This course is designed to help students develop their abilities as writers of academic or scholarly essays. The course focuses on argument and essay construction, with a particular focus on the difference between descriptive and interpretive (or argumentative) modes of writing. Students must write a research paper. 

More specifically, this course is structured around a conceptual distinction that is central to a variety of different types of academic and non-academic writing: the distinction between description and interpretation. Description, on the one hand, involves the communication of information to an audience; interpretation, on the other, involves explaining the meaning or significance of that information to an audience. All academic writing requires authors to do both these things. Whether it is the historian who, seeking to explain the origins of the English Civil War, must first relate the names and lives of important persons, places, and institutions in order to connect them in such a way as to make the War follow from a particular convergence; whether it is the literature professor who must quote and/or describe passages from his or her chosen text in order to make a case for that text’s larger meaning or historical significance; whether it is the chemist who must state the terms and conditions of an experiment before proceeding to describe how that experiment’s results advance research in some area: in all of these cases the writer must both describe and interpret. 

       Each assignment in this course, therefore, asks you to think about the work of description and/or the work of interpretation. Often, these two modes of writing blur into one another, as the things we choose to describe become bound up with the results that get reported. Even so, we will study how to be aware of when you are describing and when you are interpreting so that when it comes time for you to write you will be able to control how and when (and when not) to use these two vital skills.