Tips for Graduate Writing

• Let me know early on what question your paper will answer. After I have read your paper, what will I have learned that I didn't know before? Don't simply say, "I'm going to explore...." That's a strong sign that you don't know what you're going to find out in this exploration, which does not inspire your reader with confidence. You can explore all you want on your own time, but when you hand in the final draft of your paper, I want to know that you've arrived somewhere. Research papers are not novels; plot twists are not appropriate. Writing a good introduction to your paper means that you have decided what you are going to say before you say it.

• After taking a huge stack of notes, it is tempting to use them all in the hope that the reader will recognize all the hard work you did. The reader, however, will be more likely to note that your work is poorly organized and contains distracting and irrelevant information. Don't use a "he said, then she said" format for dealing with other academic material on your topic. If you are challenging or nuancing previous arguments, then lay those arguments out in some detail and enter your voice into dialogue with them. If you're not bringing any new light onto someone else's argument, then either leave that work out, cite it in a footnote, or write no more than one sentence about it (the latter two options are usually to acknowledge central works on your topic that you are not engaging directly). Get to your insights quickly. Don't think of what you're doing as a "literature review" ("I'm responsible for everything that's been said on this topic"); think of yourself as answering the question "How is what I'm doing similar to and different from what has been done before?").

• Throughout the paper, keep asking yourself "So what?" What is the significance of what you're saying? Why should the reader care?

• Develop a "nose" for what's "news." As a master's student, you probably learned to apply theory X to object Y competently (a postmodern reading of Blade Runner, for instance). This is a valuable skill that I call "it fits" criticism. You apply a theory to an object, and surprise, surprise, it fits perfectly. But the real world is more complex than theory; actual instances don't fit perfectly. You should pay attention to the things that don't fit as well as the things that are illuminated by the theory. Such consideration can help us nuance the theory, providing a significant payoff to the field. No one will care in the broader field about your paper if you simply do a competent application of theory to text because it's not "news."

As a Ph.D. student you are beginning to enter into the broader conversation of the field. This can be difficult because you're still learning what the field is, but as you mature you should use each seminar paper as an opportunity to find out something that the field doesn't yet know. Not every seminar paper becomes an article, but you should give yourself the chance for your papers to become articles. If you set out to answer a yet-unanswered question of importance, then your seminar paper at least has a chance of becoming published.

• Avoid the temptation to structure your paper in the same chronological order that the film/television program/new media text uses. This is usually the weakest way to structure a paper. Instead, you should structure it around your insights, picking supporting evidence from the original text as needed to make each point.

• For every assertion/generalization you make about a text, provide an example that supports your reading. Don't assume that your reader will agree with you. It's your job to convince them using evidence from the film/television program/new media text. Think of your reader as someone who has seen the same text that you have seen but who disagrees with your interpretation of what you've seen.

• Each paragraph should contain ONE idea, fully developed, and connected to other paragraphs by transitions that indicate how you got from one idea to the next. Don't overload your paragraphs by stuffing a bunch of unrelated ideas into them. Each paragraph should have a theme, and every sentence in that paragraph should be CLEARLY related to that theme.

• Don't begin paragraphs with description. You need to frame that description with a hint of what's at stake in the paragraph. What am I supposed to be looking for in this description? Don't wait till the end to tell me. If you do, I have to go back and reread the description in light of what I now know is the point.

• Don't end paragraphs with a quote. Don't let someone else have the last word in your paragraph; you should have the final say. If you use a quote near the end of your paragraph, tell me what's important about that quote, why it's relevant to your particular case.

• Similarly, don't end paragraphs with an example. Examples don't speak for themselves; you need to interpret them. If the point you want to make using an example is obvious and doesn't require explication, then it's probably not a very good use of an example (and certainly not a strong way to end your paragraph).

• How do I justify my choice of film/television program/new media text? Sadly, most qualitative researchers tend to avoid this question entirely, choosing texts simply because they find them interesting. When you get to the dissertation stage, you should definitely think about this question. What are the appropriate bases for choosing texts to study? There are several:

Representativeness: asserting that this text stands in for a group of texts. The most methodologically sound way to do this is to use a random sample (which, by the way, does not mean picking texts in a haphazard manner). Say that you want to make an assertion about American films of the 1940's. You would get the list of all films made in the Forties from the American Film Institute catalog for that decade and then use a random number table/generator to select from that list. This is a high methodological standard, making it relatively unfrequently used in media studies (though there are important examples of its use, such as Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger's The Classical Hollywood Cinema)

Availability: Sometimes you only have access to a limited amount of texts. For instance, if you are examining early television programming before the age of videotape, you may have a limited number of kinescope copies available. This is part of the difficulty of much popular culture research: that the texts you study were intended to be evanescent.

Influence: You may justify your choice based on an argument that a text created a trend for later work (Jaws for the blockbuster film, Doom for first-person shooter games, etc.).

Popularity: Choosing films based solely on their box office earnings is another relatively infrequently used but important method. Robert Ray's The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy begins by noting the popularity of the almost forgotten Andy Hardy films in 1939 (the year that Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz were released), and Ray asks us to consider how differently we'd look at the films of 1939 based on popularity, not on their current artistic standing.

Innovation. Sometimes it is valuable to look at a text that is not particularly popular or representative because it is takes a particularly distinctive approach.

• Avoid passive voice. Sentences in active voice have the structure "A did this to B." Passive voice would say that "B was done to by A." Often passive voice is used to make your prose sound more "academic" or to disguise the agency in what you're discussing ("Controversy was created by their choices" instead of the simpler, more active "Their choices created controversy.") Passive voice weighs your prose down.

• Similarly, use active verbs whenever possible, particularly in long sentences. If you write a complicated sentence that has a being verb in the middle, it saps your writing of power.

• Your professor has told you that you should try to turn your seminar paper into an article (congratulations, by the way). What do you do? What is the difference between a seminar paper and an article? A good seminar paper exhausts the local resources available; a published article exhausts all resources, including those at other institutions. Seminar papers tend to rehearse material from the course so that you can prove to your instructor that you've done the reading. When you convert that to an article, that material needs to go.

• So where do I submit my article for publication? First, check with your advisor, who will probably have some good ideas of appropriate venues. Screensite maintains a good list of cinema and media journals. You should also become familiar with the Iowa Guide to Publication, which is the best (though by no means complete) guide to publication in the communication field.