Apply poststructuralism to any other literary work we have studied (besides Pale Fire).

While catching up on my marking over the break, I drafted this paragraph that I wanted to share with the class.

Undergraduates who are drafting research papers often call too much attention to the mechanics of citing sources and organizing evidence. In the book My Big Boring Academic Study, by the noted researcher Professor H. Pompous Windbag III, it offers a quote on page 221 that supports my point. The passage says, “English professors often ask their students to cut down needless introduction and repetition, in order that each successive revision call less attention to the routine mechanics of writing a research paper, and more attention to the results of the process – namely, a well-defended, original argument.” As this quote shows, Windbag is in agreement with the point I made about how students in literature classes are often so proud of finding a quote that supports their argument that they introduce it with great fanfare, and then after the quote they summarize the point the author of the quote has just made. Windbag feels that this is an unnecessary waste of time that could be spend expanding an original argument, and I cannot agree with him more fervently.

By calling explicit attention to the quotes that they use, Windbag feels that, in their first drafts, undergraduates inappropriately emphasize "the routine mechanics of writing a research paper" (221), rather than the creative intellectual work that is supposed to result from those mechanics.