Chinese literature paper
A paper is an important piece of course work in which you may demonstrate your academic ability of research (in the library and on the internet), reading, analysis, interpretation, making your judgments and expressing your ideas.
For this class, I do not want to limit your writing to a few assigned topics. Rather, I would like you to find a topic that interests you within our range of study. Although I want the first paper to be on the topic of sustainability, I still want you to find your own ways to connect your discussion of sustainability with our initial readings in Chinese literature. A reflection on what we focused on in classroom can lead you to many interesting paper topics and you are also welcome to talk with me about your topic selection.
Given the nature of our class, I require your paper to be in the nature of textual analysis. The texts we use in our class provide you the base for related contextual and inter-textual discussion.
Each literary text is a meaningful cultural and aesthetic unit that will give you ample room for exploration and appreciation-is there a value idea involved, does it depict a certain life style, why would it illicit a certain emotion, and what images does it resort to ... To answer these questions, you look at the text more closely and often want to put it in a context and relate it with other texts to gain more insights. You need to study more to be more attentive (your further reading may alert you to many issues that you were not very conscious of before). And you also need to be imaginative enough to relate yourself with a historical past through a literary text.
When you write, make sure that you have a theme, i.e. a central idea, and that your topic sentences of paragraphs consistently refer to this theme. (For the sake of exercise, you may want to do a chart of your topic sentences to see if your ideas flow smoothly and logically in your paper.) Don't forget to give your paper a title, which may often help you to state your theme and orient your writing.
Edit your paper at least once to make sure that you understand yourself (the clarity of your sentences, ideas and concepts) and that your writing is smooth (for example: do the subjects of your sentences jump abruptly from here to there or are they relaying consistently).
Make sure that you've done some research on the selected topic and that you provide a bibliography at the end of your paper listing the materials that you've referred to. When you use other people's ideas in your writing, you need to say so in a footnote. Whatever format you decide to use for your footnotes and bibliography (e.g. MLA and Chicago), be consistent.
Don't forget that your paper is about your own understanding and ideas. You don't have to write "I think" in every sentence. The whole paper, however, is an educated "I THINK." Don't leave yourself out of it.