1. Develop a focus for your work. Most critical work in the field focuses on a specific text, a specific author, a specific time (and set of conditions), a specific trend or theme, or some combination of these foci. Your focus should be on a specific text.

2. Once you have developed a focus, turn your focus into a topic. For example, you might decide to focus on the relationship between gender and power in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, but knowing you want to write a paper on this particular text and that particular idea doesn’t get you very far. So, you need to consider why you want to focus on this idea. It might be because you are interested in Eleanor’s claim of having no power in her own household, a claim which forces us to consider who has power (the General, possibly Henry) and who doesn’t, and what might a household governed by female power look like (the only household without a masculine presence is the Thorpe’s). In this novel, though, it is a man (Henry) who does the educating, and it is men who are at the center of domestic spaces. What then might we say about gender, the domestic, and education? We are getting closer to a topic. Note, however, that a topic is not yet a thesis.

3. Once you have selected a topic and the text that will be your focus, spend some time with that text. Reread (or skim) it with the new perspective of the paper you plan to write. Be careful, though, not to simply reread it to find evidence to support your position. Instead be open to the possibility that you might find both confirming and contradictory evidence. Don’t dismiss the contradictory evidence. Keep track of it.

4. Either before, after, or concurrently with the above step you will want to start investigating the critical literature on your topic. Your topic should be defined clearly enough to enable you to search effectively through the book collection in the library (unfortunately very uneven after the early 1990s) and in the online databases: MLA, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and WilsonWeb (in our library this database is known as Humanities Full Text). Some of the best critical literature is found in books, so go to the library and browse the catalog. Find books in the area of your topic, pull them off the shelves and browse through them. Look at the table of contents and index to see whether keywords from your topic appear. Also, check the bibliography for further leads on critical texts. As for the library databases, effective searches require specific keywords, so the more focused your topic is and the more refined your topic language is the better your search results. If you do a preliminary search after developing your topic and before you reread the text(s), you can save yourself some pain. A preliminary search of the criticism could reveal problems with your topic. For example, you might find that your topic has been pretty thoroughly developed or you might find that no critical literature exists. Either way, you probably need to rethink your topic. You might also find an overwhelming amount of critical literature, which means either that your topic has already been done to death or that your search terms (i.e. the keywords of your topic) are not refined enough yet.

5. Look through your notes on the topic and the text(s) and develop a preliminary thesis.

6. Write a draft (or drafts) of your paper. You might find someone in class willing to look at your essay (offer to look at his or her in return). Be careful about relying on friends—you want good feedback that will help you revise your paper and make it better; you don’t want friendly comments like "It looks pretty good to me." You can also visit the Writing Center at any stage of the process—when you are trying to find a topic, when you are developing possible responses to the topic, when you are developing a preliminary thesis, when you are drafting.

7. If you don’t wait until the last minute, you can even give me a draft to review. I won’t proofread the paper for you; instead I will restrict my comments to larger rhetorical issues like focus, development, argument and so on.

8. Be sure to proofread your essays carefully, and consider giving your paper to a friend or classmate for proofreading. Also read your paper out loud to yourself before completing a final draft—make sure it sounds like spoken English and not like paper-ese. Try for an easy, graceful, but not overly casual writing style; assume a reader who knows the text, but has not memorized every detail.