Reflections on Writing
about Mayflies
by Ron Mumme
In the view of many, "scientific writing" is, if
not an oxymoron, something that is "at best, dry and cumbersome;
at worst, tedious, pedantic, and impenetrable" (McMillan 1997,
p. 1). This misconception, however, could not be further from
the truth; the ability to write clear, precise, elegant prose
is as important and appreciated in the sciences as it is in
other fields.
Scientific writing usually takes
one of two broad forms:
Research papers present
the results of original field or laboratory research conducted
by the author(s). They typically follow a standard six-section
format that reflects the underlying logic of scientific investigation:
Abstract (summary), Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results,
Discussion, and Literature Cited. Sweeney and Vannote (see citation
above) used this format in presenting the results of their research
on the synchronous emergence of mayflies. Students in the natural
sciences at Allegheny College use the same general format when
writing laboratory reports for their courses and, especially,
when writing their senior comprehensive projects.
Review papers, in contrast,
synthesize previous research on a particular scientific issue.
Although no new data are presented, review papers typically
reflect the author's critical analysis of the research literature
in a field. Compared to research papers, review papers are more
varied in their structure and format and can range from short
papers that are tightly focused on a single issue to textbook-length
treatments of an entire field. Review papers can be extensively
referenced and written for other scientists working in the field,
or they can be "popular" pieces aimed toward lay readers with
little or no background in science. The essay on mayflies that
appears above is something of a hybrid; it is written in the
style of a scientific review, with full citation of relevant
literature, but is designed to be understandable to readers
with little or no background in biology.
Another common form of scientific
writing that combines elements of both research papers and review
papers is the research proposal. A research proposal
simultaneously reviews the literature in a given field and proposes
a novel set of experiments or other forms of investigation that,
if completed successfully, would extend our knowledge and understanding
in the field. Students in the natural sciences at Allegheny
College usually write a research proposal in preparation for
conducting their senior project research.
Literature Cited
McMillan, V. E. 1997. Writing Papers
in the Biological Sciences (2nd ed.).
Bedford Books: Boston.
July 19, 2000
Writing
a Formalist "English Paper"
For FS 201
Prof. Ben Slote
Dept. of English
Allegheny College
The following commentary describes some of the
basic assumptions and practices that define most English papers,
specifically those short (4-6 page) essays that focus on a literary
text. In the process, the commentary makes steady reference
to my five-page essay about Richard Wilbur's poem "Mayflies,"
so it is best (though not necessary) to read the poem
and my essay in conjunction
with this document. The commentary is organized chronologically
in that it begins with the most basic assumptions that underlie
the writing of English papers, then moves to the process and
conventions that mark such writing. While the whole commentary
addresses the distinctive traits of English papers from the
foundation up, the section called "WRITING
A FIRST DRAFT, Writing to readers" describes specific writing
features that make English papers look different from writing
in other disciplines.
The occasion
Why do people write "English" papers, essays that usually fall
under the heading of literary criticism? There are lots
of reasons, but the one to keep most in mind when you're writing
yours is that such essays provide the writer an occasion to
make interesting and persuasive claims about some literary text.
And why do that? Again, there is more than one reason. The literature
you are writing about compels you, in some way or another,
to respond; others who have responded to this text have gotten
it all wrong or a little wrong and you want to contest their
readings; you like to show off and convince others (or at least
yourself) that you are right about something. All three reasons
helped prompt me to write about "Mayflies": I loved the poem
the first time I read it, I think the knock on Wilbur that his
poetry is too optimistic is unfair or at least facile, and my
wife tells me I'm vain (in a quiet, winning sort of way). In
the professional realm of literary criticism, other compulsions
are at play: to get your essay published in an academic journal
and read by colleagues -- which, among other things, can help
you get a teaching job or a better teaching job or tenure and
a dependable health plan. For students, the other incentive,
a good grade, is more immediate. But essays about literature
would not have come to mean much, for academics and students,
if literature didn't compel essays in the first place. It's
next to impossible to write a successful formalist English paper
without some sure sense of how the literary text (and not just
the assignment) compels it.
How does a literary
text "compel" a response? You begin to answer this
question the first time you read a poem or story and ask, "I
wonder what that was really about?" Unlike some other subjects
which you study and write about in other classes, the study
of literature is founded, in part, on the premise that literary
texts require interpretation. (If they don't,
according to some, they are not "literary.") Poems and stories
are not like street signs or well-written recipes; they are
not self-explanatory entities; they are not confined to one
explicit, self-evident meaning; they are not even physical entities,
the way mayflies are, and so they are not really open to responses
to them that claim the kind of empirical authority biological
definitions do. This means, among other things, that literary
texts, unlike arithmetic problems, are always open to multiple
(though not infinite) interpretations. (Only in the literary
realm--in a wonderful story by Charles Baxter called "Gryphon"--can
a teacher assert that six times eleven is sometimes sixty-eight.)
The work that an English paper does is a version of the work
any reader does who wonders about a literary text, speculates
about confusing or ambiguous parts and gropes toward what may
eventually feel like a surer sense of what the text is saying.
This response, by the way, is different from a reading that
is merely appreciative. Sometimes bad book reviews are
mostly appreciative: "What a splendid novel, a poignant reappraisal
of the human condition, etc., etc." Although I was inclined
to write about "Mayflies" because I liked it so much right away,
my interpretive essay about the poem could not be based on my
admiration of it. English papers are different from book reviews
in another important way, too. Their main business is not to
tell their readers what "happens" in the story or poem, or what's
in it on a literal level. They assume that their readers have
read the text in question, already know the explicit "facts"
involved, and now would like to see what another reader (the
writer of the essay) thinks about the text.
What are English papers
obliged to do? Like a lot of different kinds of essays,
English papers should make a coherent set of interesting and
persuasive claims, as I said before. This "bottom line" should
remind you of some of the basics you practiced in FS102 and
perhaps FS101. English papers are almost always arguments,
or more precisely, interpretive arguments, in which you
attempt to convince your readers that the claims you are making
about the text in question are valid. As with any argument essay,
you will want to make yourself convincing by using evidence
to justify your assertions. In formalist English papers, that
evidence consists of quotations from and references to the text.
(In other kinds of literary criticism, the focus widens to include
material outside the text.) There are ways of using textual
evidence (quotations) particularly effectively, which my "Mayflies"
essay may exemplify, but before you think at this level of detail,
it's crucial to remember a more basic principle about interpretive
arguments: you should only make ones that are worth making.
Anyone who has read Wilbur's poem would not want to read an
essay the principle argument of which is that "Mayflies" is
in fact a three-stanza poem about an insect called the "mayfly."
That is of course an "interpretation" that does not need arguing.
The argument or thesis of your interpretive essay should
need to be argued, which is another way of saying that it should
be interesting or unobvious. Similarly, you should not base
your essay on an argument that cannot be made, that is,
an argument for which there is no evidence.
How does one produce
an "interesting and persuasive" interpretive essay? This
question needs to be broken down into parts. One has to do with
the process that leads to the composition of a successful
essay. The other has to do with the experience of composing
the first draft of the essay itself.
1. PREPARING FOR THE
ESSAY
a) Reading and rereading.
Writing a successful interpretive essay involves much more
than sitting down and writing. To get to the point of beginning
a first draft, almost any good writer undertakes some serious
and often time-consuming intellectual labors. In the case
of a formalist interpretive essay, you obviously have to read
the literary text a number of times. Before I wrote my "Mayflies"
essay, I read the poem about 12 times -- just short of killing
its effect on me. If you are writing about a poem, you will
also need to read it aloud a few times -- and listen
to what you hear.
b) Generating ideas-and
questions. What you might do next -- what
I did next with the "Mayflies" essay -- is record somewhere
all your ideas and questions about the text so far, all
of them, with no concern at this point about whether or not
these ideas and questions will be used in the first draft.
You might break the ideas and questions down into categories
to keep track of them. I did a version of this in the appended
document called "Mayflies notes." You can think of these notes
as a kind of holding tank from which some of your thinking
in your essay might be drawn. Remember, though, that your
essay will not be about your notes but about the literary
text. Do not lose sight of the literary text as you prepare
your essay. I recommend rereading the text -- or chunks
of it, if it is a long novel -- as you generate and regenerate
ideas and questions. Raising questions can be particularly
useful, especially when you consider that what compels interpretation
are the questions, the unclear possibilities, that many readers
may find in a text. My "Mayflies" essay is mostly based on
a question I ask and ask again in my notes: What are those
"pistons" doing in the poem? I think that's a very natural
question to ask of the poem. I couldn't have asked it, though,
had I not reread and thought about the poem as much as I had.
c) Moving toward
a first draft. One conventional next step is, of
course, an outline. I created
an outline of sorts for the "Mayflies" essay. As you can
see, it is less a detailed blueprint for my essay, with categories
and sub-categories, than it is paragraph-like writing that
represents my mind warming up for the essay itself. You may
discover, even at the note-taking stage, that in writing out
in a rough way what you think about a text you will find yourself
writing a draft of the essay itself. That's fine. The writing
process can often be messy. We can't -- and maybe shouldn't
-- predict how and when our best thinking occurs to us. So
how you move to the drafting stage is something you need to
develop on your own. Elaborate outlines help some writers
-- especially when working on longer essays -- while others
foreswear them altogether, and others (like me) plunk down
some sort of outline to help get the drafting process started
but plan on abandoning it when a better way shows up during
the writing of the first draft. The "Mayflies" essay I came
up with is, for me, unusually loyal to the outline. Still,
you should be able to see thinking in the essay not anticipated
in the outline.
2. WRITING A FIRST DRAFT
a) Writing as discovery.
Even with the substantial preparation
(or "prewriting") described above, writing a successful English
paper involves more than just finding the right words and
organization for ideas you had formed before you started writing.
For one thing, we cannot separate words and ideas. You cannot
really mean something without having the words for it, so
"finding the right words" really involves still formulating
your ideas. As my colleague Laura Quinn says, writing
is thinking. (My ultimate argument about Wilbur's
poem didn't get completely crystallized, for example, until
I lighted upon the word "concede," which I didn't use until
nearly the final draft; it appears nowhere in my notes and
outline; later I also stuck it in the first paragraph of the
final draft). Furthermore, some of one's best thinking can
happen while composing a draft. Writing notes and outlines
is productive, but at times there is nothing like the particular
pressure of writing clear prose to force one's ideas into
a new clarity and depth. What this all means is that you should
expect -- and allow time for -- discovering new ideas for
your essay while you write the first draft.
b)Writing
to readers. Once you
begin to compose your first draft of an English paper, you
need to do more than discover and write out what you think
about the text in question. You now need to remember that
you are asserting your ideas to readers, and in the
case of literary criticism that audience in conventionally
understood to be people who have read and are interested in
the text you are writing about but are not necessarily inclined
to agree with everything you say about it. As you write, then,
you need to keep these readers in mind. That kind of rhetorical
sensitivity is implicit in the conventions of essay writing
that most literary critics follow when they write. Reading
my "Mayflies" essay should illustrate some of these reader-sensitive
conventions. Here's a partial list of them, with reference
to my essay:
1.) The title.
Titles exist to give your readers a first indication of
the subject of your essay. Ideally, they should refer in
some way to both the subject you are writing about and what
you are arguing. In English papers, keep titles short (they
should not be complete sentences). Often titles play on
a key word or two from the text in question. In my essay,
"call" is such a word (forms of it are used twice in the
last stanza of the poem). "The Call of Artifice" refers
to my contention that the poem, despite its assertion that
the speaker is "called" by God or some natural force to
see and present nature in a vivid and pure sort of way,
is actually called by the conventions of poetry writing
to depend on artifice (which by some measure isn't "pure").
This full sense of the title's meaning can only be gathered
after one reads the essay. That's okay. Because they are
short, titles are usually oblique, maybe even intriguing.
2) The introductory
paragraph. With
your readers in mind, your first paragraph is obliged to
do a number of things: 1) introduce the author and work
you're writing about; 2) declare what you will be arguing,
a declaration sometimes called a thesis statement;
and 3) suggest how your essay will go about making its argument.
Ideally, the first paragraph should address a fourth obligation
as well; it should suggest why such an argument ought to
be made. Given all these aims, you can see how it can be
very difficult to write a good first paragraph straight
away. You need to know a lot about your essay to
write a good first paragraph, often more than you can know
before you've written a full first draft. Thus many writers
write a kind of skeletal first paragraph, write a draft
of the rest of the essay, discover what they are entirely
asserting, and then go back and revise the first paragraph
so that it more fully introduces the ideas that will follow.
I followed a variation of this process. My first version
of a first paragraph (which you can see by clicking here)
got too long and ungainly; as I eventually realized, I was
writing the body of the essay (especially the 2nd paragraph)
in the first paragraph and was taking a long time getting
to a statement of my argument. (click here
to see my change.)
In short essays, your readers really ought
to leave the first paragraph with some basic sense of what
the writer will be asserting in the rest of the essay. (In
longer essays, a statement of the argument sometimes comes
in the second or third paragraph.) In my first paragraph
(final draft), the
second half of my last sentence suggests my argument ("
. . . the poem concedes something less 'bright' . . .),
though you'll notice it only suggests the argument,
it doesn't spell it out. The first half of that same sentence
indicates how I'll be making my argument -- by "examining
the poem closely, and in particular the series of comparisons
. . .". So obligations 2) and 3) are met in one sentence.
The first sentence -- in fact the first
five words -- takes care of the first obligation (introducing
your author and text). With short essays, it's wise to start
right away on your specific subject. Resist opening with
grand generalizations, even though they sometimes feel like
the appropriate "introductory" mode. Most of the rest of
the first paragraph is, in effect, about why my argument
should be made (obligation #4): in lots of ways "Mayflies"
seems like a positive poem (recalling the Jarrell criticism),
so the argument that it is really not so positive is worth
making. Ideally, readers should leave your first paragraph
knowing what your argument is and eager to see how you'll
pull it off.
3) Paragraph-to-paragraph
organization. The
convention of paragraphs in all prose writing has everything
to do with reader convenience. When we come to a new paragraph,
as readers, we know that we are taking a step into another
category of the subject we're reading about, presumably
a smooth step, one we might have expected, but we have definitely
crossed some sort of seam in the fabric of the whole text.
As a writer, one good indication that you're not in command
of your argument is when you have no idea where one paragraph
should end and another begin. Each paragraph in an English
essay should always be built around one principal assertion;
a series of those main assertions (paragraphs) should add
up to one coherent argument (or essay). A good test to see
if your essay has such a logical construction is to see
if you can write a "reverse outline" from it that
identifies the controlling ideas of the paragraphs and list
them (and their subsets) in the order that they come in
the essay. Here's what one version of a reverse outline
of my "Mayflies" essay looks like:
I.Intro.
A. What kind of poem this
is
B. Its apparent optimism
(typical of Wilbur?)
C. Thesis statement:
it's not so optimistic after all
II. The poem's positive treatment of the
mayflies (series of ironies)
A. Mayflies as object of
poetic elevation
B. Mayflies as transcending
mortality
C. Speaker's contrasting
mortality
III. Less obviously, the speaker transcends
mortality by "seeing" as he does
IV.Yet the poem concedes its dependence
on artifice: the second stanza
A. Here, too, the poetry
works to become mayflies -- Wilbur's formal ingenuity (rhythmic
patterns, rhyme)
B. Yet the series of comparisons-a
pattern of increasing artificiality
1. "entrechats" -- ballet (high cultural conventions)
2. "weavers" -- flies now makers of beauty, not beauty themselves
3. <its own paragraph>"pistons
of some bright machine" -- making artifice conspicuous
V.Last stanza confirms the admission
A. The speaker's epiphany
as more self-generated than inspired
B. The epiphany hedges its
bet: "Unless…"
C. The recapitulating list
of what the speaker is not (fly, star) edits out the artificial
comparisons (ballet dancer, weaver, pistons)
VI. Conclusion: Jarrell's formulation (about
Wilbur's optimism) needs complicating
All my roman numeral categories represent
paragraphs, except for IV.B.3., my reading of the "pistons
of some bright machine," which, you recall, was the oddity
that prompted my interpretation in the first place. It needed
the room of its own paragraph.
There is no formula for how to sequence
paragraphs. Still, as you do it, remember the principles
of being logical, interesting and persuasive. My organization
in the "Mayflies" essay tries to be all three by starting,
in the body of the essay, with the more obvious (and positive)
ways of reading the poem and then moving to the less obvious
(and negative) interpretation. Can you see why starting
out with, say, the paragraph about the "pistons" might not
work for readers? It's worth noting that while I have a
paragraph about the last stanza of the poem that follows
a paragraph about the previous stanza, the organization
of the essay is not really dictated by the organization
of the poem. What should always dictate the organization
of your English papers is your argument.
4) Economy of ideas.
It is often not easy to convert the swirl of ideas and questions
that a literary text generates into a clearly organized,
interesting and convincing essay about that text. Almost
invariably, this process involves excluding ideas,
not pursuing legitimate and perhaps really interesting ideas,
because they don't logically belong to the rest of your
thinking or fit into the page limit. Notice how many of
the ideas in my notes on the poem ("Mayflies
notes") didn't make it into my essay. (I particularly
rue not doing anything with "quadrillions" and "quadrille.")
Similarly, you have to be strategic about what parts of
the literary text you choose to analyze and emphasize. (Literary
critics argue over many texts because they emphasize different
parts of them.) Making a coherent interpretation inevitably
involves seeing in (or imposing on) a text a hierarchy of
significance. Who knows if Wilbur meant for those "pistons"
to draw such attention. But that's how I engaged the poem,
so it had to affect how I proportioned my writing about
it.
5) Using textual
evidence. There
are a number of technical rules, codified by the Modern
Language Association (MLA), that govern how one properly
quotes and cites sources in an English paper (primary sources,
Wilbur's poem in this instance; and secondary sources, like
the Randall Jarrell's criticism). Along with these rules,
you need to remember the rhetorical logic behind quotation.
It's simple: your reader will be much more inclined to agree
with your interpretation of the text if she or he sees the
evidence for it. It should be clear that my "Mayflies" essay
depends on Wilbur's words. All good formalist criticism
should have that look of dependence. The essay should be
fairly saturated with the words of the text in question.
It's not enough to quote your text, though.
To make convincing use of such evidence, you need to write
about the quotations and argue that analysis.
One very rarely sees a paragraph of published critical prose
end with a quotation. The writer is obliged to demonstrate
or argue his or her interpretation of the quoted text. This
happens most obviously in my essay on pages 3 and 4, after
the one block-text quotation of the essay (the second stanza
of the poem). Notice how often I return to words and phrases
from the quotation as I assert my reading of it. Do not
be afraid to quote and requote. Remember, your readers
may not be predisposed to agree with what you suggest.
6) Writing "style."
One of the ways that essays must seem very different in
the different disciplines is in the writing style or voice
that is expected. Sometimes you will hear teachers, maybe
especially English teachers, talk about the need to find
"your" voice so that you can just write that way. This advice
may not be helpful. What such advice might most helpfully
imply is that, when you are writing an English paper, you
should be able to write in a way that may seem slightly
more relaxed and colorful than you should in, say, a Bio
lab report. (An English paper voice does not need to be
too far removed from your speaking voice.) But Biologists
who are used to writing in their field no doubt find their
writing "voice" natural, too. Professor
Mumme's essay surely reflects this idea.
The range of acceptable voices for literary
criticism is wide enough to let some personality onto the
page. You can use metaphors, you can play with language.
You can even use a sentence fragment or two (if it's clear
you're doing it on purpose). That freedom is one of the
reasons I like writing in this field -- and I'm hoping such
liberty and pleasure is discernible in the essay. Developing
one's own natural-seeming voice can take a long time, though.
For now it's much wiser not to worry about having your essay
sound like something some people might think of as the
"English paper" voice. What should determine your choice
of words (and everything else in the essay) is your thinking
in the essay. Don't try to sound smart, be smart. It is
never the case that an English paper gets a low grade because
"the teacher didn't like your writing style." It is always,
ultimately, the ideas that make or break an essay. This
fact makes the idea of just writing the way you speak problematic.
When we speak, we almost never have the same pressures on
us to be so clear, convincing and logical as we do when
we write careful critical prose.
Although there is no one standard voice
for English essays, the good ones always share a few features.
They are articulate (saying what they mean), concise
(not using more words than they need to), clear (not
overloading their sentences or paragraphs with words or
ideas that obscure meaning), logically organized
(sentence-to-sentence and paragraph-to-paragraph), grammatically
correct, and without typographical and other mechanical
errors.
7) Technical language.
While much of what a good English paper consists of should
be natural-sounding language, on occasion you will need
to use terminology specific to literary criticism in order
to do the work of interpretation. In my "Mayflies" essay,
I use a dozen such terms: "Romantic,"
"lyric," "foil,"
"metaphorical,"
"stanzas," "pentameter,"
"trimeter," "dimeter," "iambic," "archetype," "epiphany,"
"recapitulation." In each case, those terms help
me identify something that I see going on in the poem. For
a reader who knows these words, their use should be clarifying.
That's the main reason technical words in any field get
generated. They are the tools of the trade. Becoming a proficient
English student means, in part, coming to use such language
appropriately and naturally -- and coming to see how it
enables your own interpretive vision.
8) Using secondary
sources. While Professor Mumme's essay contains
many references to the work of other biologists, mine has
only that one quotation of Randall
Jarrell. Typically, a published essay of literary criticism
(which is usually about four times as long as my "Mayflies"
piece) includes many more secondary sources (sources other
than the primary, literary one). It does this in part to
demonstrate to its academic audience that the essayist knows
the nature of the critical discussion he or she is in effect
joining in writing the essay, and in part to help distinguish
the essayist's thinking from others. I use Jarrell to help
distinguish my thinking from another strain of thought,
a gesture that means to imply something about the originality
of my argument. Contesting other critics is an excellent
way to propel one's own thinking, too. Jarrell's critique
ended up clarifying my own interpretive purpose. But you
can use criticism in other ways: as a prior interpretive
response which you can elaborate on or complement, or (with
criticism that's not about the text you are interpreting)
as a way of thinking that you can apply to "your" text.
In upper-level English classes, particularly the Junior
Seminar and the Senior Project, reading criticism and making
it a part of your own critical responses will become more
important.
This commentary does not constitute a full definition
of what distinguishes English papers from the writing you do
in other disciplines. Nor does it cover the whole process that
can produce successful English essays. (I haven't mentioned
the crucial step of global revision, for example.)
Still, it should help on both these scores. Perhaps most importantly,
it should demonstrate that writing successful English papers
requires a lot of work at a lot of stages. Which is as it should
be, given all that literature can compel.
 Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Email us at writing@alleg.edu.
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