i don't do bad sauce passes
Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
One Nice Bug Per Day
KIROKAZE
blake kathryn
#extradirty
No title available
roma★
sheepfilms
d e v o n
No title available
Keni
Kiana Khansmith
oozey mess
occasionally subtle
tannertan36
No title available
No title available
Xuebing Du
seen from Singapore
seen from Australia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Austria
seen from Türkiye
@armed-with-articulation
july 6, 2021 — day 8/100 of progress
fell off the face of the planet to wrap up spring semester but never fear it is summer and i am still in classes! i’m really liking my data science class so far, genuinely squinting at doing more of this in the future 🧡
btw i do data work professionally now :)
Do you want a guide to writing a research paper but you don't want to scroll a mile on your dash? This post is for you, buddy.
This book (book????) or tidily-laid-out-shitpost or whatever you want to call it is a handy-dandy guide to college-level humanities research methods and paper-writing.
This is a step-by-step follow along of my process as I, a person with a BA in English Lit, navigate writing a paper on George Orwell for my English 101 class.
This is NOT carefully crafted, it is literally a post that I made.
That said, it is a post that I made that is twelve thousand words on how to write a paper and now comes with a table of contents and headers and fancy alt-text and image descriptions and is forty fucking pages.
This document includes:
How to read an academic paper
How to skim a book for a college class
How to prioritize what sources to use
How to write an organized, cohesive research paper with an introduction, support paragraphs, and conclusion
(i managed to only say "fuck" six times in forty pages so I'm not taking them out.)
ANYWAY for a PDF click here.
If you want it in .docx click here.
Free to use for any reason, free to reproduce, give them to whoever, just don't sell them. (if you want to credit me if you do share them, ms-demeanor.tumblr.com is perfectly fine)
Happy finals season, babes. Good luck with those papers.
This is actually explicitly NOT the case with research and writing at the level that I'm discussing. Even the professor for our 100-level class has instructed students to assume that their reader will be familiar with the author's work.
SOME things may need a bit of an explainer, but if I were, say, writing about Austen at this level I would only give brief explanations for minor characters [for example "Mr. Gardiner, Elizabeth's maternal uncle, discusses angling with Darcy while Elizabeth's internal crisis mounts."], I probably would assume knowledge of basic autobiographical information about the author, and I would probably give a two-or-three word explanation if I was sourcing something that wasn't one of the novels (so I might say "Love and Freindship, Austen's juvenile epistolary parody story, lacks the delicate touch of her later works," and then go on to discuss it like the reader had read it).
This is a good (and very short!) example of what academic writing at this level expects the reader to be aware of. This is about a character from Emma, and almost doesn't describe the plot or characters of Emma at all outside of Mrs. Elton and Mr. Sucking. (TW slavery, if you click through that link). What this short essay spends its time on is explaining things that the reader might not be familiar with, like the contemporary association of Bristol with the transatlantic slave trade.
At a certain point you come to expect your readers to do a little legwork. As I was working on the paper that this guide is about I kept running into discussions of "A Hanging," "Marrakech," and Burmese Days, so I read the two essays and a plot and character synopsis of Burmese Days. At this level your reader is almost always active, either in that they are an expert in the field who is going to be peer reviewing your writing or they are a professor who assigned research on an author they are familiar with or they are a researcher going over your arguments to see if they support or contradict their own research.
The structural basics of "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em" are essentially true, but also a conclusion is a chance to really hammer home your argument after you have familiarized your reader with the state of research on the topic of your paper. Your conclusion isn't just summarizing your argument at the end of the paper, it is a mic drop.
Anybody want an exhaustively in-depth, step-by-step breakdown of how to write a research paper for a college literature class?
Okay, so you start by identifying the work that you're going to write the paper on. Most lit classes will announce in the syllabus that you'll have a paper due at the end of the term, and usually it will be a text that was covered in the class. The FIRST thing you should do is skim the wikipeda pages of all the assigned readings. One of the BEST things that you can find on a wikipedia page about a work you're considering for a research paper is a section discussing debated meanings or controversy about the text - this means that there is a LOT of material on the work you're going to break down.
The reason to do this at the start of the class is twofold: One, it gives you more time to prepare for the paper, Two, you should know what the readings assigned at the end of the term look like before you panic and choose a work that the class has already covered. I have been in twenty English classes where pretty much no one went over the works assigned for the last couple weeks of the term. This is a mistake! Those works are usually assigned late in the term because they're what the rest of the term has been building to in terms of complexity and meaning, which, again, probably means that there's a metric fuckton of research on those readings.
Anyway. I'm doing my paper on George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," which you can read here if you want to play along with this post.
The next step is to read the work. If you have already read the work earlier in the class, now is the time to go back through and skim it to re-familiarize yourself with the text. You are making very big, very general notes. The notes that I made on this read-through were things like "baited," "performance of empire," "the ugliness of empire," and "performance to one another." You're just getting the biggest, vaguest ideas out, because now it's time to do your precis, which is not as precise as that name would imply.
The way that I approach a precis is as a very, very, very broad statement about what I think the work is saying and what I want to say about it. In this case I think Orwell is saying that imperialism is both cruel and pointless, that it is mutually degrading to those subject to empire and enforcing empire, and that it makes the world worse. Cool. Orwell doesn't like empire, that's not a surprise.
At this point I have a general idea of where I think I'm going to go with this paper (in the direction of performance; i'm going to talk about the way that Orwell fixates on empire as performative) and it is time to go dig up research.
*nineteen articles later*
The reason you do your precis before you do research but that you do not write a thesis statement before you do research is because you need to guide your search, but you don't want to box yourself into a corner by only looking at one specific argument. For instance, for my Austen project I am examining radical politics in Austen's work but I have bought books written by biographers who understand her as a conservative as well as a whole book of marxist criticism of Austen that considers her a conservative; that is not totally in line with my reading of her work or her politics, but it's important to see what arguments people who *aren't* totally in line with my view of the matter make.
So what I have done for this Orwell paper is searched my school library's database for terms like "Orwell and Empire," "Orwell and Violence," "Orwell and Authority," "Orwell and Policing," and "Shooting an Elephant."
I went through the results from most to least relevant for each search, and opened them all in other tabs. I didn't read them, or even skim them, I just opened the database link to the articles in another tab. You DO NOT need to read every single one of these that you open, you do NOT need to read them one at a time before choosing to open another.
Okay, so, now that you've got a bunch of articles to sift through, you start an annotated bibliography. The way that I *personally* do this is to start by putting the info I will need to cite each of these articles/books/etc, into a document. I also create a new folder and download everything that I possibly can.
Two of my sources were books that I have institutional permission to view but not to download, so I have those open in my browser.
Downloading is an important step. Download, download, download. Don't just leave these up in the browser and close them after you've skimmed them and decided they aren't necessary - download them because you could get a third of the way into your paper and realize that, actually, that WAS a necessary part of your paper and downloading will save you the hassle of trying to go find the paper online again (this is also why you START this process by getting the citation/publication info into a document).
At this stage you have STILL not read any of these documents. You are still NOT going to actually read them for at least one more step, you are going to start by skimming.
Your next step is to just skim each of these documents to see if they are *at all* relevant to your research paper.
So, for instance, that paper on "Landscape and the mask of self" is actually a paper on *geography,* not a paper on literary criticism. There's a good chance that it is not going to have anything to do with my topic, so I am going to skim it [pause for skimming] and after skimming it, it's an intertextual exploration of geography and Orwell's story, history, and other writings on empire. This text *IS* relevant to my paper, which I now need to note in my bibliography document.
I'm not going to completely read this paper, yet, or pull any quotes out of it, I just make a note in my document that it touches on themes that will show up in my paper.
Then I move on to another document and skim it [pause for skimming] and it appears that "This Side of the Barricades" is okayish background on Orwell that I might use if I really need to justify a statement, but is more journalistic than literary and is not really on the subject of the work that I'm discussing. It is not useful to my paper, so I make a note of *why* it is not useful in my document.
What I also start doing at this point is sorting out "useful" and "not useful" with visual cues. I use a highlighter in my document, and I also change the titles of the PDFs so that they will be sorted in my file explorer with useful stuff at the top and less useful stuff at the bottom:
And that is all for the moment. I'll write more once I've skimmed all my possible sources but I'm getting worried that tumblr is going to crash and eat this post.
If you need to skim a BOOK rather than an article, that is also a multi-step process.
First, you read the table of contents to see if the ToC has any direct references to the subject you're exploring or has any chapter titles that touch on the issues you're looking at. "Doubleness and the Value of Decency" has a section titled "learning how to write about Orwell" and includes an exploration of Burmese Days, which means there's at least a bit of material that is in the correct ballpark for what I want to talk about in this book.
After you read the table of contents, skip to the end and read the index. Look for your subject.
The story I'm writing about is referenced three times, so I can hang on to this book and move on to skimming other works, but there is not going to be a ton of material for me to work with here.
The other book that came up in my search has a whole chapter that plays off the title of the story I'm researching:
But the book as a whole doesn't seem useful, since it's about politics in post-9/11 America. So Just in case, I'm going to skim by checking the first sentence of the first few paragraphs of this chapter.
"George Orwell did not have a good opinion of the language of politics."
"Ten years before penning his analysis of the emptiness of political language, Orwell, in his first great essay, told a story from his days as a subdivisional policeman in British-ruled Burma."
" 'Don't think of an elephant,' advises linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff."
"Our inability to not think of an elephant illustrates the way language frames work."
"One of the ways negative political attacks work is they can force the target of the attack to invoke the negative frame while denying it."
These are all the first sentences of the introductory part of the chapter. This is not useful for my assignment, I don't have to look at this book anymore. But I WILL make a note of why it's not useful in my bibliography document, and I will note how and where the other book might be useful.
PRO TIP: as you are skimming and checking, check the bibliographies and works cited sections of what you are skimming. One of the papers I've downloaded is referenced in one of the books I skimmed and in the bibliography of another paper. That likely means that it is VERY relevant and means that I'm going to pay more attention to it when I do my first full reading of it.
ALSO PRO TIP: As I'm selecting what sources to skim I typically work backwards from the sources I think I'm less likely to use to the sources that I'm more likely to use. I'll typically check the things from the geography journals, ethics journals, and political books first before I move on to articles from books with Orwell as their sole topic, articles that directly address what I want to cover in the title of the article, etc.
I find that it saves time to first narrow down the field of what you'll be looking at, instead of immediately diving into things you want to take a lot of notes or pull a lot of quotes from. It's really easy to end up spending an hour looking at a twenty page paper, get a lot of good info out, then step back and realize you have another fourteen papers to go through and lose some steam. Knock seven less useful papers out of the way first, THEN dive into the good shit.
For the record, here's how to skim a paper:
1 - Read all the titles of all the sections
2 - Read the first paragraph, then the first three sentences of the next three paragraphs.
3 - Read the conclusion.
4 - Either text search or just look through the text for words relating to your area of focus (in this case I'd probably be looking for "white" "empire" and "imperialism").
5 - If you're still not sure if the paper is a good source for you or not, read the first and last sentence of a few paragraphs.
This *should* be enough to give you the general idea of what a paper is about, if the author is in the same ballpark as you are in their interpretation of the text, and if it's going to be a text that you can work with.
For instance, skimming the geography paper didn't mean that I read the whole thing, but I read the headers and some of the pullquotes and the conclusion, and in handling the text I almost put it aside because it uses the kind of academic language that drives me up the wall and that seems particularly ironic when applied to Orwell. I decided to keep it because it has some very pertinent-seeming sections, but I know that when I deal with it, it is going to be frustrating to read.
One of the papers that I've got in the "maybe" pile is there because its analysis is from a feminist lens instead of a postcolonial lens and so it focuses on patriarchy instead of on imperialism.
One of the papers in the "no" pile is there because its tone is too unacademic and it reads like something out of Time Magazine.
This is what you're looking for in your skimming. "Does it address the topic I'm researching?" "Is this a paper that *I* can understand?" "Does the paper explore the topic that I'm researching in a way that is relevant to my approach to the work?" You're *still* not reading these papers. That still comes later.
Okay, you (I) have completed your first skim of all of your potential sources. You have pared down your field considerably - now it must be time to read the papers, right?
Wrong!
Probably at this point in your research, the plan you had in your precis has changed. I am still interested on writing about Orwell and Empire, but skimming has made me more attentive of stuff that I had been overlooking before. There *IS* an element of performance that is important to the story, but now I think that's maybe a paragraph or two of something that's a larger point. So I rework my approach a bit: George Orwell doesn't like empire, sure, fine. That's not a surprise. However, for someone who doesn't like empire and is talking about how evil it is, the narrator of this work sure does hate the Burmese people a lot and there is, in fact, a lot of racism going on here.
Four of the papers that I looked through discuss this, and two of them discuss it in depth. So, okay, now I'm writing about Orwell and Empire and Race and the performance of whiteness. Cool. Keep your new approach in mind, and then organize your sources in a new document in order of most to least pertinent to the argument that is taking shape in your head.
As I do my first skim, I have a 4-tier system, Good, Okay, Okay I guess, and Nope. I started with 19 sources I was looking at, immediately dropped that to 17, and now my "good" and "okay" list have a total of ten sources, so I only move the top ten over to my new document. If you have fewer than ten "good" sources keep some of your "okay I guess" sources on the new document.
The 4 Tiers of Supporting Material are something like:
Good - Talks about the work that I'm exploring extensively OR another work by the same author on the same subject; explores the work through the analytical lens that I'm using to approach the topic; explores the same concepts that I'm looking at, but also makes me consider new concepts about the work.
Okay - Talks about the work I'm exploring and/or other works by the same author on the topic. May explore the author in question as part of a larger conversation comparing other authors (Kipling and Forster were common in this, all three being English authors who had written about the British in India). Perhaps uses a different analytic lens, or is slightly off-topic in terms of approach (cross discipline geography paper and paper from the utopian studies journal aren't Lit papers per se, but they'll do).
Okay I Guess - Mentions the work you're researching as a footnote in a larger discussion, uses an analytical framework in the same neighborhood as your approach (a marxist approach to a work you're examining through a postcolonial lens is probably going to have one or two lines you can use; a psychoanalytic paper might not).
Nope - Off topic, irrelevant. The name of your subject might come up but is not discussed. Using this paper in your assignment would be a disingenuous grab for sources because you couldn't find enough pertinent information and your professor WILL notice this.
So you have sorted all your papers into a different document and you have ordered them from most to least helpful, surely now is the time that you actually read them, right?
Wrong! Open your two best sources and look in their bibliographies.
These weren't in my initial searches, now I need to see if I can go find them. [pause for searching] I don't have institutional access to Stephen Ingle's paper, but I was able to just find Mohammad Sawar Alam's paper online and download it. After a quick skim, it gets added to my bibliography.
So now, surely, it must be time to read these papers?
Nope!
Now it's time for you to re-read your primary document, this time you're making more notes. And I'll be back later when I've got more notes.
At this point in your writing process you should be miserable and doubting yourself. Don't worry! That's normal!
The tension and doubt that you are experiencing are because you are changing how you thought about the work in the first place.
Personally, I'm torn between the feeling that Orwell intentionally made the speaker of "Shooting an Elephant" exceptionally racist in order to underscore the idea that the Raj was specifically structured to amplify and widen racial divisions and the feeling that Orwell was just pretty racist.
I'm not personally familiar with enough of Orwell's works from this era or specifically about empire to say, and this is something on which my sources are conflicted.
This is made more difficult by the fact that this work is alternately described as an essay and as a story; whether it is a work of pure fiction or if it is supposed to recount an actual incident is debatable, and that makes a difference because that would clear up if Orwell is narrating his own thoughts or if he is narrating the thoughts of an unnamed speaker who shares exaggerated versions of Orwell's opinions.
I can't make up my mind yet, and I don't have to, because now it is time to read my sources.
Please note, I am now several hours into working on this paper, I have read the work that I'm analyzing at least four times, and I do not yet have a specific thesis.
When you are writing a paper like this you *DO NOT* settle into a thesis that you're going to argue for until you are DEEP into the process.
So now, let's go through the steps of reading some literary criticism together. This is an active process even on the first read, and this is part of why your annotated bibliography is going to be *annotated.*
I'm going to start with Alan Blackstock's "Narrative Hysteria" essay, which I am delighted to have found under a digital commons license, so I can link it here for you to read along. Blackstocks' essay approaches the work of three English writers discussing the British Raj. Blackstock is examining these authors through a feminist lens. His discussion of Orwell is largely limited to the novel Burmese Days, which I have not read, but Blackstock is discussing empire in Orwell, so this is fairly relevant to my research. This is one of my "okay" sources. I have already done a quick skim of the essay once, so I know the discussion of Orwell is limited to pages 193-199, and that there is some talk of empire in the conclusion; I noted this in my annotated bibliography when I was doing my first fast survey.
This is one of sub-optimal sources, so I am not going to read it multiple times.
Start by carefully reading the first few hundred words of the essay. You want to know what the paper is talking about to know how relevant it is to your research, but you don't want to waste time reading a few thousand words about a book you're not familiar with by an author who you're not reading. I don't need to read Blackstock's analysis of Kipling to parse his thoughts on Orwell. So read the introduction. [pause for reading] Having read the introduction, I see strong parallels between the portrayal of empire in Burmese Days and "Shooting an Elephant." I'm going to need to be somewhat familiar with Burmese Days to get more out of this, so I am going to read the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel; the novel comes up in other sources I have so now is a good time to get a basic handle on the story.
Now that I've read the introduction and a summary of the work that this essay is primarily discussing, I am going to skim the discussion of Kipling and then start reading the section on Orwell. (Even if Kipling isn't relevant to my research, essays are often internally referential so likely the section I care about will refer to the section on Kipling).
Because I am only going to read this once, I am going to do it with my annotated bibliography open in another window, and I'm going to copy potentially relevant sections of text into the annotated bibliography as I go.
When I started today my annotated bibliography had 438 words just for the citations of the 10 collected sources. After reading the Orwell section of Blackstock's essay I now have 788 words. I'm going to skim the section on Forster and then read the conclusion closely.
I am now laughing because the entire conclusion is relevant to my paper and I have added another 400 words to my document, including two citations made by Blackstock that I may need to cite if I cite this section of his conclusion.
However, the whole purpose of reading this source was to mine it for resources and close the document and never have to open it again. I have a brief note about what Blackstock's essay is about, four long sections of the text copied into my bibliography that I may quote in my paper, brief notes about each of those sections explaining why they're relevant to my research.
The point of reading Blackstock's paper in this way and collecting the quotes in an annotated bibliography is to close the paper and never need to open it again. All of the sections of this paper that are useful to me are now in one place with my notes about my thoughts on in. When I sit down to put my arguments in an organized essay I do not want to have to flip back and forth between ten documents and page through them looking for the quote that I need and struggle to remember if it was in the essay on empire written by the Iranian sociologist or if it was the one written by the American geologist.
Your annotated bibliography is the most work that you will do on any research paper. It is where you transcribe or copy relevant text quotations, it is where you make your arguments to yourself, it is where you will eventually copy or transcribe the sections of your primary text to figure out what in-text evidence there is for the argument you are making.
Okay. We have read one paper. I have two papers listed that I've determined I need to read twice and nine other sources that need a reading similar to this one. I'll see you when I'm done with the other sources like this and it's time to go through a close-read paper.
one more cos it went reaaally well yesterday:
personal:
read about outlining
outline fic: 30 / 60?
shower + hair
stretchout
go on a walk
class:
qlab tutorials: 1 / 2 / 3? / 4?
read + respond to prof email
essay: 30 / 60? [no]
attend lecture @6
update sound notes sheet
email j, e2 about testing mics + prelim sx levels for tech
email e about qlab and script mtg
housework:
wipe down: tub / bathroom walls
dishes
change sheets
sheet: spray / soak
clear dishrack
change bathroom light
life maintenance:
emails: 15 / 30 / 45?
fridge tidy
activate credit card [do tmrw]
cook kimchi fried rice + fajitas
schedule grout appt
catch up on bujo
order new laptop case
phone grandma
work:
leads agenda
catch up on slack
emails?
leads mtg @3:30
ask prof + figure out rvw sesh room?
woo public todo list time for Accountability:
personal:
write for an hour on anything!! do a fifteen min writing sprint for fic
text to skip group call jk just drop by for a bit on group call
housework:
water plant
fridge tidy
cook kimchi fried rice
wash / dry / fold / store laundry
dishes
wash tub and walls w new rubber gloves!
stretchout: 30 / 60
go for a walk? could go in the middle of writing sesh if i’m stuck
exit
shower, hair if i’m up for it
life maintenance:
calc daiso money
text i to check math on ^ and send $
look at other jtown reciept pics
go thru reciepts pile on desk
costco, chipotle, walg, etc. into sheet
activate credit card [push to mon bc bank closed today oops]
catch up on bujo oof
tidy up index cards on desk
buy new laptop carrier
class:
qlab tutorials: 1 / 2 / 3?
skim sun reading
read assignment sheet for paper
draft + send email to prof about topic selection for paper
work:
nothing because i am off for the weekend!!
aw god she’s a long one! we’ll see how it goes.
july 6, 2021 — day 8/100 of progress
fell off the face of the planet to wrap up spring semester but never fear it is summer and i am still in classes! i’m really liking my data science class so far, genuinely squinting at doing more of this in the future 🧡
love to .. download so many papers from @jstor that jstor needs to ask me if i’m a robot
this month’s spread! is it just me or is february every year just weird??
april 13, 2021 - day 7/100 of progress
man it’s been a hot minute (internship hunting had me really down) but i have a Plan for the summer in the very likely situation i am not interning, and it is time to slowly ease myself back into studies for the last four weeks of the semester !
march 18, 2021 - day 6/100
four years into undergrad i’m finally starting to feel like i have a grasp on how to take lecture notes haha
🎧 - my space heater
feb 20, 2021 - day 5/100
its project hours babey!
feb 15, 2021 - day 4/100
there is so much work! i do so much of it and there is still so much left!! aaaaaaaaa!!!
feb 2 2021 - day 3 / 100 of progress
spent a little more than an hour typing up notes for an article that i’ve been procrastinating on for a few weeks, which feels pretty good! i’m meeting w/ my advisor later this week, which i’m a wee bit nervous about
jan 28 2021 - day 2 / 100 of progress
working thru my databases lectures still! its barely been a week and a half of classes, but things are already going sO fast — kind of exhilarating but also kind of stressful
jan 24 - 1 / 100 days of progress
working through notes on my databases course!! things are happening Too Quickly but i’m hopeful that they will go well
day 4/100 - november 17, 2020
so... in the last two months i’ve SUPER decreased my goals for grades this semester, come to terms with to expecting not pass a class, and am starting to figure out one work-life balance.
11.5.2020, a ray of sunshine
She's getting ready for tomorrow online midterm (it's at night).
