Unlike high school book reports, college papers require in-depth interpretation of readings at hand. The term close reading is one that doesn’t often come into play in a high school environment, though in college, close reading is the expected norm. Close reading is the careful reading of a text that considers everything from syntax to structure to, basically, everything about the language down to the minutiae of a single word. Not only are college students expected to do close readings of texts, but they are also expected to interpret the text — not just describe what happens. College papers are very much “show, don’t tell.” College writers don’t repeat synopses of chapters in their papers; they interpret the text and only write, in their papers, about ideas, not action.

4. Informed Argument.

College writing always requires an argument. An argument requires a strong thesis statement. Check out our blog entry on writing strong thesis statements to learn how to focus your paper around a strong argument. College papers seek to prove something through a series of though-out examples and analyses. Professors are interested in seeing how you think, and whether your writing is thoughtful and considered. By examining the argument of your paper, and the ways that you back it up, professors are really looking to see the way your mind works in structuring and attacking a problem and arriving at a solution, via the written word.

3. Specifics.

When I first started writing college papers, they were often returned to me with “what does this mean?” or “can you give me specifics?” written in red ink on the margins. Soon, I learned that the more specific and to-the-point my language was, the higher I scored on my papers and the better my papers were. Being specific is important for many reasons, the most important of which is that specific language shows that you’re not BS’ing assignments, something your high school teachers might let you get away with. College professors want to see that you know exactly what you’re talking about. The operative word is ‘exact’. College professors want you to say what you mean, and they won’t tolerate any fluff.

2. Topicality.

College writing is centered around questions of interest to the academic community. In college writing, it’s very unlikely that you can get away with general and almost meaningless topics like “characterization” or “symbolism”. College professors want to see you really analyze the texts you read in a meaningful and scholarly way, and they respond well when you write on topics of academic interest. Instead of discussing the use of symbolism in The Inferno, which has already been written on extensively for going on five hundred years now, perhaps a more useful or interesting topic would be on the syntax of time and temporality within the text, for instance.  Or a comparison of The Inferno with a modern text that shows marked similarities and differences, and what that says about the text.

1. Expectations.

The crucial difference between high school and college writing is your professor’s expectations. College papers, simply put, are judged by a much higher standard than anything you’ve probably witnessed in high school. You will, therefore, need to try much harder in college. Often, humanities courses in college are judged on papers alone, so papers are worth far more in terms of your overall grade once you get to college. You will have to start papers earlier, think harder about what you’re going to say, do more research, and write better. You will not just be judged on the quality of your ideas alone, but also on your presentation of those ideas, so you will be expected to have impeccable grammar, spelling, and organization. It may sound difficult and overwhelming, but being forced to write in an academic environment is one of the best methods of not just teaching you how to write, but also of teaching you how to think. After four years of writing in a college environment, I feel that both my writing and my critical thinking has improved, though not without hard work and a lot of frustration. Luckily, it all pays off in the end.

Looking at a topic through a theoretical or philosophical lense can add a deeper level of understanding. Theory and philosophy are in practice everywhere, from politics to psychology to art to literature. Literary theory is something that every English major in college is expected to understand. Not only does theory add more layers of understanding to any literary work, but it also helps readers analyze works in deeper and more meaningful ways.

That said, college students often flagrantly name drop theorists like Deleuze, Baudrillard, Althusser, Derrida, et. al. without truly understanding a word of their theories. While taking higher level seminars in college, I often heard my fellow students talking about Lacan in ways that obviously showed they never really read Lacan beyond his Wikipedia page. While I don’t condone the irresponsible application of misunderstood theories to any of your critical papers, I do believe that a basic understanding of certain theories is highly useful for any person studying literature, not just because it will heighten your comprehension of literary works, but also because you will see firsthand the many ways that literature has power in the world beyond the physical pages of a book by applying theory into practice.

The purpose of this post is to hopefully inspire students to read literary theory outside of class. Not only will understanding theory make your reading more scholarly, more perceptive, and even more interesting, but it will also serve you well in writing papers. So here are 5 famous thinkers every student should know, and some links to their works.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure has had an enormous impact on liguistics and critical theory due to his writings on structural linguistics and semiotics. If you’ve ever heard people discussing the terms sign, signifier, and signified, they are referring to the school of structuralist thought founded by Saussure. Structuralists believed that language is the complicated workings of many structural parts, which can be individually dissected and analyzed in the search for meaning. Not only can language be intrepreted in this manner, but all of life itself can be seen as the complex workings of signals and signs. For more on structuralism, this resource is a great place to begin. For those who want to read Saussure, his Course in General Linguistics is the best place to begin.

4. Jacques Derrida. Derrida is a post-structuralist philosopher who became a prominent thinker due to his contribution to the field of deconstruction. From the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, deconstruction is: “A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.” While Of Grammotology is perhaps not the easiest place to start reading Derrida, it’s considered by many to be his best known work.

3. Judith Butler. Judith Butler, a post-structuralist thinker, has greatly contributed to feminist theory and queer theory. This page from Theory.org is a great place to begin discovering Butler’s works. Butler has written that gender is a fluid concept that is not tied to a person’s sex, and “Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler’s approach — inspired in part by Foucault — is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not ’caused’ by other stable factors.” Understanding that the term “gender” is a myth is important for any kind of deeper analysis of works relevant to feminist studies or gender studies.

2. Edward Said. Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, is required in every post-colonial curriculum. Written in 1978, Said argued that the type of academic thinking prevalant during that time actually created more divide between the Western and non-Western worlds than any kind of greater understanding. “A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices… It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ Said argues for the use of “narrative” rather than “vision” in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient…” Readings of works by writers like Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Daniel Defoe, all of which are commonly read in high school and college courses, are of interest to post-colonial thinkers due to their imperialist undertones.

1. Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a psychoanalytical thinker who made great contributions to literary studies. His concept of ‘the other’ is often discussed in literary studies. “We depend on the existence of the Other to fill in the gap of our desires, to create, if only for a moment, the wholeness before our subjectivity, before there was an Other… Images constitute the self. Images of the literal Other create both a separation because it is through that difference that we are constituted but also as we look toward the Other, it is with the desire of being a unified self.” If you Google “Lacanian reading of” you find thousands of links to different writings that apply Lacan to everything from Langston Hughes to Wallace Stevens to Shakespeare. It makes sense: for every character, there is a foil, or an ‘other’. Because theory incorporates and attempts to explain the world around us, it of course has application to literature, which does the same except in a fictional setting.