Your last assignment for Environmental Philosophy is the most important one: the individual term paper.

This is a very flexible assignment. While I require that your term paper be anchored in discussion of one or more of the texts that we've been covering in Module 3 (from Sextus to Jonas), you are welcome to go on from there to discuss whatever environmental issue or issues interest you the most.

You'll be working on your paper in two stages:

(1) First, you'll quickly produce what I call a "rough draft" of the paper. Please bear in mind that what I call a "rough draft" is a lot less work than what many other teachers call a "rough draft." As I'll explain in class, what I call a rough draft needs only be four to five pages long, and doesn't have to include drafts of all of your paper's parts. While I do need to see your projected main claim (thesis statement), it's fine in my book if you merely describe, or just sketch out vaguely, what you plan to do in your introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

(2) A few days after you hand your draft in, I'll send you feedback and recommendations on how best to turn your draft into a successful final paper.

Here follows a general description of what a successful philosophy paper looks like, at least in my book:

In philosophy, as in all the other humanities disciplines except for creative writing, the main genre of academic writing in which students demonstrate their competence is the persuasive interpretive paper. In a persuasive interpretive paper, the standard for success is that you can engage, and ultimately persuade, a general academic reader (i.e., someone who’s reasonably well-educated, but isn't an expert on the ideas or material that you’re working with) with a line of argument that you’ve developed consisting at least in part of interpretation of material from the course at hand.

Papers of this sort have a standard structure that is firmly grounded in the psychology of reading. We start with an introduction because readers are fickle, and need to be hooked to get them to commit to reading through the whole thing. We divide the main argument of the paper into digestible body paragraphs because readers easily get stuck, and need to be prodded to keep moving. Finally, we end with a conclusion that gives the reader concrete reasons to be pleased that he or she has read through the whole thing, because readers demand a clear return on the time and energy they invest in what they read.

We really don’t have any choice about this structure. If we don’t give readers what they want, they’ll vote with their feet; and a persuasive interpretive paper stands or falls on the outcome of such votes.

In order to write a term paper that is successful on these terms, you’ll need to discharge a varied set of tasks. In my experience, these include:

(i) locating a line of argument in one or more of our Module 3 texts that provokes and interests you, and that you want to develop a deeper acquaintance with by writing about it & engaging a reader in dialogue about it;

(ii) identifying the main claim (thesis) that you would like to make that has something to do with this line of argument, and formulating your main claim concisely in one (or two) thesis paragraph(s);

(iii) drafting a lively summary of the relevant textual passages in which this line of argument comes up;

(iv) organizing your draft summary so that it becomes highly accessible to a general reader—meaning that you break it up into a series of short or medium-length paragraphs, each with an accessible main sentence (an accessible main sentence is always located either as one of the paragraph’s first two sentences, i.e., a topic sentence, or the last one, i.e., a punch line);

(v) pressing on with your discussion of the line of argument that interests you in a Module 3 text until you end up discussing that argument outside the relevant text as well, by contextualizing and/or critiquing that text, and so establishing your own independent view of the matter (again in short or medium-length paragraphs with accessible main sentences);

(vi) pressing on still further until it seems you can take credit for having made a complete persuasive case for your main claim;

(vii) drafting a wrap-up (conclusion) that not only briefly restates what you’ve demonstrated, but shows the reader why it has been so useful to go through your argument with you;

(viii) reading through what you’ve got so far, and on that basis strategizing and drafting an introduction that will spark the reader’s interest in your main claim (normally this is done by destabilizing the reader, i.e., getting him or her worried about something he or she would otherwise take for granted);

(ix) rereading your whole draft paper in light of your draft introduction, reflecting on what it would be like to be a reader approaching this paper from the outside, and on that basis inserting signposts at the start or end of certain body paragraphs that keep your reader informed about where you are in your own line of argument, and that trigger further curiosity about what comes next (e.g., how you’ll establish some counterintuitive claim)…

... And those are just the steps that go into the drafting stage! After these comes getting feedback from me (as well as, I hope, from other actual readers), and ultimately revising and polishing your draft on the basis of both that feedback and the new perspective on the paper that you yourself will have gained with a bit of time and distance from your completed draft.

Please notice that the order of tasks in the list above is rather different from the order in which the parts of your paper will appear on paper: introduction, thesis paragraph(s), body paragraphs (traditionally: first summary, then discussion), conclusion. I put things in the above order not because there’s something holy about that order (there isn’t, though it is the order that works best for me personally), but because I want to emphasize a central maxim about order in academic writing that I think will be especially useful for you to focus on. This maxim is: the optimal order for presenting ideas to the reader is rarely the same as the optimal order in which to work on writing about them; and that order in turn is rarely the same as the order in which you actually come up with the ideas.

This, in my experience, is why taking time to revise papers after getting some distance from them is so useful. Doing so is the most efficient way to figure out how to put things in the most effective order, which is crucial for making your paper as a whole be persuasive—and thus successful.