A few notes on writing papers in English 168.7

• You are being asked to write the kind of essay in which you form a reasoned and well-supported judgment of your own on a question for which you can "take responsibility" - i.e. treat as your own. (Write as though the question you address had occurred to you without the help of the assignment, as it well might have.) That "judgment" will be your thesis (which will necessarily be a complex thesis given the questions you are addressing); you will develop it in what we will call the argument of your essay.

• You should write that essay for an audience which is intelligent and normally well-informed but not intimately familiar with the material you are writing about (the film and the articles). It is your job not only to support your argument - with your own reasoning and with reference to your viewing and reading material - but to tell your audience what it needs to know about the context of the references you make and the quotations and examples you use. Getting this right is hard. No one wants to read long mechanical summary of the plot of a film or story or of the thinking or information conveyed in other sources; on the other hand, readers are likely to be surprised and disoriented by sudden, decontextualized quotations or statements that seem to assume that they know the material just as well as you do. When you take responsibility for explaining this stuff, you will also be giving yourself incentive to offer further interpretation of what you explain.

• A good general rule for verbs, by the way: Write about the action of fictions that you read or view and the arguments of nonfictional essays you read in the present tense system. HAL, you might write, tries to destroy the crew because he has concluded that Bowman and Poole will try to disconnect him. (Why is this convention so important? Let's talk briefly about that question.)

• Writing about film can be tricky: you have to convey, in words, an adequate sense of the context of features of the film that you cite. That means that you should view with a pencil in hand to try to get details and dialogue right; it also means that you may need to make especially firm "orienting" statements ("Just before the Discovery reaches the vicinity of Jupiter"; "While Frank is sunning himself in the tanning room and listening to his parents' birthday broadcast"), since you have no page numbers to refer to. Yet you should offer these orienting statements when you write about stories and (sometimes) articles, too.

• When you quote from or refer to your material, you should make reference in the most economical form possible. but that will of course depend on what kind of material it is. For a film, see the note just above; for Schank's and Dennett's articles, parenthetical reference like "(Shank 175)" will do. But for these and other sources, get into the habit of giving adequate information in a "Works Cited" list to which your parenthetical references refer. We'll go into forms of reference-making at some length later, but bear in mind that Web-based and other electronically transmitted material should be cited in a form that gives author (or equivalent), title, date created, URL, and date accessed. A reference for Kurzweil's article on speech recognition, for example, would look like this:
  Kurzweil, Raymond. "When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying?" HAL's Legacy Online. Ed. David Stork. 1997. http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/ Hal/chap7/seven1.html (6 September 1998).

• Cornell's Academic Integrity Code, binding on all students, bars (among other things) representing the work of others as your own. You should be intimately familiar with this policy from the start of your career at Cornell. Find it at
  http://www.cornell.edu/Academic/AIC.html. In writing papers for English 168.7 (and all other courses), you must give full and clear references for all words, ideas, and information that you reproduce or otherwise cite from sources, electronic as well as non-electronic.

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