Hello Everyone!

In class as of late, we have been reading scholarly essays covering different texts. The general theme surrounding the texts is memory, our most recent reading solely having to do with memory. We began by reading Hillary Chute’s essay on Persepolis, where she detailed the book’s depiction of trauma and how no retelling can ever show the true horror that people faced in Iran. Next, we read Matthew Bolton’s essay on Running in the Family. His essay spoke on Linda Hutcheon’s concept of Historiographic Metafiction and how Running isn’t a true memoir. Most recently, we have read the introduction to Marita Sturken’s book on memory.

While in class we have been covering the themes and the author’s message for writing these pieces, what I have learned most from these is purely stylistic. Entering university, I didn’t know much about how a scholarly essay should look. I assumed that it would be written with a much more formal tone than my own writings, but I was unaware of how drastic of a difference that the two styles have.

One of the biggest transitions for me was the change in format. In high school whenever we were given the task of writing an essay, we had to use the 5 paragraph format. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s a very simple essay format where you begin with an introductory paragraph that usually ends in your thesis statement, then three body paragraphs where you give your main argument, and finished by an summary paragraph (some people like to start their summary paragraph by restating their thesis statement). However, this is not how scholars choose write their papers. From what I’ve observed, they tend to spend a lot more time on their introduction which will usually last a few pages. They then move into their analysis, which sometimes will begin with a critique on other scholars thoughts on the same subject. They do this because there may already a lot of other published pieces on the subject they’re writing about and they want theirs to stand out. They may go about this by taking a new stance or, in the case of Matthew Bolton, will use another scholar’s work/concept and apply that to the text.

Another thing about scholarly writing that we’ve been discussing in class is proper citation. Something I learned was how to give authority to the people you’re citing. This can be done in a few ways. For example let’s say I’m writing a psychology paper and I want to cite the psychologist John Doe, instead of just simply saying something like, “John Doe argues ________” I should give the person I’m citing a title to show their authority like, “Psychologist John Doe argues ________”.

These in class discussions on scholarly writing are really helping me to become a stronger writer. They are showing me better ways to communicate my argument, and how to do it in a more professional manner. I feel more confident in my ability to write a properly formatted essay, and defend my points.