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For the purposes of this course, it may be useful for you to think of intellectual work as having levels of thinking, since most of your work here at the university is evaluated according to the level at which you engage with the course materials (as well as on the accuracy of your details, precision of your analysis, and and elegance of your presentation).

Discussion works in a similar fashion. Most of our discussions may begin at the level of information gathering (collectively deciding what a passage says, or collecting various moments in a text or film that interest you), but from there we will proceed to organize analyze patterns of details (Level Two), ask what these patterns of details might mean (Level Three), and even move to asking questions about the larger worth of the intellectual project we have posed and the answers we have produced (Level Four).

Understanding the differences between various levels of thinking and inquiry will also help you to understand not only what I expect from you in the course, but also what your future teachers and employers will be expecting of you, regardless of the job you take. Most important for your years here, understanding the various steps of intellectual inquiry will help you to write better papers, which, in turn, will help you to receive more positive evaluations of your work in general.

Level 1 (Generating Data) is purely associative, and akin to brainstorming. You might begin by gathering or grouping kinds of data, such as all of the moments in which a film diverges from a novel, or all the moments where characters talk about money. We often begin doing this kind of work when we're taking notes, and complete this kind of work when we reread, noting all the instances of something as we go.

Sometimes, I receive papers that have not thought (or barely thought) beyond this level -- usually plot summaries, descriptive essays, or papers that merely begin at the beginning of the novel and do a running commentary, but that have no real project organizing them. Almost always, our papers and discussions begin at this level. The challenge is to think beyond this level.

Level 2 (Analyzing Data) begins when you begin noticing patterns and analyzing them. It occurs in earnest when you decide that a specific pattern matters and begin systematically collecting everything that's pertinent to what you've noticed. Level 2 can also be its own kind of brainstorming, since in the process of analyzing you'll begin to see how different threads in a novel relate to one another.

Students often write papers that do not go beyond this kind of thinking -- that are either selective plot summaries or that merely trace out a pattern through its various manifestations in the text. They may begin to get at how a pattern works ("Austen always has wealthy characters talk about class difference as natural, while her poorer characters represent it as arbitrary and artificial; she never has one without immediately following with the other"). What they do not do is get at is the significance (the why) of the patterns they lay out for their readers. Once we see what you see, what does the novel become about? The best way to avoid this kind of problem is to ask the question "So what!?" of the pattern you've noticed. If you don't know why the pattern interests you, then you need to take another turn in your thinking before you continue with your essay.

Level 3 (Asking Questions of Analyzed Data) occurs when we move beyond what happens in the text, and even how it happens, and begin to ask why these details occur.

For example, perhaps you've noticed that letters seem to be important in Austen, and have collected together all the ones in a given novel or group of novels (Level 1). Perhaps you've noticed that whenever Austen includes the text of a letter in a novel, she has at least one character analyze it, much in the same way we do close readings of passages (Level 2). You're convinced that these moments are important, and that they can shed light on how the novel makes its meaning. So, the problem is, what is a good interpretive question to ask? What is a good problem to pose for yourself? What is a good hypothesis to form? For example, do you think that she includes these moments -- where you read the full text of the letter and then watch two other people interpret the letter -- because she is modeling literary interpretation for you? Do you think you know why she would do that? Could you demonstrate that in a paper and be persuasive? Now you're definitely at Level 3, and writing essays that will fall at least in the "B" level and often higher depending on the execution.

Level 4 (Understanding How and Why Your Analysis Matters): Often, once you've done all this -- traced a pattern in a text, systematically inquired into its significance, and understood how that aspect of the novel actually help to produce its ultimate meaning -- then you have already begun to understand why you're writing this particular essay. In other words, you might have put together a convincing interpretation of a novel, but you have not necessarily worked through why your reader should value what you've written. Perhaps your interpretation helps you to understand something not only about this novel, but novels in general? about this author in general?

Often, this kind of thinking only becomes possible if you see yourself as participating in a larger discussion on the topic -- so that your essay is a contribution to that conversation. Are you writing your essay in part as a response to a class discussion we've had? Did you read an article and are you putting forward an alternative interpretation. Good. Make sure that in your essay you explain this -- and explain how and why you're responding in this particular way. In a sense, once you see yourself as responding to other interpretations, then you can imagine yourself explaining to your audience why you want to read a given novel differently.

For example, much of the writing on Sense and Sensibility assumes the two terms of its title to be opposing forces; most of the resulting interpretations therefore see the novel as staging a conflict between the two, in which neither Marianne nor Elinor emerge unchanged. But what happens if we analyze the novel under a different premise that we see supported by the text? What kind of interpretation would occur if we considered the two terms and needing each other, so that "Sense" needs "Sensibility" in order to be socially palatable? What happens if we read Sense without Sensibility as Fanny Dashwood? How then does the novel change for us? What does it become about?

Most of the truly outstanding essays I read at some point think on this level--and by "think" I mean that they do more than muse randomly at their conclusions.