I continue to say hey this guy Tarantino may be up to something other than just stealing stuff. Like Milton. You quote stuff, reinterpret it, that kind of thing.
FROM STAR TREK
[Ricardo Mantalban in a spaceship says something like "Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold? Well in space it is very cold."]
FROM KILL BILL
[The epigraph to Kill Bill: "Revenge is a dish best served cold. Old Klingon Proverb]
I talked about the epigraph to Kill Bill before, but totally failed to provide the clip from Star Trek. Here it is. [yeah this sucks without the clip but I am leaving this here as a placeholder. Sorry. More exciting things next week.]
Star Trek Wrath of Khan features Khan, a genetically enhanced survivor of the 1990 (!) Eugenics War, getting revenge on Kirk for banishing him to a wasteland which lead to the death of his wife. It is one of Tarantino's favorite movies, and is kind of awesome, although lamely Kirk and Khan never get face to face in the movie, which seems like a pretty big mistake.
Hey Geoff, Ive been periodically checking in with this series of posts. I noticed (as I did with your intro's for jason's posts) that you refuse to reuse a canned intro. Everytime you redo it. Now I also imagine that you read a lot of less than exciting essays/papers in your day job. So maybe you have some thoughts on the following issue.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in college having to write and introduction with a thesis and then writing a conclusion repeating the thesis always frustrated me.
I was afraid to give away the whole thesis in the introduction, because I didnt want the telegraph the ending. At the same time, it seemed like my teachers just wanted me to just repeat the damn thing at the end. But that always seemed bizarre to me.
Do you think that there is a certain skill to "repeating the thesis"? Somehow using everything that came between the intro and the conclusion to make the thesis sound like something "new" even though it was always there on the table?
(Also do you find it interesting or maddening to see how your students deal with this problem?)
"I was afraid to give away the whole thesis in the introduction, because I didnt want the telegraph the ending. At the same time, it seemed like my teachers just wanted me to just repeat the damn thing at the end. But that always seemed bizarre to me."
ReplyDeleteNot bizarre at all. You are right not to give the whole game away at the beginning. But your teachers have a lot of papers to grade and need to know FAST if you have a point or not. When you are published by a reputable place people will assume you have a point and wait for it. Teachers cannot assume you have a point, as many students forget. If you put your point late the teacher may spend the entire paper thinking you are an F student with no point. You don't want them thinking that. School essays and published essays are different beasts as much as we pretend otherwise.
"Do you think that there is a certain skill to "repeating the thesis"? Somehow using everything that came between the intro and the conclusion to make the thesis sound like something "new" even though it was always there on the table?"
I like restating it every time because it is like what I do in conversation when people ask me what I am working on. Messing with it I may improve the formula. Also I am trying to generally be more casual in my writing, more like how I talk. There is a skill for restating the thesis at the end of the paper in a new way, in a way that takes into account the paper they just read -- it just needs to be more sophisticated I think. It should be suggested at the opening, but fully said at the end I think.
My students do not, however, really try to do this. I am successful if they HAVE a thesis up front. Repeating it at the end is a skill that gets triaged to the bottom and really never dealt with.