Sign up for meeting times with me to discuss your précis and your unessay HERE.

Due Dates

  • Unessay précis due: Friday, October 9 by 10 pm to Blackboard
  • Unessay due: Friday, October 30 by 5 pm (to Blackboard, or to me in person – it depends on what you’re doing)

Project Overview: The Unessay Précis

The supposed “formlessness” of the unessay assignment sounds great, but all is not sunshine and roses. Before you can think rigorously about how to most compellingly and effectively use the freedom the unessay allows to produce something that is truly interesting, you need to just think rigorously. That’s where the précis comes in.

If the unessay gives you free range to utilize whatever form best suits your ideas and goals, the précis forces you to adapt your thinking to a very specific, strict, and unforgiving form. That form is the outline.

Your unessay précis will consist of an outline of the close reading paper you would write were the unessay assignment a “real” essay assignment. In other words, you will use the training you have been developing in close reading through our blog posts (detect a pattern, form a hypothesis, return to the text) to create an outline of an imaginary 5-7 page close reading paper about 1 or at most 2 of the literary works (or Pumzi) we are reading in this class. You will then distill the main argument you develop in this “close reading paper” into your unessay, remediating it in a different form.

After you submit your précis, you will meet with me individually to discuss your ideas for your unessay.

The unessay précis is worth 5% of your course grade, and it’s graded on completion. If you complete all requirements of the assignment, you will receive full credit. If you don’t, you won’t receive any credit.

Assignment Details & Requirements

The unessay précis has two sequential parts:

(1) The précis: Your unessay précis will be organized by paper “section” and it will look like something like this:

I. Introduction

A. Any introductory info (specific definitions of concepts or terms, for example) your reader might need to know to understand your argument.

B. Thesis: What you will be arguing in this paper. You should write this last, after you’ve completed the rest of the outline. You should also revise it – several times – before turning it in. This is a statement of your paper’s argument about your chosen text(s).

II. Section 1: Give each of your sections a title. You can think of a section as a paragraph if it’s easier for you, but I tend to think of sections as potentially encompassing more than one paragraph. A section is a logical unit of your paper. It comprises a main point of your argument.

A. The first step in making your first main point. Explain whatever needs explaining here so I can follow your argument as you go.

  1. “Supporting evidence from the text” (page number). This should be a quote. This is where all of that fun pattern recognition we did comes in. Find a pattern in the text. Your ideas need to come from the text. If you’re writing about Pumzi, talk to me about what this should be.
  2. “More supporting evidence from the text” (page number).
  3. Etc.

B. The second step in making your first main point. Explain whatever needs explaining here so I can follow your argument as you go.

  1. “Supporting evidence from the text” (page number). This should be a quote. This is where all of that fun pattern recognition we did comes in. Find a pattern in the text. Your ideas need to come from the text. If you’re writing about Pumzi, talk to me about what this should be.
  2. “More supporting evidence from the text” (page number).
  3. Etc.

III. Section 2: Give each of your sections a title. You can think of a section as a paragraph if it’s easier for you, but I tend to think of sections as potentially encompassing more than one paragraph. A section is a logical unit of your paper. It comprises a main point of your argument.

A. The first step in making your second main point. Explain whatever needs explaining here so I can follow your argument as you go.

  1. “Supporting evidence from the text” (page number). This should be a quote. This is where all of that fun pattern recognition we did comes in. Find a pattern in the text. Your ideas need to come from the text. If you’re writing about Pumzi, talk to me about what this should be.
  2. “More supporting evidence from the text” (page number).
  3. Etc.

B. The second step in making your first main point. Explain whatever needs explaining here so I can follow your argument as you go.

  1. “Supporting evidence from the text” (page number). This should be a quote. This is where all of that fun pattern recognition we did comes in. Find a pattern in the text. Your ideas need to come from the text. If you’re writing about Pumzi, talk to me about what this should be.
  2. “More supporting evidence from the text” (page number).
  3. Etc.

Repeat as needed. You should include as many sections as you need to make your argument complete. Remember that this is an outline for a 5-7 page paper. Adjust the outline accordingly, taking into account the overall scope of the paper.

IV (or V or VI or VII depending on how many sections you have….) Conclusion

A. What do you need to do to give this paper a sense of an ending? How will you close it out in an interesting way without just blindly repeating what you’ve already told me? What are the larger implications of your argument? Do you need a conclusion?

The basic idea here is that I will be able to follow the logical steps of your argument and see how you support these steps with specific evidence from the text by reading your outline.

(2) Meeting with me: After fall break, you will meet with me individually to discuss your ideas for your unessay (sign up for a meeting time using the link at the top of this page). We will talk for about 20-30 minutes about your précis and about how you envision the final form of your unessay. You should come to the meeting with specific ideas about what you want your unessay to be. My job will not be to tell you what to do. It will be to help you hone your existing ideas.

Why the Unessay Précis Is Not a Waste of Your Time

By forcing you to set all of your thoughts out on paper in a very formalized, artificial, and abstract way, I am forcing you to think through the main ideas that will inform your unessay. Your unessay, however, should not simply be a repetition of the ideas you develop in your unessay précis: it should be a remediation of them. To “remediate” something is to allow it to be refashioned by a new medium. You should see the relationship between your unessay précis and your unessay as something like the relationship between light and the prism it enters: the prism (the unessay) scatters and refracts the light (the unessay précis), breaking it into its component “parts” and sending it in a different direction.

This is all to say just this: the medium(s) and form(s) through which you choose to present your unessay will affect the content of the unessay in hopefully interesting ways. The purpose of the unessay précis is to develop the content you will then deform.

Tips

  • Re-read the close reading tip sheet and the “Surprise,” “Observation,” and “Disobedience” sections of Paul Graham’s online essay on essay writing (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html) that you read for Blog Post 5. Your unessay précis should give me, your reader, a sense of the close reading paper you would write if I would only give you the opportunity.

  • No person is an island. Come talk to me about your ideas. I can help you. But you need to ask.