What topic?

>>7384448
This is how you learn, my friend. Trial and error.

Besides, all college essays during your undergrad are going to be garbage.

>>7384448

I don't think it matters. My college essay was about how depressed and useless I was and how they probably shouldn't admit me and they admitted me.

>>7384448

1. stop worrying so much about being correct and specific, loosen up and let personality show through in your arguments. worry more about your prose style than your thesis. trust me, I've made up shit the day before the essay was due and just let my personality take over when I don't know what I'm talking about—and then I get comments like "wow anon this essay shows such great signs of improvement over your earlier essays" (professors want to believe they've helped you grow, just give them some sign that you're writing more confidently than before and they'll take it)

2. try writing ahead of time so that you can re-read it after some time has passed. I know this is hard, but it helps so much. Often when you've been deeply involved in writing an essay you forget how much ISN'T in the essay. Your head is over-loaded with ideas that went in and got edited out, or you're reading the first paragraph with the last paragraph in mind. You need time to forget everything so that you can read it again with a blank mind. You will be much more sensitive to things that do not follow or gaps where things aren't explained.

3. just keep reading. no amount of essay-writing advice and intimate familiarity with the material is going to be better than having a good, broad feel for the literary canon. this will not only help you read books in context, it will also give you a sense for what is and is not interesting to say in an essay.

4. only write about stuff that seems interesting to you. if none of the offered topics for an essay seem cool, force something you do want to talk about into the shape of one of the offered topics, then write up a note before your essay explaining that you started with one essay topic in mind but then your reading kind of took you into new territory and you're sorry if you coloured outside the lines a little too much

5. talk to your professors at every opportunity. meet with them at office hours just to talk about the course material if nothing else. I mean, don't force this if you have no interest in doing so, but try to be enthusiastic about the material and the discussions started in the class. when the prof gets to know you they will better understand your essays, and they'll be more sympathetic to what you were trying to do. And they'll tend to grade a little higher. Also, the more you learn about their perspective on the material, the more you'll learn what kind of ideas your prof would find novel or interesting

>>7384448
might not be conducive to solving your immediate dilemma, but if you are currently in college and haven't done so consider taking a philosophy class. practicing and getting feedback on that type of reading and writing style will strongly improve your interpretation and writing skills for all subjects, prompts, etc.

>>7384487
#2 is based advice. And on top of everything else you mentioned it's much easier to find grammar and structural mistakes after you've forgotten what you wrote. I find that if I know word for word what I'm supposed to be reading than that's how I'll read it. My brain simply ignores errors and fills in gaps because it's expecting something else to be there.

>>7384594
I tell students this all the time. Procrastination beats out in the end a lot of the time, but when they don't put off their essay and go back to re-read and edit it, they tell me later it made a world of difference.

Also, read your essays aloud. If it sounds stupid aloud, the grammar is off.

>>7384487
>5. talk to your professors at every opportunity. meet with them at office hours just to talk about the course material if nothing else.
Yeah, if all my students did this I'd lose my freaking mind. It's good to see you care and want to understand, but most of us are grading nonstop and planning during office hours as well.

>>7384603
how do i become a professor senpai

>>7384448
Steal from NotBillMurray

>>7384603
>Yeah, if all my students did this I'd lose my freaking mind. It's good to see you care and want to understand, but most of us are grading nonstop and planning during office hours as well.

But all of your students are never going to do that

Maybe I should add: "if your prof sounds like he doesn't give a shit and posts on 4chan in his spare time, don't bother". I was thinking more of the really enthusiastic profs who seem to enjoy teaching and interacting with students, especially if they have a smaller class.

I can't say what will work for your students, but as a student at a relatively good university it has always worked for me.

Be clear, concise, original.

>>7384448
Distinguish perfectly between your topic and your hypothesis. Using Stoner as an example, Stoner's relationship with Charles, the idiot protegeé, is a topic. The idea that that relationship could be parallel to current trends in academia (coddling students not because they're talented, but because they're black/gay/etc.), and that the parallelism could be an influence on the novel's renewed popularity, could be a hypothesis.

I don't advice you to write that essay, of course, because it would be too critical of academia and could get you reprimended, but the point to be made is that your hypothesis should be something very specific and thought through to the end, so that you can answer the big 3 questions: what am I studying? (the relationship between Stoner and Charles and its closeness to progressivism today), how will I study it? (by pointing out textual examples in which the novel echoes real-life instances of academic turmoil), and why am I studying it? (because I think doing so will provide somewhat of an explanation to the novel's great surge in popularity, as well as a valid critique of modern academic methods).

Notice that in the last question I stated a reason to do the study that's grounded on the text and then a reason that's more general, almost cultural. That's a good thing to do, end on a note that let's teachers know you see the cultural implications of literature, and not just the text itself, myopically. Just don't overdo it, no one wants to see some undergrad little bitch claiming to have extracted universal truth out of a Hemingway short story or whatever. Keep it simple, discreet, and culture-specific.

Also, I wholeheartedly agree with the second and the third points that >>7384487 made. Don't do shit at the last moment, it's not professional, and teachers can tell 90% of the time. And read all the good stuff you can get your hands on. Don't read only the ones that look interesting to you at the time; a true patrician knows he's gotta read the canon, settles down and does it, even if it means 1000 pages of Samuel Richardson. Even if they look unappetizing, just remember, they're celebrated books for a reason, and if you can let go of prejudice you might enjoy the fuck out of some of them. One last thing: don't forget to read academia as well. You can't understand what an academic essay or book looks like if you refuse to read them.

>when you type it up in a one day frenzy and you feel like the English language is slipping out of your hands, like you're losing the ability to write grammatically correct sentences or to spot spelling mistakes

>when it's so late that you have to tell yourself to not give a fuck and just hand it in, imperfections and all

haha being a piece of shit is great haha I hope I didnt forget to edit out the part where I got frustrated and started typing about how I want to die haha

>>7387504
>when you're on the way to the late submission box via transit and you are trying really hard not to read your essay because you might have a heart attack if you find a typo

>>7384448
>>7384448
learn about New Criticism, and how to "do" it. whether or not the text is self-contained is not the point here. what is important about New Criticism is it is how you are being taught to read literature if you're going to uni in America. so, knowing how to do a close reading of a passage, knowing how to pull three or five lines out of a novel and construct ten pages of cohesive argumentation out of those lines is crucial. seriously, once I learned about New Crit, and started applying it in my studies, it was like I had cheat codes for all my english classes. you don't even have to stick to the strictly New Critical style of interpretation wherein you limit yourself to the text alone. the close reading technique and reading/writing style can and should become the sort of nexus for any other strands of high-theoretical critical lenses you want to adopt, be it Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist... what have you. all of those kinds of discourses have to be speaking 'about' something, and you should start to realize that that 'something' isn't necessarily just the text itself, but rather, the text combined with your interpretative arguments thereof. once you get a handle on being brutally explicit in pulling your arguments directly from the text, looking at every possible literary element you can see packed into as little as one line, then your essays will virtually write themselves. as you're starting to get a handle on this (and this depends on how many papers you're asked to write in a semester... the more the merrier if you care about this sort of thing) it can be fun and useful developmentally to being overly-spartan in your selection of passages... i'm not saying be myopic and ignore the rest of the novel, but try and limit your selected material as much as possible. you'll find that, assuming you have a good handle on the plot and the central obsessions of the author and the narrative, you can pull so much more material from a few lines than you ever could when you were trying to write a paragraph on a whole chapter at a time.

that, and go to office hours. and try and find out about your profs research—if you can write a really tight, smart, interesting essay about something related to their research, you'll go far in any humanities dept. case in point: i had to do a paper for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and found out that one of my prof's research interests is in the use of clothing in modernist literature. so, I spun my whole argument about the model of masculinity Stephen constructs for himself in reaction to his father's outmoded model out of the latter's use of a monocle on the first page. i got an A even though there were glaring holes in my reading of the text (for instance, I said that Stephen "kissing his fingers in adieu" at the beginning of chapter 5 was feminine... she disagreed, saying it is rather more 'Continental' as in Europe.)

>>7384603
Erik?

If it's a liberal arts field, just pander to the professor who'll be grading it. Work out what their stance is on major controversies within the field, and lean your argument in that direction.
For example, say you're doing a lit degree: do they agree with Barthes' 'Death of the Author' or not? If yes, then there's no point in using the author's biography to back up your reading of their text, as the person grading the paper is just going to dismiss it anyway. This is honestly, in my experience, the best way to up your grades.

>>7385838
rekt

>>7387797
Samuel?

>>7384603
it makes me very sad to think there are students in the world who have to learn from a 4chan poster who hates when a student comes to his office hours