Some of my favorite papers to write were in my British Literature class and Gender and Sexuality in Literature classes. In my British Literature class, I was given a prompt to explore a particular theme in a Shakespeare sonnet and how that was reflected in the form. I really enjoyed writing this paper because it was an argument based on the form and themes within a poem, which I found interesting to write. I also liked writing a lot of the papers in my Gender and Sexuality in Literature class. In that class, the papers had prompts where I had to create an argument about a theme in different waves of feminism and not just pull evidence from the texts we were reading, but also from outside current events. I enjoyed those papers because I had a lot of freedom when writing about the waves of feminism and choosing what outside current events/pieces of media I wanted to include as other pieces of evidence.
My least favorite papers to write were in my US Literature Class. A lot of the papers I wrote for that class were focused on the different theological beliefs people in the early Americas had. One of the papers I wrote was about Native American’s theological beliefs and the other two were about Calvinism. Those papers I wrote were all based on past historical texts and documents and while interesting, they were difficult to write because of how hard some of the texts were to fully understand.
I think my strongest paper recently was one of my papers from my Gender and Sexuality in Literature class from last semester. I wrote a paper connecting the Constructivist Approach of Third Wave feminism to the movie Fight Club by drawing on the Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the classical versus grotesque bodies. I really enjoyed writing this paper and I feel it was one of my strongest because of how interested I was in the content and theme of the paper. I also think it was one of my strongest papers because I was given a lot of freedom on what I wanted to write about as long as it related to Third Wave feminism and included a piece of media or text we went over in class. My weakest paper was a paper on Mary Rowlandson’s kidnapping and how her Calvinist faith affected her during that time. This was a very weak paper from me. I think it was so weak because of how much of the argument was based in Calvinist theology. The text I had to pull evidence from was very old and difficult to understand and then creating an argument about her Calvinist faith was even more difficult.
I approach analysis and writing usually by creating a very casual outline. I wouldn’t even really call it an outline, it’s more so just a list of ideas with some quotes that I think might support those ideas. I then will start writing and draft my thesis. As I begin writing my body paragraphs, if I feel that the thesis has to be changed, I’ll go back and change it and keep writing and revising until the argument makes sense. Writing a paper for me usually ends up with me drafting, revising, drafting, revising, etc. Sometimes when I revise I realize I need to add evidence from another source and then I will search academic journals to find secondary sources I might need to add in a section of the paper.
My writing has evolved a lot since high school. I used to be required to draft a thesis first and then create a detailed outline. This usually led me to taking more time to write because often, I changed my mind about something and no longer needed this detailed outline I wasted time on because my argument changed. I also used to never use passive voice nor “I” because I was not allowed to in high school or I would get points off. Now I find using passive voice and using “I” in certain parts of my writing to be more effective to really stress my argument. Not having so many arbitrary rules on the form of my writing as I had in high school has really given me more freedom and creativity when drafting and forming my argument.
What’s fun about literary analysis is when I come up with some lightbulb idea argument about the text and because of that get fully invested in the analysis. That happened with the Third Wave feminism paper I talked about above. As soon I started seeing how Bakhtin’s classical body theory could be used to form my argument based on the text I was completely invested in doing the analysis. What’s difficult about literary analysis is when the text is difficult to understand, such as when it is a historical document like the one I used for the Calvinist paper I talked about above. It’s also difficult when I don’t feel invested in the text. If I’m not overly interested in a specific test It’s difficult to find something interesting to analyze. There have been times in the past where I had to write on one specific text that I just happened to not like that much and it made analysis so difficult. It’s much more fun to do literary analysis when there is more freedom in the texts being analyzed for a paper, in my opinion.
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