Transitions

Cause and Effect
1. accordingly
2. as a result
3. consequently
4. hence
5. it follows, then
6. since
7. therefore
8. thus

Conclusion
1. as a result
2. consequently
3. hence
4. in conclusion
5. in short
6. in sum, then
7. it follows, then
8. therefore
9. thus

Comparison
1. along the same lines
2. in the same way
3. likewise
4. similarly

Contrast
1. although
2. by contrast
3. conversely
4. despite
5. even though
6. nevertheless
7. nonetheless
8. on the contrary
9. on the other hand
10. regardless
11. whereas
12. however
13. in contrast
14. while
15. yet

Addition
1. also
2. besides
3. furthermore
4. moreover
5. indeed
6. in addition

Concession
1. admittedly
2. although it is true that
3. granted
4. I concede that
5. of course

Example
1. after all
2. as an illustration
3. consider
4. for example
5. for instance
6. specifically

How to Write a Successful Paper

Guidelines for a Successful Paper:

A helpful metaphor for paper writing is that your argument is like a building, so make sure that every piece of evidence (quotations from the text and the analysis of those quotations) that you use as a brick in your building fits well and is strong. Make sure that you cement your evidence into your argument through the use of strong topic sentences that reflect the main point of the paragraph and concluding sentences that tie each paragraph back to your thesis.

Textual Evidence: Any good literary analysis must use many specific details to support the conclusions that it reaches. Make sure your own claims about the text are supported with specific quotations from the text. In addition, remember to explain as completely as possible the significance of the quotations you choose to cite. How does a particular quotation relate to your larger argument about the text? Quotations should always be accompanied by detailed analysis. Close reading is a crucial part of this essay; you must explain how specific elements within the material you quote help to establish that which you claim the quotation establishes. Remember to connect the steps in your thinking for your readers – the connections obvious in your mind usually aren’t obvious to us, and we want to understand the point you’re making. Quote selectively; cite only those passages that support your argument most effectively. Try to avoid using too many long quotations (over three lines); try to say more about less. One recipe for a good paragraph is something called the Paraburger:

State the argument of the paragraph (TOP BREAD)
Quote the text that you will use to make your point (SPECIAL SAUCE)
Analyze the significance of the quoted text to make your case, requoting where necessary (MEAT/VEGGIE PATTY)
Tie the point of your paragraph back to the main thesis of your paper (BOTTOM BREAD).

Arguable Thesis and Organization: Be sure to include a thesis stating your main claims about the text(s) near the beginning of your paper. Think of your thesis as a promise to the reader concerning the points you will make in the rest of the paper. Your thesis should focus and organize your essay; every paragraph you write should develop your thesis in some way. Tie every paragraph back to your thesis, thereby reinforcing the role the paragraph plays in your larger argument. Make an outline before you write to help you connect your thesis to the supporting paragraphs. Also, try making a paragraph from your thesis statement and all your topic sentences – if that paragraph is coherent, then you’re topic sentences (and hopefully also your paragraphs!) are on track. Try to conclude your argument with comments that do not simply repeat what you’ve already said, but point the reader to other connected ideas or issues.

Avoid Generalizations: Take the time to define key terms in your analysis in your own language. Always “earn your terms”—don’t just repeat expressions or phrases from lecture, but make sure that you define what you mean by key images or ideas. For example, if you cite a term from Lukacs, you still need to explain how exactly this term fits into the context of your particular argument (what do you mean by "consciousness"?). Try to build a convincing case for your interpretation of the text using specific logic and evidence. Focus on specific word choices and phrases in your analysis.

How to Write a Strong Thesis

1st story: Describes a topic; gives the facts; makes an observation. This level of thesis makes observations that are non-controversial (i. e. no reasonable person would disagree with them). A person reading such a thesis immediately thinks: "Yes, this is true."

2nd story: interprets, gives a point of view on, and/or adds controversy to the facts of the first story. By adding controversy, I mean it takes a position on the facts which is not obvious, a position which reasonable person could disagree with. A person reading a 2-story thesis thinks: "That's an interesting point of view; now prove it to me." By controversial, I do not mean this thesis has to be absurd or idiosyncratic; you'll never be able to convince your reader of that kind of argument. Rather, I mean it takes one position out of a number of positions.

3rd story: relates the 2-story thesis to the bigger picture, explains its significance, sets it a new context. This is the most difficult type of thesis to describe (and write) because it can take so many forms. I find it helpful to think of this story "opening out" - as if though a skylight - to a wider view. It is the answer you get when you ask of a 2-story thesis, "so what?" The reader should say: "I see why this argument matters." The pitfall in this type of thesis, that you want to be careful to avoid, is that it can get too ambitious, and try to make a bigger claim that you're able to substantiate (e.g. "My analysis of Sonnet 18 shows that all Western poetry is morally bankrupt and self-serving."

Examples

1st story: Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" employs metrical substitution, imagery that depicts her writing as illegitimate child, and an allusion to Greek mythology.

2nd story: Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" employs metrical substitution, imagery that depicts her writing as an illegitimate child, and an allusion to Greek mythology in order to convey her vexed relationship to her writing.

3rd story: Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" employs metrical substitution, imagery that depicts her writing as an illegitimate child, and an allusion to Greek mythology, which allows her to convey her vexed situation as an author. This vexed quality, ultimately reflects on the larger situation of gender and writing in the new world.

4th Story!: There's no need for your essay to read like a list. Revise your thesis so that it flows more naturally.

Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" reflects her vexed situation as an author, a relationship that largely reflects the prevailing attitudes about writing and gender in the New World.

In this example, you would still discuss those aspects listed above in the body of your essay, but there's no need for you to give a run down at the beginning of your paper.

As you can see, each story depends on the one below it. It is difficult, to say the least, to build a three-story house without a first story. The same holds true with a thesis: a two-story thesis needs a first story, and a three-story thesis needs a first and second story.

How to Close Read

Close reading is a critical way of interpreting literature that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century by a group of scholars and intellectuals known as the New Critics. The movement found success in the American University system because it both professionalized criticism while simultaneously making refined literature more accessible to a generation of students who had come to college with a diverse set of cultural backgrounds. While the theoretical and critical insights of the New Criticism have not been “new” for some time, the methodology of close reading that they pioneered still remains an important technique within literary studies and a key component in classroom instruction.

The New Criticism derived in considerable in part from the British scholars I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis as well as from the essays of T. S. Eliot. However, the movement developed principally in the United States by critics such as Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom (who coined the term), and William K. Wimsatt. Of particular importance are the critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (also a renowned novelist) who developed a series of New Critical textbooks that were widely adopted throughout the United States: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Understanding Drama (1945). These critics developed the New Criticism in response to the prevailing interests of scholars, critics, and professors who were particularly interested in the mind of the author or his biography, or in the social context of literature. Instead, the New Critics argued that the focus of literature ought to be the text itself and its literary qualities.

As such, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley established two New Critical “heresies” that would focus readers on the text itself. The first of these, the Intentional Fallacy, declared that it was fallacious to be interested in what the author intended to say. Since the New Critics held that literature was autonomous and self-sufficient, what was in the author’s mind did not matter. Furthermore, it was for all intents and purposes unknowable. What mattered were the words on the page. The second of these heresies, the Affective Fallacy, addressed the problem from the other end, the reader. Just as they ignored the intention of the author, they ignored the feeling of the reader. How literature might affectively move a reader did not matter because an interest in this got one away from the text. Thus, when you are constructing your own close readings, you should leave your own affective responses out of your explication of the text.

How to Close Read
According to M. H. Abrams, a prominent New Critic himself, the principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. Literature is a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systemic opposition to the language of science and of practical logical discourse, and the explication procedure is to analyze the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is on the “organic unity,” in a successful literary work, of its overall structure with its verbal meanings, and we are warned against separating content from form by what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of the paraphrase.” New Criticism is therefore a formalist school of criticism and close reading is a formalist activity. Close reading requires you to pay close attention to form, or the way in which literature communicates information. When performing a close reading, you should consider the following:

Structure

• In what genre is the passage written? Is it heavily or lightly marked by genre?
• How does the passage fit in with the overall genre of the work in which it occurs? (E.g., is it a humorous passage in a comedy, or a moment of comic relief in a tragedy?)
• Does the passage consist of narration, description, analysis, or discourse?
• Is discourse direct, indirect, or free indirect? Are there significant repetitions or redundancies? Does one part of the passage contradict or modify another? Are there significant omissions? Does the passage move quickly or slowly, briefly or at length? 

Diction

• Connotation: why these specific words? (e.g., father, dad, daddy, pa, sire)
• Polysemy: do the words have other meanings or homonyms?
• What parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) predominate?
• Are the words:
• Common or unusual?
• simple or complex?
• long or short?
• concrete or abstract?
• particular or general?
• archaic or current?
• context-dependent or context-independent? 

Syntax and Sentence Structure

• Do any sentences or clauses have an unusual word order ("California is where I went")? (The basic word order in English is subject-verb-object.)
• Does the word order make us wiat for information or provide it earlier?
• Does it call particular attention to one part of the sentence? 
• Does it cause an initial mistkae or ambiguity that it later clears up?

Verbs

• Tense: past, present, future?
• Aspect: neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect?
• Mood: indicative, imperfect, conditional, subjunctive
• Valency: intransitive, transitive?
• Voice: active, passive?

Person and Number

• Are subjects first-, second-, or third-person? Singular or plural?
• Are objects singular or plural?

Tropes

• What figures of speech are used?
• Does the logic of the passage rely mainly on metaphor or metonymy?
• Are comparisons made through metaphor or simile? 

Close Reading in Action
In How to Read Literature (2013), Terry Eagleton, by no means a New Critic, nonetheless demonstrates the power of close reading to make critical observations about literature. Eagleton turns to the opening passage of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) in order to demonstrate close reading. Orwell’s novel begins like this:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Eagleton then goes on to interpret the passage by paying close attention to the words used in the passage and noting their arrangement. In two paragraphs he demonstrates how a close reading can be done on just two sentences:

The first sentence gains its effect from carefully dropping the word “thirteen” into an otherwise unremarkable piece of description, thus signaling that the scene is set either in some unfamiliar civilization or in the future. Some things haven’t changed (the month is still named April, and winds can still be bitter), but others have, and part of the effect of the sentence springs from this juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unfamiliar. Most readers who open Orwell’s novel will know already that it is set in the future, though in the author’s future rather than our own…

This is a dystopian novel (dystopia being the opposite of utopia) about an all-powerful state that can manipulate everything from the historical past to its citizens’ habits of mind. No doubt it is this state that gave Victory Mansions its triumphalistic name. Yet it may be that the second sentence of the passage offers a mild degree of hope in this dismal situation. As Winston Smith enters the Mansions, a swirl of gritty dust manages to infiltrate the building along with him; and though the novel itself seems to find some ominous meaning in this intrusion (the wind is “vile”)… this gust of grist [may be] rather less sinister. Dust and grit are signs of the random and accidental. They represent bits of stuff without rhyme or reason, which fail to add up to any total or meaningful design. One might therefore see them as the opposite of the totalitarian regime portrayed by the novel. In the same way, the wind might be seen as a force that defies human regulation. It blows as it will, now this way and now the other. There is no rhyme or reason to it, either. The state, it would appear, has at least not been able to harness Nature to its purposes. And totalitarian states are uneasy with anything they cannot dragoon into order and intelligibility. Perhaps the regime cannot entirely banish chance, rather as Victory Mansions cannot entirely keep out the dust. (42-43)

Thus, by paying attention to the first two sentences of 1984, Eagleton provides some insight into Orwell’s novel. There is, despite the omnipresence of Big Brother, and undercurrent of hope and it is revealed even in these first two sentences.

Why Do This?
The benefits to close reading are vast. They allow for a thorough interrogation of the text and its language. Knowing how to close read will not only help you with basic reading comprehension, but it will allow you a greater understanding of it; with close reading you will be able to penetrate beyond the surface meaning of any text. Knowing how to close read in your day to day life will allow you to see past the everyday meanings of the texts you encounter and to gain a fuller understanding of the world around you. That being said, while we will work on our close reading throughout the quarter, we will not hold consider it a sacrosanct methodology. As the quarter progresses we will discuss how we can read historically while still paying close attention to the language of the text.

This material was developed after consulting M. H. Abrhams’s Glossary of Literary Terms and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature.

Statement on Academic Integrity

COC Statement on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

Approved by Academic Senate in May, 2010

Students are expected to do their own work as assigned. At College of the Canyons, we believe that academic integrity and honesty are some of the most important qualities college students need to develop and maintain. To facilitate a culture of academic integrity, College of the Canyons has defined plagiarism and academic dishonesty. Due process procedures have been established when plagiarism or academic dishonesty is suspected.

At COC, we define plagiarism as follows: Plagiarism is the submission of someone else’s work or ideas as one’s own, without adequate attribution. When a student submits work for a class assignment that includes the words, ideas or data of others, without acknowledging the source of the information through complete, accurate, and specific references, plagiarism is involved. This may include dual submissions of a similar work for credit for more than one class, without the current instructor’s knowledge and approval.

To be specific, below are some of the situations that will be considered plagiarism at COC:

·        Use information from any source, online or in print, in one’s own writing without acknowledging the source in the content and in the reference page of the assignment;

·        Simply list the sources in the reference page, without parenthetical citations in the body of the essay;

·        Take more than one printed line of  words consecutively from the source without putting quotation marks around them, even though the student has put the author’s name in the parentheses or in the reference page;

·        Turn in work done for other classes, regardless how big or small the assignment may be, without the current instructor’s approval—this is considered “self-plagiarism,” which is a form of academic dishonesty; or,

·        Turn in work by another student, even by accident.

In addition, COC has strict rules against using electronic devices during exams without the instructor’s approval. To be specific, absolutely no cell phones or any electronic devices can be on the desk or in sight during test or exam without the instructor’s approval. The presence of electronic devices in sight during exams may be considered as intention to cheat and will be processed as a form of academic dishonesty.

Cases of alleged academic dishonesty, such as plagiarism or cheating, will be referred to the Dean of Student Services for investigation. See your syllabus for course specific policies, rules, and guidelines on plagiarism and academic dishonesty.