Tips for Essay-Writing in Political Theory By James Bourke The following guidelines are intended to help you in the

writing process. They are especially intended for students who do not have much experience with academic writing, or for students who do not have much of a background in political theory or other humanities disciplines. Though these considerations might be helpful for you, they should not be understood as a formula for getting an A. They can help you avoid making common mistakes, but doing well on a paper depends on the work you put into it. Moreover, everyones writing process is differentyou should experiment with styles and techniques in order to find the best ways to organize your own ideas. 1) Have a point. A good essay will be organized around a main claim. There should be a guiding idea or set of ideas that you believe in and want to persuade the reader of. You should state this claim clearly and directly in the introductory section of the paper (1st or 2nd paragraph), using no more than a sentence or two. 2) Make an argument. The task of the body of the paper is to persuade your reader that your claim is correct. To do this, you need to make an argument in support of your claim. The way you structure your argument depends on what your claim is and what would count as evidence for it. In the kinds of analyses you will be asked to do for this class, most of your argument will involve textual evidence for the view you are taking. In some instances, you may also choose to introduce historical evidence about the context in which the author was writing, although this is less likely to be appropriate or feasible in this class. Your handling of the text should be more than regurgitation of what the author saysyou should do some interpretive work on the text, which might make clear certain hidden presuppositions, or spell out in greater detail the authors reasoning, or try to relate and make sense of seemingly disparate or unrelated claims. 3) Consider objections. As you build your case in support of your main claim, consider how a skeptical reader might object to your argument. Is there counterevidence in the text that doesnt support your claim? Are there other ways of reading the passages you rely on as evidence? You should consider questions like these and deal with them in your paper. There are many possible ways of handling objectionsone is to show why the objection is wrong, another would be to qualify your claim and concede some ground to the objection. How you deal with this depends on how strong or important you think the objection is. 4) Answer the question! [only essays based on prompts]. If you are writing in response to a prompt, make sure your claim is clearly related to the prompt. If the prompt asks a question, answer the question. If the prompt asks you to consider an issue, consider the issue. Sometimes you might want to challenge the premise of the question in the prompt. This is acceptable (indeed, encouraged), but if you do this it must still be clear how your claim and argument are related to the question.

Some common practices that you should avoid: 1) Dont use a grandiose introduction. Some people like to open their papers with sweeping claims like since the dawn of time, man has struggled with the issue of x or history shows us that x Try not to do this, because it is difficult to substantiate such claims. The dawn of time was a long time ago, and history is a big, complex thing. 2) Dont puff up your writing with SAT-words or purple prose. It is common to think that big words, the sorts of words that might be on the verbal portion of the SAT, ought to be used frequently in academic writing. In fact, the opposite is true. You can write most effectively by saying things clearly. And clear writing is most often a matter of simple, direct expression. 3) Dont bite off more than you can chew. A good essay writer understands that, within typical space constraints, you can only persuade your reader of a small amount. There may be all kinds of interesting questions related to an author or a topic, but you cant answer all of them, at least not well. Try to make strong cases rather than far-reaching ones. A note on formatting citations: I am not a stickler for formatting, but I do insist that your sources are properly credited in your work. Wherever you have relied on someone elses ideas, you must credit that person. If you excerpt directly from someone elses work, place the excerpt in quotation marks, or indent it as a block quotation if it is a longer passage, and indicate where the quote can be found (the work and the page number). If you are paraphrasing or summarizing someones work, you should still cite it. You may choose whichever citation convention and format you prefer, so long as you credit your sources and give the most important information (minimally: author, title, year of publication, as well as publisher information). If you use one citation format in your paper, you should use it consistently. What you choose to do is up to youyou may use in-text, parenthetical citations with a full list following the essay, or footnotes or endnotes. If you would like some good formatting instructions, I recommend the Chicago Manual of Style (available online).