Essay Editorial Advice

• Use "you," "the reader," or "one" because you are assuming that any possible reader will have the same opinion that you are presenting. You should only use these forms of address when you are making a specific and well researched argument about the reception of a particular text.
  
  
• Use "I" or "me" unless you are using personal experience to back up your argument(s)
  
  
• Use "I believe" or "I think" because those phrases allow you to hedge your arguments instead of just saying "this is so"
  
  
• Use contractions because they are informal language structures
  
  
• Use questions because you, as the writer, should be answering questions not asking them
  
  
• Use the phrase "the fact that" because it is just extra wordage
  
  
• Use the words "thing," "some," or "many" when you should name the object particularly -- be as specific as possible
  
  
• Use "there is/are" or "it is" because in using these sentence structures you are avoiding clearly signaling to your reader who/ what is the subject of your sentence
  
  
• Use "this" as the subject of a sentence because this construction tends to obscure the actual subject of the sentence
  
  
• Use passive voice when active voice is more appropriate (ex. "The building is considered by Ruskin." -- should be "Ruskin considers the building.")
  
  
• Use ellipses at the beginning or end of quotations -- simply quote the phrase (ex. " . . . never to yield . . ." should be just "never to yield")

What you ought always to do in your essays for this class:

• Use commas after introductory clauses, connecting two independent clauses, and with items in a series
  
  
• Use "female" and "male" when you are writing about biological anatomical facts, and "woman" and "man" when you are writing about the gendered identity of either sex.
  
  
• Use present tense when discussing a text unless you are making some sort of temporal based argument (ex. "Wilde argues" not "Wilde argued")
  
  
• Hyphenate nineteenth century when you are using it as an adjective (ex. nineteeth-century women writers)
  
  
• Look up any questions you may have about parenthetical documentation or grammar in The MLA Handbook or some other grammar handbook
  
  
• Talk to me regarding things you are unsure about

• The introduction should be begin by discussing your main topic in a more general manner than your thesis (something that the reader can relate to) and then moving toward your specific argument about the topic in the thesis, which is usually the last or second to last sentence(s) in the introduction paragraph. This paragraph should be significantly shorter than your body paragraphs.
  
  
• The thesis should include your topic, argument, and subtopics (which do NOT have to be three in number or correspond to only one paragraph). The thesis sets up the overall structure of the essay and, as such, is extremely important. When you begin writing, don't worry about getting the thesis precisely right. Instead, think about your first thesis as a working thesis that will change as you write the essay and develop your ideas.
  
  
• The body paragraphs should develop a subtopic or part of a subtopic and can be any number. However, you must consider the length of your essay when deciding how to organize your subtopics into paragraphs. For example, having nine paragraphs in two pages is NOT a good idea because each paragraph will be too small to explore any idea in depth. Since your thesis is always some sort of an argument, each body paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that makes an argument about the subtopic or part of a subtopic that it is dealing with. This topic sentence works the same way for the paragraph that the thesis works for the overall essay -- it provides structure. The paragraph should end with a concluding sentence that both draws to a close its paragraph and transitions to the next.
  
  
• The conclusion should begin by stating the thesis with a difference. This difference comes from the argument that you have developed in your body paragraphs. Then the conclusion applies the specific argument of the thesis to a larger context. However, be careful not the end with a "save the world" sentence. The conclusion should be short and sweet and only about three sentences in the case of two to three page papers.