Second verse, same as the first!

[icepixie]

I'm going to attempt to get the second half of my paper done tonight. More accurately, I'm going to fix the first half of the paper, and then try to write the second half. All before I go to bed at ten, because student conferences mean I have to be in the Starbucks at the library at seven-thirty in the morning gah. (Yes, we have offices. No, no one uses them, because they're old/in poor repair and underneath the stadium, so the kids have no clue where to go to find us. Everyone uses the Starbucks or other coffee shops for office hours.)

Expect freakouts as the evening progresses, since y'all seem to be amused when I use LJ as therapy. Current freakout topic is how my entire first body paragraph of a no-more-than-five-pages paper is pure summary of a story only seven pages long. I appear to have forgotten how to analyze. Yipes.

Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

Current freakout topic is how my entire first body paragraph of a no-more-than-five-pages paper is pure summary of a story only seven pages long.

Welcome to my world last semester, and to some extent, this past semester. My 20-page paper kind of had to have summaries, though, because if it were a "real" paper (in the sense of getting it published), discussing the myths in the book would require some sort of recap. My first advisor was constantly on my case over plot summary, though, and I still get paranoid about it.

Good luck!

[icepixie]

This was something I fought with heavily during my first year of college and mostly managed to kick after that. My first drafts usually start out with too much, and I manage to scale it back in the revisions. But this...I'm talking about narrative techniques. I have to quote and summarize extensively in order to have things to talk about, but I definitely feel like I'm overquoting. Ugh.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

That sounds like the problem I usually have. I have to put some sort of examples and sometimes need a sentence or two of backstory, and once I do that, it's hard to keep in mind where the line is. (And when I first started last year, 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. Oops!)

[rowdycamels.livejournal.com]

because they're old/in poor repair and underneath the stadium

awwwwwww, shunned.

[icepixie]

it's hard to keep in mind where the line is

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

[icepixie]

We're supposed to get shiny new offices all to ourselves (instead of the entire first year MA class having to share one) when they renovate a building near the library and humanities plaza.

In 2012.

(...If I go for the doctorate here, I...will still be here then. Starting my third year of five in the PhD program. I think that might be even more horrifying.)

[rowdycamels.livejournal.com]

In school FOREVARRRRRRR!