Of course, I still have to read the last third of the book. Details, details.
So, below follows my paper. For miscellaneous reasons I will Amazonlink to the book I am critiquing instead of spelling out the title.
My name
Professor's name
Class
Date
Title of Book (I don't feel clever enough to make up my own title for this one.)
This is where the introduction should go. All sensible introductions should somehow end up having at least four lines in them. Any less and it's just not going to look right. When the time comes, with the help of introductory clauses and whatever it's called when you break away into a that- or which- clause, we should be all right. Especially if we can add a few adjectives to force a word onto its own final line.
This is where the paper will begin. Here we will determine the protagonist. Is it the young editor who is playing chauffeur? Is it the aging pathologist who has controlled the brain, save the pieces given away, for so many years? Is it Einstein, whose biography lightly parallels those riding in the car? Whichever it is, let's keep some of these verbs, as they will work well for the real thing. In this paragraph we will discuss the risk-taking of the journalist, I think. He is the narrator and should open the story. As if we were writing dutifully good Jane Schaeffer paragraphs, we shall provide three or so specific examples or quotations of the risk-taking involved. Pity the Works Cited page never counts as a page. Meanwhile, I'm full of anxiety that double-spaced papers only happen at my old university, in high schools, and in the hallowed pages of the MLA guide, and at this school -- a school in a city whose library doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System! -- in this class full of people from all disciplines (including the dodgy film majors; are we to expect they have a codified writing standard beyond the Nicholl screenplay format?), "3-5 pages" might actually mean three to five pages single-spaced.
Oops, that last paragraph is a little too long and thus is ruining this exercise where I show myself how easy it is to type a "3-5" page paper, so long as one doesn't OBSESS and psych one's self out about it. I quite like using the word "one"; I find it useful. Some of my former professors hated it. Some of them even permitted the first person. I'm sure my current professor would say if she permitted the first person. Too bad I can't use the first person, as I could then make a parallel between a road trip with Einstein's brain in the trunk and a road trip with a very small pet cemetery in the back seat floorboard. Maybe it will come out in the presentation. But I hope not. Anyway, this is the paragraph where I will talk about the doctor -- Tom Whatshisface -- and the risks he has taken. It will be at least as long as the previous paragraph, perhaps, or maybe will take up two paragraphs, so I guess I don't need to edit my mock version after all. I should discuss here the obvious risks the doctor took at the time then go on to the risks he is taking on this road trip. I must be careful to keep the "risk-taking" aspect separate from the "inner quest" aspect until we're ready for the transition. That will be hard. I don't really like this book.
The middle paragraph for the whole paper, then, seems like it will be about Einstein himself. Here we should blend risks taken and inner quests. What motivated Einstein? How is he like the people on this trip? How does he influence the people on this trip? What would Einstein think of this trip? (According to the people on the trip.) Alas, or "oy vey" as the book defines it (I really don't think the expressions are the same), I can't get away with prepositional abuse in the real paper and thus can't keep repeating "on this trip" as if I'm some foreign inquisitor who keeps repeating a phrase because he's confidant in how to say it and can at least be sure that this much of his speech is working. "On this trip, Mr. Einstein, how did it feel to have your brain cut up like globs of chicken and floating around in cookie jars, on this trip?" It puts one (there's that "one" again) in mind of the famous line from the Paul McCartney/Wings song, which "they" now claim is "in this ever-changing world in which we're living," as opposed to "in this ever-changing world in which we live in," but I do wonder if the removal of that terminal preposition isn't a little revisionist. Oh yes, I will have no trouble teaching postmodernism to the Cre*tive Wr*ting class next year. I really do need to make some lesson plans.
The last paragraph above is all a big lie because, in the course of writing it, I didn't get it fixed into my head what I could really say about Einstein. I wonder if he should be in this paper at all. Maybe in the next 60 pages his role will be more obvious. (I can't believe I have to read 60 more pages about a journey that I've ended up being INCREDIBLY bored by. If this is karmic justice for everyone who bought my book and was snoozed off their feet, I apologize. However, while you'd think that having mushy bits of Einstein in your trunk would be more exciting than my having to tip the maid $10 because of what I did to Disney World Resort sheets, you might be wrong: this is definitely more of a soul search than a wacky John Candy-cameoed romp. Anyway, I will stop thinking about how, when I write the real paper, it will be stretched out by eliminating all of the contractions. Instead, I'll think about how, when I write the real paper, this paragraph will be about the inner quest that changes the pathologist. Assuming he changes by the end of the book, that is. Because otherwise it looks like I'll be making a lot of crap up then finding some weak references that should stand up if no one thinks too hard about it.
Now, finally, this should be the penultimate paragraph. This should be the paragraph where I write all about how much the journalist/editor changes as a result of driving Einstein's brain and the pathologist who stole/acquired it across the country to be delivered to Evelyn Einstein, the big E's granddaughter. This guy has established that wanderlust runs happily in his family, so we can't discuss how he suddenly discovers the adventuring spirit. While on this trip, he is having staleness issues with his live-in, an adventurer herself. Maybe he will discover something in himself that he can use to keep this relationship going for the rest of their days. Or maybe, as he has started to worry about in the last chapter, she has already left him. Maybe he is having to learn about the price one pays for adventuring, the price that took its toll on Einstein's and Harvey's (that's the doctor) families. But, since the author's girlfriend likes to get up to explorations, maybe not. Maybe she's more like Einstein than he is? No. Maybe I should finish the book so I will know. Whatever happens, this feels like the easiest paragraph.
And now we're where the conclusion will go. See -- this hardly took any time to write. Twenty minutes, tops. So, I reassure myself, all I need to do is read these 60 pages, whip up a crappy rough draft of this paper to be revised at the last minute (I present it on Wednesday), and then I should study for tomorrow's midterm, which I don't have a bluebook for. This conclusion is already longer than my real conclusion -- I hate writing conclusions; they seem so redundant ("tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them, tell them what you just told ‘em). But I'm trying to hit the bottom of the page so I can say to myself, "look, it only takes 20ish minutes to write a 4ish page paper." Of course, then I will obsess that the graduate students are expected to write five pages while the undergrads may go for the easy three. I think too much. Or, in the case of headbanging last night in the front row of the REO Speedwagon concert at Green Valley Ranch instead of reading, sometimes not enough. What a great show. All of my junior high fantasies are coming true. (I don't remember grad school being amongst them, though.) Okay, back to "work." (What will I do in the fall when I have to do three grad classes while teaching four different classes every day of my own?)
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