Throughout the year, students will enter into a rhythm of writing short, informal papers and revising this work under the supervision of their teachers. The skill of essay writing will, through this practice, become a natural mode of exploration, analysis, and eloquent expression. Over the course of each term, students will revise and develop one of these short essays to be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, rigor, persuasive force, and elegance of expression. These polished papers will then, in turn, comprise a final dossier that will be reviewed and graded by external examiners at the end of the year.
The goal of the drafting and revising that students will undertake in the context of these short papers is not only to gain facility with the essay form as a medium for expression, but to experience the act of composition as a formative process of discovery in itself. In writing, one’s own particular perspective and insights become embodied in sentences and paragraphs, and are thereby made available to other minds. Accordingly, the writing assignments of the MA program are less focused on the typical end-points of formal assessment—an inflated letter-grade assigned hastily at a semester’s end—than they are on the cultivation of the invaluable ability to articulate one’s thoughts in clear and compelling ways. The point of these individual papers, and the final dossier that they will form, is to communicate—for others and for one’s self—a view: a coherent position of assertion and understanding that has been achieved during a unique process of composition and revision.