Generally, we will be helping you form and support arguments that usually begin with the statement of a thesis, some focused interpretative claim you will make that the rest of the paper will exist to make intelligible and persuasive. Please understand that by argument we do not mean a knock down drag out fight in written form. Rather, we mean a form of academic writing that you will often be expected to produce at the university, no matter what your major or discipline, though from discipline to discipline there is a good degree of variation about what is expected and about what counts for evidence and how it should be presented and documented. In the Core, we will try to spell out those expectations very clearly, though you should understand good writing is never merely the filling out of a form, never merely the following of a recipe.
Good writing is often the result of many shrewd and strategic choices about means and ends.
Good writing is often the result of good rewriting, which is itself often the result of bravely rethinking one's position, and sometimes radically remaking it. Good writing is often a form of intelligent, organized, truthtelling. Good writing often makes possible a form of gift exchange between writer and reader, one person's ideas, experiences, and perspectives, carefully prepared, hospitably offered in exchange for another person's equally generous offer of attention. In the Core, writing is one of the ways, perhaps the best way, that meaning is produced and shared. As a person only gets to write so many papers in a lifetime, it is important that you take the opportunities the Core offers and make the most of them.