A snarly first draft is often a great achievement.
This line gives me confidence because I often feel discouraged when my first drafts are messy. The chapter explains that rough drafts are normal and even useful because they help writers discover their ideas. This encourages me to focus on getting thoughts onto the page first and worry about clarity and concision later during revision. It makes the writing process feel less stressful.
Your professors are much more likely to find a self-consciously highbrow writing style tedious than impressive
I really agree with this point because I used to assume that professors wanted complex, academic-sounding language. This chapter points out that trying too hard to sound scholarly actually makes writing harder to read. It reminds me that clarity is more important than showing off vocabulary. I think keeping my writing straightforward will help my ideas come through more effectively.
Producing and reading elegant writing is a pleasure, but what really matters in academic writing is precision.
This sentence stands out to me because it challenges the idea that academic writing must sound fancy to be good. I sometimes worry that my writing isn’t “academic” enough, but this chapter reminds me that precision is more important than sounding sophisticated. Clear writing shows clear thinking, and readers care more about understanding the ideas than being impressed by complicated sentences.
Cohesion refers to the flow from sentence to sentence. For example, compare these passages: Version A (That I Rewrote): Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. If an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other, according to balance theory (1973:1363).[10] Bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties, Granovetter argues (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. If two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. Only weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends” can connect people in different cliques. Version B (The Original By Giuffre): Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. In brief, balance theory tells us that if an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other (1973:1363). Granovetter argues that because of this, bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. This is because if two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. The only way, therefore, that people in different cliques can be connected is through weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends.” [11] Version A has the exact same information as version B, but it is harder to read because it is less cohesive.
The comparison between Version A and Version B shows me how cohesion works. I realize my writing feels choppy sometimes because I don’t connect old and new information clearly.
In academic writing, readers expect each paragraph to have a sentence or two that captures its main point. They’re often called “topic sentences,” though many writing instructors prefer to call them “key sentences.” There are at least two downsides of the phrase “topic sentence.” First, it makes it seem like the paramount job of that sentence is simply to announce the topic of the paragraph. Second, it makes it seem like the topic sentence must always be a single grammatical sentence. Calling it a “key sentence” reminds us that it expresses the central idea of the paragraph.
The examples of Version A vs. Version B help me understand why key sentences matter. They don’t just introduce topics—they connect each paragraph to the argument.
Effective paragraphs are the fundamental units of academic writing; consequently, the thoughtful, multifaceted arguments that your professors expect depend on them. Without good paragraphs, you simply cannot clearly convey sequential points and their relationships to one another
This section reminds me how important paragraph organization is. I used to think content and style were separate, but the author shows they work together.
Drawing on a lifetime of research, Kahneman concludes our brains are prone to error:[8]
The comparison here helped me understand why paraphrasing is often better than long block quotes. Even though the original quote is interesting, it contains extra terms that distract the reader. The paraphrased version is shorter and clearer while keeping the main idea. This makes me want to practice paraphrasing more because it allows me to show my understanding instead of relying on long copied sections.
Another error beginners often make is to drop in a quote without any context
This part explains clearly why dropping quotes without context makes writing confusing. I used to think that adding a citation was enough, but readers need to know who the author is, why their idea matters, and how it supports my argument. The example in this section shows how a quote can feel “ghostly” if it appears suddenly. This reminds me to always introduce and explain every quote I use.
Combine research findings from multiple sources to make a larger summary argument. You might find that none of the sources you’re working with specifically claim that early 20th century British literature was preoccupied with changing gender roles but that, together, their findings all point to that broader conclusion. Combine research findings from multiple sources to make a claim about their implications. You might review papers that explore various factors shaping voting behavior to argue that a particular voting-reform proposal will likely have positive impacts. Identify underlying areas of agreement. You may argue that the literature on cancer and the literature on violence both describe the unrecognized importance of prevention and early intervention in order to claim that insights about one set of problems may be useful for the other. Identify underlying areas of disagreement. You may find that the controversies surrounding educational reform—and its debates about accountability, curricula, school funding—ultimately stem from different assumptions about the role of schools in society. Identify unanswered questions. Perhaps you review studies of the genetic and behavioral contributors to diabetes in order to highlight unknown factors and argue for more in-depth research on the role of the environment.
Before reading this chapter, I didn’t realize there were so many ways to develop an original thesis using sources. I used to think my only job was to agree or disagree with one article. This list helps me see that I can combine studies, look for patterns, or point out unanswered questions. It gives me more creative options for building my own argument instead of just repeating what sources say.
encourage you to think about writing with sources is a “They Say/I Say” process.
This “They Say / I Say” idea makes a lot of sense to me because in many past essays I either depended too much on sources or summarized them without connecting to my own point. Guptill’s explanation shows that good writing balances both: listening to what “they” say, then adding what I think. It reminds me that my voice matters, as long as I connect it directly to the sources.
One place where neoliberal understanding of society has asserted itself in both scholarship and everyday speech is when we refer to digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as “social media.” At one level, the term “social” is here roughly synonymous with “interactive,” a word that at its narrowest refers to exchanges between discrete individuals. That usage of the keyword is entirely compatible with neoliberal ideology and with mainstream media accounts of social media and technology as atomizing and isolating. Cutting against these ideologies are phenomena ranging from the Arab Spring to the August 2011 London riots, from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, each of which is larger and broader than a delimited “society” understood as an organization with a particular goal or purpose but none of which claims to represent “society” as a totality. The same media outlets and politicians may depict social media at one moment as isolating and at another as somehow responsible for these movements. In doing so, they are claiming (plausibly or not) that these interactive technologies enable political participation and the formation of new collective identities and are linking the word to broader and more explicitly political usages of the keyword such as “social justice” and “social movement.”
This section stands out because it shows how the meaning of “social” shifts depending on context. Social media can isolate people as individuals, but it can also create collective action, like #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo. The author shows how the word reflects both personal interaction and large political movements. It demonstrates how “society” is not a fixed thing but a dynamic process shaped through technology and participation.
society produces “conformity” by enforcing conventional “names and customs” on the otherwise free (explicitly male and implicitly white) individual.
Emerson’s view of society as a force that suppresses individual freedom is interesting but also very reductive. This annotation makes me think about how easy it is to imagine “society” as something separate from people, when in reality individuals help create and shape it. The passage shows how the conflict between the individual and the collective is more complicated than a simple opposition, which fits the author’s argument about the word’s ambiguity.
Society” is a word too often used in a sloppy or vague way. When teachers share their pet peeves about student writing, they frequently name “society” as the word they would most like to ban. There are typically two reasons given for this antipathy. First, the term falsely implies universality (when you say “society,” do you really mean to refer to every single person in the world?). Second, it attributes agency to an abstraction (how can “society” actually do anything like oppress someone or believe something?). Baked into such usages is often a simplistic if widely recognizable story about how an amorphous “social” pressure is applied to equally amorphous “individuals” who either succumb to that pressure or resist it by “being themselves.” You can find versions of this story in a blog post about how well the free market organizes “society,” a sociology paper about gangs’ “antisocial” activity, or a political speech blaming “society” for certain behavior. But wherever this story is told, if it lacks any specifics about what is meant by “society,” readers are likely to see it as a cliché, an overgeneralizing formula.
The author points out that “society” is often used without clear meaning, and I notice that I also tend to use the word in a broad and imprecise way. This section reminds me that academic writing requires specificity. When people blame “society,” they usually refer to certain institutions or groups, not every person. The author’s criticism pushes me to be more intentional about who or what I actually mean when I use the term.
Outside of the arena of national policy, perhaps the most influential nonmilitary use of “war” in recent decades has been in what came to be called the culture wars. Most prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, the phrase “culture wars
The section on “culture wars” shows how the word “war” doesn’t just describe conflict — it produces it. Jeffords connects the term to debates over education, art, and politics, which reminds me of how the “celebrity” essay explored power structures and social influence. What inspires me here is the method: Jeffords uses history, politics, and examples from public controversies to show how a keyword reflects deeper tensions in American culture. For my research project, I can follow this model by showing how my own keyword shapes debates, identities, or values today.
The second half of the twentieth century also saw the increasing use of “war” to refer to more than just direct military encounters, thus shifting the emphasis from the first definition of “war” (conflicts among nations) to the second (conditions of antagonism). Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served in World War II as general of the US Army, in his last speech to the nation before stepping down as president, acknowledged that the post–World War II military environment would be different from any in the past because of the emergence of a permanent, economically profitable armaments industry, or “military-industrial complex
Jeffords shows how the meaning of “war” expands in the 20th century to describe social problems — the “war on poverty,” “war on drugs,” and “war on terror.” This reminds me of the “celebrity” essay because both authors explore how language shapes public attitudes. By calling these issues “wars,” politicians create urgency, fear, and conflict even when the situation is not military at all. This metaphorical framing is something I want to use in my own research: analyzing not just what a word means, but what it does in society.
Tug-of-war, Cold War, war on terror, World War II, “Make love, not war,” WarGames, War on Poverty, prisoner of war, War of the Worlds, Iraq War, war on drugs, antiwar, “All’s fair in love and war”—these are just a few of the myriad ways that the word “war” is used every day in the English language. It is difficult today to turn on a television, check a news feed, or go to a movie theater anywhere in the United States without encountering a verbal or a visual reference to war. Whether through reports of wars around the globe; declarations of “war on” a variety of social issues, from AIDS to poverty to drugs to crime; or descriptions of sporting events (“throwing a bomb,” “blitzing,” “sudden death”)—references to war permeate US culture.
Jeffords’s opening reminds me of last week’s “celebrity” essay because both authors start by showing how a single word appears constantly in everyday life. Just like “celebrity” was more complicated than it first seemed, “war” also carries multiple meanings beyond literal combat. I like how Jeffords uses examples from sports, politics, and media to show how the term shapes how Americans think about conflict. This approach gives me ideas for my own keyword project — especially the strategy of starting with common uses before digging into deeper cultural meanings.
Primary sources are original documents, data, or images: the law code of the Le Dynasty in Vietnam, the letters of Kurt Vonnegut, data gathered from an experiment on color perception, an interview, or Farm Service Administration photographs from the 1930s.[3] Secondary sources are produced by analyzing primary sources. They include news articles, scholarly articles, reviews of films or art exhibitions, documentary films, and other pieces that have some descriptive or analytical purpose. Some things may be primary sources in one context but secondary sources in another.
This section clarifies something many students, including me, often misunderstand: the difference between primary and secondary sources depends on how the source is used. I found the example about news articles especially helpful. A news article can function as a secondary source when it reports or interprets events, but it becomes a primary source if we use it as raw data for patterns or frequency. This made me realize that choosing sources is not just about finding information, but about understanding the purpose each source serves in our research.
Academic papers are essentially reports that scholars write to their peers—present and future—about what they’ve done in their research, what they’ve found, and why they think it’s important. Thus, in a lot of fields they often have a structure reminiscent of the lab reports you’ve written for science classes:
The explanation of a scholarly article’s structure (abstract, introduction, literature review, methods, results, conclusion) gave me a practical strategy for reading academic work. Before, I used to feel overwhelmed and tried to read everything from top to bottom. Now I understand that I can use the abstract to check relevance quickly and focus on the introduction and conclusion to understand the main argument. I don’t need to understand every technical detail. This approach makes academic sources feel much more manageable and less intimidating.
Some sources are better than others You probably know by now that if you cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source, the wrath of your professor shall be visited upon you. Why is it that even the most informative Wikipedia articles are still often considered illegitimate? And what are good sources to use? The table below summarizes types of secondary sources in four tiers.
because it explains why professors strongly prefer peer-reviewed (Tier 1) sources. These sources are evaluated by experts and therefore provide the strongest and most credible evidence. I like how the chapter also acknowledges that Tier 4 sources, including Wikipedia, still have a role in the early research process—mainly for generating keywords or identifying important names and topics. This helps me understand that good research doesn’t mean avoiding Google entirely, but knowing how to move from lower-tier sources to higher-quality academic ones.
The other type of difficulty reflects a general characteristic of the language system as any language user mentally models it. The difficult ‘key’ word is polysemous or vague (that is, it has multiple, concurrent senses which are historically and semantically related, or it under-specifies what it denotes
Many keywords are hard to use because they can mean several things at the same time. If people use different senses without realizing it, conversations can become confusing or lead to misunderstanding.
Some of a word’s earlier meanings persist into the present; others have become recessive; and others again have disappeared altogether and been replaced by new ones.
This shows how the history of a word affects how we use and understand it today. Old meanings can stay, fade, or be replaced, which makes communication harder if people don’t realize those older layers still influence the word.
A ‘keyword’, in the sense in which we investigate keywords on this website, is a socially prominent word (e.g. art, industry, media or society) that is capable of bearing interlocking, yet sometimes contradictory and commonly contested contemporary meanings.
This definition helps me understand that a “keyword” is not just any vocabulary word. It is a word used a lot in society and can have multiple overlapping or even conflicting meanings. This complexity is why keywords require deeper analysis.
Religion is an endeavor to cultivate freedom from bodily constraints to reach a higher state of being beyond the physical constraints of reality.
I like how this opening starts immediately with substance and a specific idea. It makes the reader curious and shows how a strong introduction can begin with a meaningful concept rather than general background.
Strong conclusions do two things: they bring the argument to a satisfying close and they explain some of the most important implications.
I agree that a conclusion should not just restate the thesis but also explain why the argument matters. This makes the essay feel complete and shows deeper thinking.
At the college level, think of “general” as context: begin by explaining the conceptual, historical, or factual context that the reader needs in order to grasp the significance of the argument to come.
This sentence changes how I think about introductions. In high school I was told to start general and narrow down, but now I see that college writing means giving readers context, not vague filler.