Workflow: Seminar Paper Project Advice
Each year, our department’s graduate student organization puts together a workshop for MA students to look over their work with a more experienced graduate student. I can’t participate this year, so I took the option of sending along some advice instead, and I figured I may as well repost it here.
The TL;DR here is that I think the most effective way of crafting a good seminar paper project is to finish a draft early, and review that with your professor if they’re willing to do so. And to be clear—I’ve never done this, except for when required. But if it counts for anything, if I were to go through coursework all over again, I would do this, at least for one or two high priority projects that I felt were important to my dissertation project.
1. Decide how important this seminar paper project is to you.
Since your time is extremely limited, before starting your project, it can help to get a sense of how important this project is to you, and how much work you want to put into it. Because you are probably doing 2–3 of these types of projects at the same time, thinking carefully about this can help you prioritize them.
For example, you may be completing a seminar paper project to complete a class that you’re only taking because it fulfills a distributive requirement. If, simultaneously, you are working on a project that you intend to develop into an article, and may be in an area that you intend to focus on in your dissertation, then you may want to spend more time on the latter project.
I’m not saying to do a bad job on the former project. But I do feel like one of the biggest challenges of coursework is that you’re expected to do a lot of things very well with a very limited amount of time available to you. Spend those limited units of time deliberately and purposefully, and primarily on those things that are most important to you and your goals.
2. Remember that reading and writing are different phases of the project*, and that the project is complete when the writing is complete, regardless of how much you have read.
It’s tempting to try and read everything relevant to your topic, especially since that helps put off actually starting writing. However, while it is valuable to be conversant in the current debates about your topic, there is likely to be a point at which reading more won’t help much—your own ideas and arguments need to get developed and fleshed out.
Try limiting just how many texts you will read or skim before you start writing. Should you complete your draft a few weeks ahead of time, you can always go back to that other stuff.
Full disclosure, in my most recent writing projects, I frequently haven’t gone back to those items. But that’s because by the time I’ve finished my draft, it’s became apparent that some of those things I thought were really important before I started writing turned out to ultimately not be all that important.
3. Clearly articulate your main argument and put it in a prominent location towards the beginning of the paper.
This is a frequent and more often than not correct critique of seminar papers. I think the reason this frequently needs to be given is that a seminar paper is frequently written in haste, and one may start with what looks like a thesis, and then by the end of it, it turns out that that’s not actually the paper’s thesis.
At least, that’s what’s often happened to me.
After you’re done draft 1, and if you don’t have much time for revision, he remedy to this is to go back over the paper and make sure that intended-thesis and actual-thesis align, and are clearly written somewhere in the first few pages (perhaps even painstakingly explicitly, in terms of the language that signals it as the main argument).
If you can carve out the time, though, one of the best ways to deal with this issue, and many others, is to:
4. Draft your seminar paper early and discuss it with your professor, prior to revising and submitting the final draft.
I’ve never done this, but I know this is probably the best way to complete an actual good seminar paper.
I’ve only come close to this once, and that was because a draft was actually required before Thanksgiving break. But that ultimately turned out to be one of the better papers that I’m written, and I feel pretty confident that this is the way to go.
The thing is, so many other things compete for your time that actually doing this can be near impossible unless you are absolutely required to do it for your class.
So the real answer is probably to do item 1 and decide how important this project is for your work in the long run, and if it’s very important, shoot for completing item 4 as an ideal goal: if your professor’s amenable to it, get that draft done, discuss it with them, and use that conversation to help refine your thoughts and your project. You’ll likely end up with a very solid piece of writing, and you’ll also have the opportunity to develop your working relationship with that professor, if such is one of your goals.
* This is borrowed in part from someone else’s bit of advice I saw shared on Twitter, though I can’t recall who had posted it.