Even if student papers are not a huge success the first time around, students will keep on building skills the more they practice within the topoi’s framework. Gradually, their critical skills will mature; even if first attempts are sloppy or clunky examples of analysis, future attempts will hopefully become more nuanced and insightful. Learning to write about literature is similar to learning any other skill or craft. Beginners start with foundational knowledge, produce elementary, hesitant examples of the craft, but then eventually gain mastery of their skills and are able to “make them their own.” Once mastery is gained in writing, students can make detailed, intricate, and convincing original arguments. Perhaps they’ll be able to do this by the end of the semester, but likely not. If they enter the field of literary studies, it could still take them years to get to that point of really feeling comfortable analyzing and explicating a text. But before they can do that, they need to start somewhere. I think emphasizing the topoi is a good place to begin.
One point of comparison that the study drew on was the fact that those in the experimental classes were more likely than those in the control classes to be able to pick out a critical article amidst a Cliffnotes summary and a book review. I think this would be a really helpful place to start discussing what constitutes “good” writing in this field. Perhaps at the beginning of the semester I might have them read a few different samples of these types of writing and ask them to figure out similarities and differences. Using these samples, together as a class we could arrive at how we write about literature in a scholarly way, integrating an introduction on the topoi into the discussion as well. I’ve been wondering about how to introduce the concept of “close reading” and textual analysis to my lit class this summer, and Wolfe and Wilder’s article have helped me begin to flesh it out.