- Have a title. Ideally, it should both grab your readers’ attention and tell them something about the paper.
- As much as possible, try to organize the paper by the logic of your argument, not the chronology of the text.
- Avoid vast, weighty generalizations (“From the beginning of human history….”) in your opening line; instead, find a punchy, compelling way to jump right into the text(s).
- Do your best to get things right (spelling of characters’ names, details about the plot, quotations from the text). Avoid typos. You’re trying to persuade someone to trust what you have to say about the text; making basic mistakes about it damages that trust (because it suggests you’re not really paying attention).
- Try to maintain a neutral, or mostly neutral, tone. You’re trying to persuade someone that you have thought carefully and deeply about the text; a ranting tone won’t help.
- Psychoanalyzing or morally judging characters isn’t terribly persuasive on its own – they aren’t people. They only matter as an aspect of the text, so tell the reader how the judgement you are making about the character (“Ada spends all her time thinking about her marriage prospects”) is important for a larger understanding of the text (“This works toward the author’s larger point about how patriarchy constrains women’s ideas of their own possibilities.”)
- Long quotations need to justify the “real estate” you devote to them in the paper. Quote only as much as you need to, to make your point. And – whenever you’re including a quotation, but especially when including a long one – say why the quote is important, why you’re bringing it to your reader’ attention.
- Think of your paragraphs as units of thinking: long enough to articulate, flesh out and demonstrate (with support from the text) one main point. An overly long paragraph suggests to the reader that you are trying to grapple with too much at once; an unusually short paragraph suggests you haven’t fully thought through the idea.
- Remain, as much as possible, focused on the text.
- Don’t use 10 words when 5 will do.