True Stories in Composition: Part 1 of 5
Contributed by David Mansfield on 09 October 2006 at 08:39To take a break from offering bland writing advice, I thought it might be wise to spend this week relating how I approached an actual paper assigned to me this semester. After all, my position on the Crew presupposes that I know how to write papers well, and so perhaps my example will be useful.
That said, today will not be the meaty portion. I will start with how I approached research, and then over the next few days I will expand to my method of organization, composition, and revision.
Dr. Linda Ehrlich assigned the paper in question for her course on great film directors (ENGL 368C). The prompt was, "How is the act of looking problematized in Claire Denis's films?" For purposes of this class, in which we saw only two Denis films, that translates to, "How is the act of looking problematized in Chocolat (1988, and no, it's not the one with Johnny Depp) and Beau Travail (1999)?" So, right off the bat, I knew I could limit my research fairly specifically to those two rather obscure films, with the possibility of looking into broad overviews of Denis's work.
I should note also that the prompt specifically requested endnotes and a bibliography, meaning that merely analyzing the films would not be sufficient. Thus, I turned to the KSL research databases. The key question was which database to use. For general papers, I tend to use Academic Search Premier, and for political science papers having to do with current events, I tend to use Lexis/Nexis, but for film papers the clear choice was FIAF.
So I ran three searches: "beau travail," "chocolat," and "claire denis." I then faced three tasks when looking through my sources. The first was to weed out all the articles that were about the Johnny Depp Chocolat, with which my paper had nothing to do. The second was to find which sources were in English, as, Denis being French, many of the articles appeared in French journals which I knew I would be unable to read. Lastly, I had to make sure there was at least a chance the articles would be relevant, although I erred on the side of assuming they were; there is always the chance a seemingly unrelated article will provide a new angle for a paper.
So I wnet to ILLIAD and put in article requests for the six seemingly relevant articles I had found. Now, I did this a week before the paper was due, which clearly would not be enough time to get most of the sources, but I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that I would get two or three. Lesson: Make ILLIAD requests as early as humanly possible.
While I waited for those articles to come in, I also had two more avenues of research. One was a book for the class, Judith Mayne's Claire Denis. There was no reason not to take advantage of this book, beyond the fact that it did not address in any detail the subject matter of my paper. My other source was the course E-Reserves, in which I found an article entitled “Body transformations in the films of Clarie Denis: from ritual to play” by Elena del Rio. I printed this out and set it aside with the book.
Once my remaining sources arrived, it was time to start researching. But that's another tale, for another day, by which I mean tomorrow. Return then, gentle reader, for the sordid interlude in which I highlight key passages.