Terms

Abstract. READ THIS PLEASE! Usually, an abstract is a few sentences that give the reader a sense of the source in terms of its specific content (not just topic) and analytic themes. Students tend to provide only a topic. We need to know something of the thesis and/or conclusion of the article or relevant portions of the book. For the purposes of this class, the abstract is an exercise that requires the student to evaluate a secondary resource in its broader shape, so the student understands the context of the information or argument that is being drawn from it and so the mentor can confirm that the student actually has obtained the work in full, and evaluated it critically. (Thus web searches can lead to passages in books but the book must be located in the library or otherwise carefully evaluated.) The abstract is NOT a quote from the book or the back of the book or a web description of a book. It is a description generated by the student based on actually having the material at hand and having looked at it with some care. (If the article has an abstract already supplied, it can be considered but the student must write his or her own abstract that stands fully independent of this.) Primary works do not need more than one sentence. (A primary source is, say, The Tale of Genji, while a secondary source is a scholarly study of The Tale of Genji.) For example, if you are writing on The Tale of the Heike, and you list McCullough’s full translation of that book, you simply write: “A full translation of The Tale of the Heike." But if it is a secondary work, then you need to be more complete in your description.

Abstracts are required at various stages of the essay process and should reflect your deepening understanding of the work, but should never be just the topic. As far as its information is concerned it should always be content specific. "Provides illustrations of many female hairdos" is not specific enough. Better is: "Provides illustrations of female hairdos during the Edo period, such as ..." But in addition to information, there is surely some sort of structure to the book. If it is really encyclopedia type then say so, but it is presents a thesis or approach of some sort, we need to know it. A paper with many encyclopedia type resources is not likely to score high; we want you to read the ideas of others, not just mine for data.

Accessibility of sources ("Grader Access Information"). I have noticed that many, perhaps even a majority, of students do not handle proper their sources. Footnotes are inaccurate in the citation information, or in the page numbers, or in the way the information is represented. I have decided that graders will check the student's footnotes. This means that the grader needs access to passages that the student is referencing, and, to an appropriate level (less when a data point, more when an idea), the context of those passages. Use any combination of the below methods to provide us access to the necessary passages (more or less listed in my preferences):

Downloaded PDF files. If the full article is provided as a downloadable PDF file, please download it and attach it to your email. If it has a meaningless file title, and it probably will, change that into something we can use, perhaps the author name and short title.

URL. If the information is better viewed over the internet, please give us a URL that works (please confirm it, don't ask us to go searching). Please include additional information when needed (such as "You need to scroll down quite a bit").

If the URL isn't going to take us to the location easily, you can screen capture. BUT, these need to be .jpeg, .pdf or .png files (or converted to them) and they must include enough of the surrounding passages to give us the appropriate context and ability to sense the argument.

If it is a paper source, please scan or take a picture. Again, these need to be ,jpeg, .pdf or .png files. Remember that pictures generated with a camera can be really huge files. Slim them down if it seems like a lot (visualize a grader downloading 30 papers with various documents attached and what that does to the inbox). "A lot" is different for different graders, no doubt. For me, emails that are bigger than 10 MB, when a number are coming in at the same time, begin to slow me down. (My home network is really slow.)

We do not accept non-digitalized submissions.

We want access to everything footnoted, not just quoted.

Advisory grade. These are grades given by your mentor usually at your request. They can give you a sense of where you stand with the grader on certain issues before actually being graded on them (such as the mechanics of the paper as they stand at Step 03 before being graded at Step 04). They are recorded but are not part of the mathematical calculation for a grade. They do sometimes, however, help the grader get a sense of where the student stands. Please do not request advisory grades unless the material is truly ready for it. In other words, please don't use this privilege to test the waters for minimum requirements, or elicit grading comments for things you should learn on your own. The mentor has the right to not give such a grade if s/he is too busy or if it seems unwarranted. When you request a grade, be specific as to what portions of a submission should be graded (the first five footnotes, the first page of the bibliography, x number of pages for writing style, x concept or thesis, etc.)

Assignment tag. Used in subject lines and computer document titles, it is the short phrase that is inserted between the course number and the student’s name: “J7A_S00_ROSE_Marissa” — the assignment tag here is “S00”. More ...

Author information. It is the writer’s (your) responsibility to check whether an author is credible, and to have some awareness of his or her writing agenda. If the source is published by an academic press or an academic journal of good reputation, this work has already been done for you. Presumably the publisher is satisfied that the author meets their standards of expertise and credibility. If the source is elsewhere, then you might need to do a web search and/or an author search of our library holdings or JSTOR or both. We need to know the basic intellectual background, not, by the way, that s/he is a professor at such-and-such a university. That's OK secondary info, but we want fields of study.

Try these methods for locating good biographical information:

Author search of our library holdings. You can get a sense whether s/he has published otherwise, is considered credible enough to be in the library, and you might find author's dates.

Author as word string search on JSTOR. You can find other writings and, importantly, reviews of the books you are using.

Monument Nipponica gives basic bio info as the first footnote of its articles.

Author as word string search via Google or similar search engine.

Author as word string search on Amazon. Amazon will link all writings with that author so you can find other writings that way. The book might also be "openable" and there might be author information on the back cover, or flap, etc. Use with care, though.

Sometimes using the author's name + obituary as keyword searches solves the problem of finding biographical information.

Self-descriptions can usually be found at university web pages if the author is still employed in academia somewhere.

Consider variations of the name. Some authors have elected to be listed with initials instead of first names, some decide partway through to add or drop their middle name, and so on.

Sometimes using the author's name + obituary as keyword searches works very nicely.

Critical distance. Critical distance is at the very heart of what should be your approach to the sources you use for your essay. It is your critical distance that the reader relies upon. In other words, the reader wants to assume that you have this perspective; if the reader decides otherwise, your credibility is forever lost with him or her, and probably with those to whom the reader talks to about you.

Above all, seek to project an impression that you are well-informed, that you have put your sources through a good personal test of skeptical and critical reading, and that you have done the same with your own words.

Critical distance with sources:

Critical distance is to be aware as best as possible of the academic quality of your source and of whatever agenda the writer(s) might have that could bend analysis in a particular direction. Critical distance is not first about agreeing or not agreeing with your source, it is evaluating in an even-handed, rational and careful way all parts of a source. You may feel some parts are more informative or reliable than others. You may feel some conclusions are more agenda driven than others. One of the most common techniques in argumentation is to mix the reasonable with the less so, accurate data with some that is less so. So you must be on your guard from beginning to end. In the scholarly community, you are expected to be as careful as possible -- you cannot hand off the problem to the next person. If you quote or reference something, it means that you feel the source you is credible, that it has met your standard. You are not a neutral "in-between" link; you are endorsing your source.

Web pages without identifiable authors who you can confirm are qualified for the topic at hand do not meet the standards for quality and reliability required of academic work.

For this class of course we do not expect you to know more about a topic than your sources and so of course it is very difficult to know if someone you are working with is an appropriate source or not. But you are not helpless: you can learn about the author (not based on a bio written by the author him- or herself of course!), you can use sources that have staked their reputation of good academic material (academic presses, refereed journals, etc.), your can often find reviews of the work online (JSTOR is very good for this), and you can look at the logic of the argument.

Critical distance in your own argument

Your presentation should convey to us that you are not rhetorically pushing towards a certain position. This is entirely different from, say, the short essay written for the SAT or even for an essay test. With a paper, you have time to step back and evaluate your topic from various angles. If it seems you are unaware of obvious counter-arguments you lose credibility -- either we conclude you have written so quickly that you haven't noticed (and if you have written quickly we doubt the quality of the entire work) or we conclude that you are aware of the counter-arguments but don't wish to mention them, in order to press your own point, and that isn't the best of academic work.

If we feel you are promoting, in the guise of an academic essay, a personal value of some sort, we are equally nervous. You should be helping us to understand better the topic of your paper; if, as academic readers, we feel you are leading us overtly then your credibility is lost. You can take a stance, but it should not be hidden, it should be shared.

Culture. This term cannot be pinned down to a single notion but we don't really need to do so. The point is that "culture" in both J7A & 7B, as I teach it, has to do with the high arts, religion, philosophy and other forms of intellectual culture, or highly abstract, very central notions that have a major role in shaping Japanese life and thought as it is, such as the high value placed on blood connection in premodern Japan. It does not mean pop-culture, food habits, ordinary proper manners, etc. There are ways of writing papers on ordinary topics (one term, the best paper in a class of 70 was on Japanese curry) but they need to speak to larger issues of culture. Film, anime and gaming, by the way, are possible topics but need to be done with great sophistication. There is some excellent scholarly work in these areas that you will need to wrestle with, so do not expect these to be "easy" choices. The primary topic of this class is literature, and so that is nearly always an acceptable choice. Some Japanese arts are not well covered in other classes and these are also good cultural phenomena to consider. Random examples: dance theory, foundations of music, garden architectural principles, tea ceremony philosophy and aesthetics, the concepts behind flower arranging, some forms of theater, the concepts behind traditional carpentry, etc.

Diverse aspects. Unless you modify the topic, the paper asks that you find connections of some sort between two diverse topics in a way that illuminates something important about Japanese culture. Diverse means really diverse. Probably the historical context needs to be substantially different, the two objects of different media, practice or at least genre. So, The Tale of Heike and The Tale of Genji are not diverse enough for this definition since both are prose narratives. The aesthetics of No drama and Murasaki's comments on fiction inside the tale itself might work. The guiding principle is to bring together two objects that at first glance would not seem to be likely companions.

Essay Mentor. Early in the term the student will be assigned a essay mentor who will be responsible for all steps of the essay and will function both as advisor and grader. The mentor is assigned randomly except for this one principle: it cannot be the student’s GSI. The essay mentor assignment list is published on this web site, when available.

"How accessed." We want to know how you have obtained your source. (This is of course not part of a traditional annotated bibliography.) If you checked it out from a library say so; if you looked at it in a library, say so. Include which library. If you accessed it online, say so and be specific about the link you used.

"How I used it." In 1-3 sentences please explain how this resource contributed to the essay.

Informative title. An informative title very briefly describes the basic content of the essay and should include primary source titles, when relevant, and locate the topic within Japan and in a time period. Being a little awkward is better than being “catchy” or “creative”. Here are ten randomly selected recent examples, with my comments.

Margin comments. Several things: The GSIs and I do a lot of grading and need to manage our time. Margin comments are where a paper that started out to be graded in 30 minutes or so easily turns into an hour project or more. So I have set guidelines to curb our enthusiasm and focus our remarks to you.

We identify the same type of error only once. It does not mean that in other places in the essay it is OK.

When pressed for time, I ask the graders to set a timer and then cut off margin comments with a single such as "Time! :-)". This explains to you why suddenly detailed comments have stopped. I use this frequently.

If you see the odd phrase "WRKONTHIS" it means this particular area of the paper really does need attention and that it would be a good ideas to "work on this". It sets out from other comments those things the are of particular concern to the grader. It usually means the error is serious, but in can also mean that the benefits far outweigh the amount of time it takes to fix the matter or that the grader feels the writer has enough comfort with the writing process that slightly less major issues can, in this case, be attended to. I ask that graders try to have a least one WRKONTHIS for each paper. If the paper is very good, this phrase might be pointing at the least good of good things. Finally, the letter string has no spaces and misspells "work" so that it can be searched by you and us without turning up unwanted finds.

By the way, at least for me, when I am really enjoying a paper I forget I'm supposed to be writing margin notes. I have noticed that well-written papers can end up having no notes at all. That doesn't mean I wasn't interested; I was just engrossed in your essay.

When responding to written submissions, we use MSWord in order to use that programs margin comments feature. Sometimes students do not handle our response in a way that displays these comments. If you cannot find your margin comments, please email us.

It might seem obvious, but please read your margin comments.

Reader (Anonymous Reader / Second Reader). Each student has a mentor who works with the student to develop and complete the essay. This mentor then grades the paper on research and content. At that point, the essay is handed off to a second instructor who will grade the essay again on content and on its formal matters (mechanics). The student thus has two readers/graders. But they are different. The mentor knows the effort you have made, what you are trying to say and has a vested interest in you succeeding. But the mentor also knows that a second reader, who doesn't know you as well, who certainly know nothing about the background of your paper, and who is asked to reader not as a teacher but as a reader looking for something of quality and interest—will also grade the essay. Therefore the mentor will seek to prepare your essay for that less generous reading, and will also try to grade in the way s/he could explain, if the two grades were to be very different. As a practical matter, your mentor and your Reader each control about 50% of the essay grade.

The Reader is one of the instructors who is not your mentor. The Reader is assigned more-or-less randomly by me and is anonymous to you and your mentor until after the grading is complete.

Reading for ideas. OK, so I'm going to mount an argument against using only online searches, for the importance of reading for ideas, and such.

Online search engines have become the first and sometimes only method of initial research. On my research resources page I argue for the value of libraries (and list my favorite online resources). Please be familiar with those comments (I use them when I grade). Nevertheless, all of us spend a lot of time in the world wide web's jungle of words and images.

Search results, by their very nature, create for most of us a habit of searching out bits and pieces of data rather than spending time with extended analysis and argument by experts because search results begin with, and return, specific things. Try typing in "A good idea on how to think about the use of music in No drama" and see what happens. We don't attempt these sorts of searches because we know it is a waste of time. Instead, right at the outset, we fashion what we plan to go looking for by our knowledge of how these search engines work. This is, unfortunately, awful for getting a good grasp of the larger significance of a new topic or what good thinking has already been done about it, and so on. In my opinion search engines are changing fundamentally what we think research is about, what we expect from reading and even what we are willing to read. As some used to skip the poems and read only the prose, or skip the prose and look only at the illustrations/example, now we are also skipping the ideas and only plucking the concrete details. We search rapidly, then spend only moments with what we find before feeling we should check the next result.

This class's essay writing process requires not this type of search engine driven research but rather that the student learns from other scholar-authors (always more than one) by reading their points of view, analyses and conclusions. The actual essay should be grounded in good knowledge but should, ultimately, express somewhat sophisticated thinking based on the student’s exposure to the analyses of others, and his or her critical evaluation of them.

But, wait, there is more I would like to add: Reading for ideas requires a slowing down in the reading process, and longer chunks of time devoted to one direction of thinking. It is in that context that fresh ideas, creative ideas, solutions appear. The web not only presents extended arguments poorly (unless you are reading traditional print material onscreen, such as an online academic article), it occurs in a distracted environment where usually more than one thing is happening at the same time, where the reader is in a rushed frame of mind, and where the intention from the beginning is to "get" something rather than struggle with a difficult idea that might be new and not quickly understood. So, the web environment breaks up our attention, which drives down the potential of insight, and is somewhat passive (where the expectation is that it will bring something to you rather than be a step towards an idea), and invites a rushed frame of mind because of that deadly sense that "something from the web can be pulled together quickly." ... Please remember, too, that the Google search engine algorithms—and no doubt all search engines—use as part of their formula how many others have linked to that site. Therefore Google leads you to what everyone else is looking at in a way that time in a library aisle (as an example only) does not. In a sense web searches, while seeming to open the world to us, also bring to us what is already a part of our way of thinking about things. It may be that it is possibly less subversive to our world views, which, if true, is sort of a shame.

So, why do I care? Because I think we are losing the sense that we are the ones responsible for engaging in critical judgment (others somewhere must be doing that for us) and that in order to solve a problem worth solving in a way worth doing a big hunk of time and patience needs to be set aside. I also think we have lowered our expectations of our public discourse, that we accept as good enough sound bites for answers, data delivered without the messenger understanding it or attaching to it contextual analysis, and so forth. Everything just flows by, as sort of an entertaining collage of data. If Berkeley students don't step up to the plate, sharpen their critical minds, and use them well, who out there will? There's no one to hand off to, in my opinion.

Thesis. For the type of essay required in this class, a thesis is absolutely critical. The essay will present your analysis of something, therefore conclusions are involved. The essay is relatively short; a thesis helps to ensure that everything in the essay works together. The thesis is the heart of the essay and basically the carry-away content for the reader, after he or she has finished reading. (“That student’s essay was pretty interesting. She claimed that … (the thesis).”

A topic is a general area of interest: “I would like to do something with samurai.”

A planned course of analysis or investigation sets out an agenda that will discover something or collect meaningfully information into one place: “I will see how samurai are portrayed at different times in Japanese history, probably looking at something during the time that they were at the height of their power and something after they had grown to have little real power in daily life.”

For the purposes of this class, an hypothesis is a working (draft, provisional) thesis. You have a sense of where your analysis will end up but realize that as you become more familiar with the details of your project the thesis might be modified: “I believe that if I compare the behavior of samurai in The Tale of Heike (a major Middle period text) with the behavior of the samurai in Chikamatsu’s plays (18th century), I can show the decline of samurai values.”

A thesis is a claim that you will argue (not just state or announce) as true: "Samurai became the object of ridicule in literature as their role in society declined. [That’s the claim.] During the Middle period, the samurai played critical roles in government and their devotion to moral principle is shown respectfully in texts of the time. However, after the growth of the merchant economy and the decline of the need for samurai, they were sometime criticized in literature as falsely proud and so on. [That’s where you begin to try to persuade the reader, based on some evidence.] "

*Step 02 asks for a hypothesis. In Step 03 you will present your thesis.

*Plagiarism in thesis statements. The reading context of a thesis statement is definitely, "I am reading the student's ideas." Therefore, if any part of that thesis was derived from another scholar, the thesis must be written very clearly, in a way that make it certain we will understand who owns which parts of the thesis statement. Example, "As Koffman argues ... . While I agree with this position mostly, I will also be suggesting ..."