Full Description
From a cultural history of the essay to incisive contemporary rethinking of its usefulness in the classroom, from guides on how to write a seminar paper to guides on how to assess them, Making the Grade offers desperately needed clarity on a complex genre. The contributions in this book should be standard for every first-semester graduate student and every first-semester professor who wants to prepare undergraduates for graduate-level writing or who wants to prepare graduate students for professional publication.
Contents
Introduction: The Graduate Classroom Staple
Kevin A. Morrison
Part One: The Seminar Paper: History, Conception, Experience
1. Essaying Assessment and Assessing the Essay: The Graduate Seminar Paper as Disciplinary Performance
Phil Robinson-Self
2. The Cost of Ambiguity: How Students Experience the Graduate Seminar Paper Genre
Gabriel Morrison and Thomas Deans
Part Two: Argument, Ethos, Intervention
3. The Seminar Essay as Academic Literary Criticism: Strategies for Entering the Scholarly Conversation
Almas Khan
4. Writing with Authority: Ethos and the Seminar Essay in English Studies
Elizabeth Vogel
5. A Scaffold for Scholarship: Re-vising the Seminar Writing Assignment
Janet G. Auten
Part Three: Reading, Writing, Revision, and Presentation
6. Setting Up for Success: Strategies for Managing Research and Writing
Marilyn Gray
7. Time Management is Everything: Useful Tips for Graduate Students
Natalie M. Dorfeld
8. Peer Review, Revisited: Graduate Writing Groups
Mark Celeste
9. Presenting Research Ideas in a Seminar Setting
Lucinda Becker
Part Four: New Directions, Expanding Possibilities
10. Digital Methods and Visual Essays in the Classroom
Lisann Anders
11. Structural Shifts and the Graduate Literary Essay: Examples for the Twenty-First Century Classroom
Shanthini Pillai
12. Not for Everyone: Experiments in Assessment
Kevin A. Morrison
Coda: Demystifying the Seminar Paper
Jessie Reeder
