Wheaton College (Massachusetts)
First Year Seminar 1999: The Future
Fall 1999
Michael Drout

First Paper Assignment

Due Date: Monday, October 4, 1999 in class.

Technical aspects: The paper should be 3 pages long, typed, double-spaced with 1-inch margins. Please do not use odd, difficult-to-read fonts or type-styles. Do not use a cover sheet, and either staple or paperclip your pages together. Remember to give your paper a better title than "Assignment 1."

Possible Topics: The paper must be on some aspect of the effects of intertextuality in either the first two chapters of Virginia Postrel's The Future and its Enemies or in William Gibson's Count Zero. The paper is an explanatory paper. That is, I want you to spend the paper explaining to your reader how the author of the piece you are considering uses intertextual sources to convey important ideas. You should be explicit as to what you think those important ideas are.

Process: Use this paper to get some practice in two important areas: (1) briefly summarizing another author's work, and (2) establishing the basics of a clear argument of your own. What will make for a good paper is the is a clearly written and explained examination of the complex ways authors communicate (or fail to communicate) ideas through intertextuality. You might consider showing your reader how a particular section of one of the books doesn't make sense if you don't know the intertextual reference, but does make sense if you do.

Style: The paper must develop a coherent argument; you must have a point and spend the paper making that point. The paper should have a thesis in the first paragraph that answers the question "what is the point of this argument?" Your prose should be expository, but you can, of course, use the pronoun "I." Your paper (and all work you turn in for this class) should be proofread and free of grammatical and spelling errors.

Hints: It will be impossible to write a good paper without a thesis. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to write a good paper without a number of analyzed quotes from the primary text: tell me how the words you quote fit into your argument; explain why they're important.