Writing reports for Philosophy 020E/1
  1. Your title page should include your name & student number, your professor’s name & your TAs name, the date you are turning the paper in and the paper’s title, which should indicate whether the report is the first or second or third etc. report.
  2. Know your audience. You are writing your report for your professor & your TA. So you can assume a certain amount of sophistication in your reader. You don’t have to begin by saying, "Plato was a Greek philosopher who wrote the Socratic dialogs."
  3. Think about the main question you’re being asked to answer & other questions you think you’ll have to answer in order to answer the main question.
  4. Make a list of the passages you want to quote in your paper.
  5. Write your first draft. The American novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe (author of, among many other works, The Right Stuff & The Bonfire of the Vanities) says that in order to overcome writer’s block he pretends he’s writing a memo to his editor. "I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to my editor as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you’re not thinking about style, you’re just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages" /Wolf, 99-100. You might want to try something like this.
  6. Write a one-page summary of your paper in the form of a memo to your TA. This is to refer to when you write your first draft. List the main point you want to make, the additional points you will want to make in support of your main point & the passages you will quote.
  7. Writing your paper will now be painless. You’ve already done most of the hard stuff by brainstorming the questions you want to answer, collecting the passages you want to quote & writing a summary page in the form of a memo to your TA.
  8. The parts of your paper your readers will look at most carefully are the first & last paragraphs. Your opening paragraph tells them what you want to accomplish & your last paragraph tells them what you think you did accomplish & how you did it.
  9. Edit & polish & turn your paper in on time.

To repeat,

Cite your sources when you quote passage or use other authors’ ideas. Do this in the body of your text or as footnotes at the bottom of the page. In text citations are placed at the end of the sentence, before closing period, with a space & a "/" separating them from the text. For example: Peirce thinks the method of science is the method we must use to arrive at the truth /Peirce, 63-65. Searle says, "Of course reference is relative to a background language" /Searle 1987, 142n14 (or, /Searle, p. 142n14). Books, articles & internet sources are listed at the end of your report, in this form:

James A. Gould ed. 1998. Classic Philosophical Questions. 9th ed. Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River NJ.

Tom Wolfe. 1991. Interview: The art of fiction 73. The Paris Review 119:93-121.

Fred Dretske.1998."The mind's awareness of itself." @http:www.nyu.edu/gaas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness/papers/dretske.html.

These punctuation practices are preferred: Use double quotation marks. Put periods & commas inside quotation marks, colons & semicolons outside. Philosophers make a lot of use of two Latin abbreviations: i.e., which abbreviates "that is," and e.g., which abbreviates "for example." Treat them as parenthetical expressions, placing commas on both sides.

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