WF comments on an English paper

Dear Lisa,

I like your ideas about the different types of love in Wuthering Heights. They show a complexity of thought, affirming that passionate love is everlasting but that it still may be problematic, that contingent love isn’t good, and that an ideal love perhaps involves an equilibrium between the two. I like how you thought beyond the fact that “passionate love is good; contingent love is bad.”

From your ideas on love, it will help me, as a reader, to follow your paper if you state a clear thesis in your intro (for example, “Bronte shows that passionate love is everlasting but leads to misery, contingent love results in unfulfilled marriages, and the ideal love results from an equilibrium between the two”). You already have this basic idea in your intro paragraph, but it will help me if you state it more clearly. It would also help me if you gave a clearer road map of where you are going; right now you tell me that you will look at the marriages between Catherine and Heathcliff and Cathy and Linton, but your paper talks about more relationships than these.

Something else that will help me when I read your paper (and I think will also help you to develop your thesis) is to define what type of love that each marriage your talk about represents. For example, if Catherine and Heathcliff have a passionate love, what exactly is a passionate love? I think your paper will be stronger if you explicitly state both which type of love a marriage represents and why it is good or bad.

I like the ideas you have, but sometimes your paper gets hard for me to follow because you tend to put many ideas into one paragraph. Stating a clear thesis in your intro will help to take care of this problem. If you start every paragraph with a topic sentence that relates back to your thesis and then make sure all the evidence in your paragraph sticks to that topic, your argument will be clearer.

I also think you can strengthen your paper by doing more analysis of your quotations. Quotes help me when they don’t summarize the plot but when they make some point about your argument. For each quote you use, you might want to try asking yourself, “What do I want my reader to get from this quote? What does it say about the different types of love?”

You have great ideas about types of love in this paper, and I think that working on making your argument clearer and on doing more analysis of your quotes will make you happier about the way you convey your ideas. I’ll see you in our conference and we can talk about any of this then.