Absolutely. My rule of thumb is that if a sentence of summary isn't followed by a sentence of analysis, it doesn't need to be there, but in this paper, I have to describe the original gothic trope, and then the way Irving is mocking it in his story, to make my point that the mockery is a statement of postcolonial independence. While I would like the highlighting of these things to speak for itself as support for the analysis further in the paper, it probably doesn't look so good in a paper of this short a length.
I thought I had to provide more summary so my advisor would know what I was talking about if she hadn't read the book, until she told me she didn't care about that.
Yeah, I've learned just working in the writing center and reading my students' papers that I really don't need to know what they're talking about, but I'm a lot more focused on how they talk about it. And if I'm really lost, there's always Wikipedia for a short summary. :D
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Date: 2008-11-19 08:20 pm (UTC)Absolutely. My rule of thumb is that if a sentence of summary isn't followed by a sentence of analysis, it doesn't need to be there, but in this paper, I have to describe the original gothic trope, and then the way Irving is mocking it in his story, to make my point that the mockery is a statement of postcolonial independence. While I would like the highlighting of these things to speak for itself as support for the analysis further in the paper, it probably doesn't look so good in a paper of this short a length.
I thought I had to provide more summary so my advisor would know what I was talking about if she hadn't read the book, until she told me she didn't care about that.
Yeah, I've learned just working in the writing center and reading my students' papers that I really don't need to know what they're talking about, but I'm a lot more focused on how they talk about it. And if I'm really lost, there's always Wikipedia for a short summary. :D