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GUIDELINES FOR FORMS AND FORMATS ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

Find the space in a format that will allow it to work as a heuristic, a set of steps designed not just to organize but to stimulate and guide your thinking. Avoid the slot-filler mentality.

Look for and expect to find the common denominators among the various formats you learn to use across the curriculum. You can master—and benefit from—virtually any format if you approach it not as a set of arbitrary and rigid rules, but as a formalized guide to having ideas.

Don’t make your readers wait too long before you concede or refute a view that you can assume will already have occurred to them. Otherwise, they may assume you are unaware of the competing view or afraid to bring it up.

Always treat opposing views fairly. A good strategy is to concede their merits but argue that, in the particular context you are addressing, your position is more important or appropriate.

Use climactic order to organize your points, building to your best ones. The best ones are usually the most revealing and thought-provoking, not the most obvious or commonly agreed upon.

Phrasing your thesis to include a subordinate construction—“although X appears to account for Z, Y accounts for it better”—will give your paper a readymade organizational shape, along with giving you something to define your own position against.

A good transition reaches backward, telling where you’ve been, as the grounds for making a subsequent move forward. Opt for “similarly” and “by contrast,” for example, which specify connections for your readers, rather than merely additive transitions such as “another” and “also.”

Half a page is a healthy length for most paragraphs, long enough to launch an idea but short enough to give your reader time to rest.

To keep your paragraphs healthy, focus at some point in your writing process on what they do—not just what they say. Here are five questions to ask yourself:

Do your readers know why you are telling them what you are telling them?

Can readers see the connection between the paragraph and your evolving thesis?

Has your paragraph moved backwards before moving forward?

Have you buried your best ideas, the main claims of the paragraph, in the middle, rather than leading or concluding with them?

Have you asked and answered “so what?” at the end of the paragraph?

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Assignments: Forms and Formats

1. Infer the Format of a Published Article.

Often the format governing the organization of a published piece is not immediately evident. That is, it is not subdivided according to conventional disciplinary categories that are obeyed by all members of a given discourse community. Especially if you are studying a discipline in which the writing does not follow an explicitly prescribed format, such as history, literature, or economics, you may find it illuminating to examine representative articles or essays in that discipline, looking for an implicit format. In other words, you can usually discern some underlying pattern of organization: the formal conventions, the rules that are being followed even when these are not highlighted.

The following assignment works well whether you tackle it individually or in a group. It can lead to a paper, an oral report, or both. First, you need to assemble several articles from the same or a similar kind of journal or magazine. “Journal” is the name given to publications aimed at specialized, usually scholarly, audiences, as opposed to general or popular audiences. Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker are called “magazines” rather than “journals” because they are aimed at a broader general audience. Shakespeare Quarterly is a journal; Psychology Today is a magazine.

Having found at least three journal or magazine articles, study them in order to focus on the following question: Insofar as there appears to be a format that articles in this journal adhere to, what are its parts?

How, for example, does an article