing to the historical progression of scholarship on a subject. He then paraphrases Wald’s observation about how a field of academia, American Studies, formed during the Cold War. Part of Shamir’s point, that is, is to show that fundamental approaches of American Studies is shaped by the Cold War mentality it was born into.

This brings up another common facet of scholarly writing worth mentioning. Instead of just analyzing, say a given film or text, scholars always try to answer the question “how does my analysis of a given text teach us scholars more about our field?” On a paper that analyzes a film set in Orange County, California, for instance, a scholar would ask how the film expands our method for film studies or our way of analyzing place.

Historicization doesn’t just mean looking at the social environment of your topic, however. It also means exploring how your own background gives you, the scholar, biases and ways of thinking and looking at the world. So, another thing you’ll see scholars do is reveal their ideologies:

While I now find myself located in what some hundred and fifty years ago was called the northern frontier of Alta California, I spent the first half of my life and the mouth of the Rio Grande in South Texas. My quest for a new mapping of American Cultural Studies necessarily worries about the politics of location….The purpose of these brief personal remarks is not to demonstrate a Manichean clash of identities and affiliations, but rather to begin mapping out the phantasmatics of Nuestra America’s borders at our own complex fin de siglo.

–Jose David Saldivar’s “Nuestra America’s Borders: Remapping America’s Cultural Studies” (1997).

But you’ve been doing this all along, you argue. Well, maybe not revealing your own sociopolitical ideologies. But your essays include historical facts and other examples.

And in a sense, you’ve been historicizing and contextualizing your writing. This is nothing new, true. But by knowing what academics call it, why it’s done, and seeing examples of how academics integrate it into their scholarly writing, perhaps you’ll do it better in the future–and find better ways to fill up an 10-page scholarly assignment.

In a famous 1981 experiment by Kahneman and Tversky, two versions of the exact same dilemma were presented to doctors, one framing the problem as a “gain” and one as a “loss.”

Faced with the same problem in different wording, doctors overwhelmingly switched their decision.

The situation: A new strain of flu is expected to kill 600 people. Two programs to combat the disease have been proposed.

Frame 1: If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor?

When presented with this frame, 80% of doctors went with program A.

Frame 2: If program A is adopted, 400 people will die. If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. Which of the two programs would you favor?

Even though the probablilites are identical to Frame 1, when presented with this frame, 80% of doctors went with program B.

What does this mean?

George Lakoff, professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, points out that this framing language happens all the time (listen to an NPR article here). A few examples:

  All of the statements are true, but each puts the topic in starkly different light.

Read how whole stories can be frames

Is Framing Deceitful? Is it Propagandistic?

Lakoff draws a line between framing and propaganda. Framing is stating a truth. Propaganda states an untruth or something that cannot be proved. That said, framing can be manipulative if the framer is intentionally trying to show only one perspective. If you get a sniff of “framing language,” ask yourself: what other valid ways could this issue be framed?

Issue: Our country’s policy toward a foreign dictatorship called Oceania

Frame 1: Economic bonds with Oceania will give us more influence over the dictator. Therefore we should trade with Oceania.

Frame 2: Oceania’s leader restricts human rights. Therefore we should not trade with Oceania.

Propaganda 1: Oceania’s leader cares deeply about his people. That’s why he controls them. Therefore we should improve their economy through trade.

Propaganda 2: Oceania is an evil empire run by a monster. Therefore we should cut off all trade.

How to apply it to writing

Think of framing language as a way of exploring perspectives on a subject. Examine the wording you use to describe an issue. Is what assumptions is that language making? How might others see it differently?

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102318552

Incorporating a theoretical approach like new historicism, feminism, psychoanalysis, or deconstruction into a scholarly paper often provides a useful framework. It helps determine what details to focus on and what field-specific vocabulary to use.

Scholars developed myriad ways to interpret fiction, art, and history during the 20th century. To illustrate how different literary theories explain texts differently, I’ll use “The Lord of the Rings.”

Background

Originally written during 1937-49, recently adapted into film in 2001-3, “The Lord of the Rings” takes the form of an epic quest where a band of heroes (elf, dwarf, human, wizard, hobbit) seek to destroy a ring that has a lot of power for evil. The hobbit, patently the weakest of the party, is the one with the greatest burden, the one who ultimately must destroy the ring.

Theoretical approaches:

• New Historicist
• Psychoanalytic
• Feminist
• Poststructuralist

New Historicism

The political and cultural (sociopolitical, if you will) background in which the text was made (and in which it is interpreted) always, always influences how you interpret it, say the New Historicists. They would note that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote LOTR between 1937 and 1949, as Nazism was on the rise; that he set it in a pseudo-medieval era where races (dwarfs, elves, humans, orcs, wizards) battled each other; that it was made into a film in the 21st century, when the world was preoccupied by fear of terrorism and of apocalyptic climate change. They would also acknowledge and explore how the culture and politics they grew up in influence (and even distort) their analysis.

New Historicists might start by examining what the word “power” meant in the different relevant eras:

(from the Oxford English Dictionary)

1330 Sir Degare (Auch.) 8 in W. H. French & C. B. Hale Middle Eng. Metrical Romances (1930) 288: In Litel Bretaygne was a kyng Of gret poer in alle thing, Stif in armes vnder sscheld.

1938 R. J. SONTAG Germany & Eng. I. iv. 88 This was contempt for British statesmen and the British army; but not for the potential power of the British Empire.

1992 Utne Reader Mar.-Apr. 122/3 (advt.) The Greens: What they believe, their prospects in the U.S., and what if they achieved power?

New Historicists might conclude that in 1330, power meant the rule of one, a king, over a land; that by 1937, power took on a more negative meaning, and referred more generally to imperialist power; that in 1992, power had less to do with might and more to do with political manipulation.

“The Lord of the Rings” means something quite different for someone who watches the film in post 9/11 world than someone reading it in the 1940s. In the 1940s, it might have seemed to echo of Nazism, and the dark lord Sauron a Hitler figure, wanting to create a supposedly perfect race. Someone who read it in the 1950s might have seen red—Communism, that is—and in Lord Sauron, a “big brother” Stalin type. And it might remind a 21st century audience of terrorism, Sauron as someone who wants to destroy and attack and make people fearful.

Freudian/Psychoanalytic theory

This approach explains actions and events through the human motivations and desires that cause them. For example, traditional drives that we see at work in humans is the struggle to take the place of someone in power (the father figure), and the desire to possess something valuable to that person (the mother figure), and by so doing, achieve a clear identity (the self, Oedipus).

A psychoanalytic reading might examine the phallic relationship between the ring and the finger, shown repeatedly in close-ups in the movie; the ways that characters’ relationships can be seen as similarly structured as the family (Frodo sees Gandalf as a father figure; does part of him envy and want to take the place of Gandalf)? In a way, all the characters are Oedipal, striving against Sauron, a father figure, in order to possess the ring, a mother figure. Gollum’s (and other’s) obession with the ring “my precious” emphasizes how the desire to possess the ring comes from humans’ deep seated sexual desires.

Feminist Theory

Interpretation 1: “Lord of the Rings” marginalizes the role of women in this story. It’s a man’s story. One of the few important women characters is only a sidekick, told by men where to go, loving the hero unconditionally, giving up her eternal life for him. The whole story is a male-driven concept of domination – people strive to possess the ring so they can dominate others. The dialogue often makes use of words that efface an ideology in the world of Middle Earth as rooted in values of conquering, possessing, controlling, destroying.

Interpretation 2: “Lord of the Rings” empowers the role of women. Frodo, who is at the beginning of the story the weakest, and the hobbits are, can be seen in the society of Middle Earth as gendered feminine, concerned about traditional feminine things like keeping house, cooking yummy meals, and staying safe. But it is Frodo who ultimately is the most powerful in this story, making LOTR a revisionist text whose message is that great power and evil can be defeated not through force and power, as the humans or dwarfs or orcs might try, but through an alternate approach. The hobbits, paradoxically, are the most powerful because they are able to resist the allure of masculinized power.

Postructuralism

Poststructuralism argues that a text has no independent meaning. It depends completely on the way people read it. All meaning, poststructuralists say, is a construction of words, which have no inherent meaning, but are the result of culture and time and place. Some poststructuralist theories include postcolonialism, reader-response theory, and deconstructionism.

Deconstructionism attacked the assumption that you can ever say, definitely, that a text or event means X. It asserts that our belief that meaning can be stable, universal, or ahistorical is a construct of the human mind.

Deconstruction might examine a phrase like “The ring of power” for clues of incoherence.

For example, LOTR often mentions the power of the ring, explains it is very powerful, and that it is evil, but doesn’t exactly explain what that power allows people to do. Maybe this is because a term like “power” is very complex. The ring has power to control. But this can mean that the ring can give control to a person and that it controls the person who has it. Power, thus, has two contradictory, opposing meanings in LOTR.

“Ring” also has many meanings and connotations. Traditionally, a ring symbolizes a union between two people, marriage, but interestingly the LOTR doesn’t at all focus on traditional unions. There is a fellowship, and in some ways, the word “ring” could be used to describe them – they’re often found standing in a ring, and the term “ring” can also mean group (as in ringleader). This ring of men on a quest are united a ring of power, but their mission, their whole reason of forming a fellowship, is to destroy the ring in the fires of Mordor. To make it even more confusing, the destruction of that ring will make their fellowship, their ring, no longer of any use. So LOTR is as much about forming a union as it is about going on an epic journey to deform a union.

What we can learn from all this is that any story, any plot, any idea, is structured by what it means but does not explicitly say – that is that the ring symbolizes union, but also symbolizes disunion, that the ring symbolizes control, but also the power to be controlled. A battle where the good guys kill more people than the bad guys brings into question what good and evil mean. After all, the fellowship’s goal is to destroy a ring of power so that they, paradoxically, can gain power over orcs and a dark lord, Sauron.