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Document-Design Sample Essay 1 (E1)
The following student essay is provided as an example of a well-formatted college essay.
It was produced in an English 1 course. Miriam Kuyateh’s work here also richly
illustrates her successful study of sentence grammar, analytical style, and college-level
research. It must be said that this essay was the result of several drafts and sessions of
careful proof-reading, team-reading input, professor-student discussion, and other such
refinements.
Note the balance and richness of each of her sentences. Study carefully how she
suggests much more than she says. Ms. Kuyateh’s paragraph structure is solid and clear.
And the way she thoughtfully weaves in a rich set of resources from her research reading
is both informative and impressive.
Let this essay serve as both a model of basic sentence and paragraph structure,
and also a model of the texture and pattern of ideas that a formal essay is expected to
convey in college and university study.
The original assignment was to compose a five-paragraph essay (also known as a
‘standard essay’), with end-notes and works cited/consulted pages. The topic of the essay
was an analysis of professional work of art. That semester, we used the small-format
Phaidon book, The Art Book, a wonderful, compact palm-sized collection of 500 works of
art from several centuries of artistic accomplishment. The photos of paintings, drawings,
sculptures, and installations served as triggers for descriptive, explanatory, and analytical
assignments. In this particular project, the student writer had to provide context for the
work that she chose to investigate; describe the painting in detail; provide information on
its original composition, its reception by skilled viewers, and its social significance; draw
relevant personal connections; and end with a distillation of the value of the work.
Ms. Kuyateh, a computer science major, succeeded admirably with a challenging
work of modern abstraction, and showed that science and art are not diametrically
opposed in the consideration of a writer, thinker, reader.
[Special Note:
This essay was composed before the 2009 revisions to the MLA
guidelines for documentation of research sources in academic essays.
Thus, titles of books, works of art, and periodicals are underlined in this
essay, where currently such titles would be italicized for special emphasis.
Additionally, Ms. Kuyateh followed my in-class recommendation to single
space both the essay ID Box, long quotes (five lines of original text or
more), and end-notes, in order to save some page space, and also make the
‘look-and-feel’ of the page a bit more professional, as if it were published
in a scholarly journal. The general MLA recommendation is to double-
space all text in an essay, no matter the specific function of a text area.
Many professors still follow this double-spacing rule religiously. To avoid
confusion and loss of grade points in other classes, the best strategy is to
conference with a professor in the first two weeks of class, before an essay
is due, to see what she or he prefers. For my courses, you are free to
follow Ms. Kuyateh’s example here in the mixing of single and double-
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spaced text units. If you’re still not sure that you’ve got a solid grip on this
form of stylish page design, and it’s causing you a prickly feeling of
sustained anxiety, then please come by my ‘scholar’s cell’—Office 935 on
the main campus—during open conference hours, and I’ll help you
demystify the process.]
As you read and review this student sample note the following features:
1. Font style and size (12-point, Times New Roman, regular);
2. Double-spacing of text body;
3. ID Box (5-items, single-spaced, top-left margin);
4. Formal Title (centered on page, correctly capitalized);
5. Sequential page identifier labels (writer’s last name and page number);
6. Page margins (1-inch on all four edges);
7. New-paragraph indents (5 letter spaces. Or .5-inch tab);
8. Reference section labels and placement (i.e., End Notes, Works Cited, Works
Consulted, Appendices);
9. Explicit Thesis statement at the end of the introductory paragraph;
10. Clear and directive paragraph Topic Sentences in each development
paragraph;
11. Explicit Re-statement of Thesis in concluding paragraph;
12. Explanatory set-up and detailing in each paragraph to indicate and explain the
focus, background, issues, connections of each paragraph’s main concept;
13. Presentation of short quotations (4 lines or less of original text) as evidence in
support of a statement/idea(s) plus full formal MLA citation code;
14. Presentation of long quotations (5 lines or more of original text); as evidence
in support of a statement/idea(s) plus full formal MLA citation code;
15. Use of end notes (superior numbers at sentence-end keyed to longer
notations at the back of the essay document) to provide supplementary
information, tangent views, alternate ideas, deeper discussion of secondary
issues than the primary part of the assignment requires;
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16. Paragraph density (indicating thoughtful definition and explanation of ideas)
(in this sample, Dev-1, 10 sentences; Dev-2, 15 sentences; Dev-3, 24
sentences);
17. Development-paragraph size-equity (indicating awareness of proportion and
balance of ideas and supporting evidence);
18. Form and order of Works Cited and Works Consulted listings (alphabetical
listing by author/source originator last name; subsequent entry lines ‘reverse
indented’).
You should print out this sample essay and the pre-submission checklist which follows it
so that you can make your own work conform to the page-design requirements, and also
the general development of an expository essay.
[Special Note: In the following sample essay, the top right corner of each page
contains two headers, in the SPB: one is the essay page-sequence header (writer’s
last name and page number); the other is the rolling header for the SPB itself—
this should be disregarded in your own documents. That is, do not use the SPB
header in your essay and research docments.]
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Miriam Kuyateh
English 1/TTH 8-9:30 am
Professor Cobene
Essay 1: Artwork Description/Analysis
September 14, 1997
A Lesson Past Childhood
The line between graffiti and fine art is a thin one. This idea is especially true since
the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's made a revolutionary break with traditional
styles of representative painting. Artists like Jackson Pollack, whose drip-action
paintings are wild fields of thin, tangled color, and Franz Kline, whose black and white
oil paintings abstractly hint at fragments of Japanese calligraphy, were people who made
the viewer see in different ways than Renaissance portraits (like Caravaggio or
Rembrandt) or impressionistic landscapes (like Cezanne and Monet). One artist who
continues the work of modern abstraction is Cy Twombly. He is an American-born
painter, living now in Italy, who has brought fine art to the edge of child-like graffiti. Or,
he has lifted the scrawlings of schoolroom children on the chalk-board up to the level of
gallery masterpiece. I want to investigate how Twombly does these things by closely
examining his 1969 painting Bolsena.
The painting Bolsena is a riot of scribbles defining a mysterious beauty. As the
editor of the Phaidon The Art Book wrote, "Random scrawls and scribbles animate the
surface of this painting, recalling the freedom of expression of a child's drawing. The
loose, unordered style allows forms and images to emerge and melt in the imagination"
(Phaidon 467). The painting is done mostly in black pencil and black chalk on a canvas
covered with a sandy, beige layer of house paint.1 The thin outlines of boxes float above
smudges of charcoal and graphite that seem like bundles of burned sticks. All the various
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bundles and scratched lines lean from the bottom left to the top right corner. Near the
top and center, a simple geometric outline, with measurements, appears: a rectangle with
a right angle overlapping it just a bit. Words in a loose, cursive handwriting hover at the
top edge of the painting, but they are unclear and seem more like a faint tangle of string.
A viewer's first impression might be that this is a rough draft of some construction
drawing, or even a doodle page near a telephone. Twombly painted Bolsena in 1969
when he was staying at Lago di Bolsena (Lake Bolsena) in central Italy.
Twombly's paintings create complicated reactions. His many paintings--including
Bolsena--confuse some viewers, but they enervate others. One critic is Peter Schjedahl.
Schjedahl writes, "Twombly as an artist is plenty soulful and quite seductive" (Schjedahl
73). With this statement, he is trying to account for Twombly's enormous popularity and
success with art dealers and critics of contemporary art. He goes on to say, "His work is
as much a form of behavior as a product of craft" (73). His most important assessment of
Twombly is his importance as a "poet of belatedness":
He makes [painting] a medium for fugitive traces of other lostnesses:
Mediterranean aches, Roman poetries. There is a wonderful tension
between vatic reference and vernacular mark, the ineffable and the crude.
Twombly conveys a peculiar state…of possessing in mind and heart a
territory that his body cannot share, because the body cannot inhabit
memory. (73)
Another person who has regarded Twombly's complex artistic vision is Rosalind Krauss.
In a recent article, Krauss argues that elevating Twombly's graffiti-like paintings to the
realm of classical art is excessive, and kind of a social posturing by art dealers. She
admits that his work is about important artistic ideas, but disagrees that those ideas are
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highly significant in contemporary society (Krauss 71, 118). Kirk Varnedoe, who has
been a curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is one of the most important
"readers" of Twombly's efforts and accomplishments. He writes about Twombly's
artistic vocabulary:
Offhand impulsiveness and obsessive systems; the defiling urge toward
what is base and the complementary love of lyric poetry and the grand
legacy of high Western culture; written words, counting systems,
geometry, ideographic signs, and abstract fingerwork with paint--all ask
to be understood in concert. (Varnedoe 10)
Varnedoe informs us that the period of August and September of 1969 when Twombly
was painting Bolsena was one when the painter's thoughts were filled with the Apollo 11
moon landing as well as the wild, volcanic countryside of the ancient town where he
stayed (Varnedoe 43). Thus, the painting is a complicated meditation on ordinary Italian
life and one of the most spectacular moments of human history.2 And this painterly
meditation is condensed through the painter's emotions and thoughts into the seemingly
restless gestures that leave boxes and bundles of lines, numbers and blurred words on the
sandy background. It is as if the painting is an echo, or a snapshot of an echo (how
impossible is that!) of streams of perception that moved through the painter's mind.3
Bolsena, and Twombly's paintings in general, interest and inspire me. I'm studying to
be a software designer, but I currently work as an assistant counselor for newly disabled
kids at a private school in Benicia. When I first saw Bolsena, I thought it was kind of
ridiculous that such a messy, "basic" drawing was considered important enough to be put
in an art catalogue. But the image kept coming back to my mind. I saw kids at the
school making similar scratches and scribbles. And at night when I studied at my kitchen
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table--tracing chip circuits and trying to find control flow in a program--I noticed that my
note pages were full of similar blotches and bundles, half diagrams and hasty, blurred
notes to myself. So I went back to the bookstore where I saw a magazine with articles on
Twombly, and I bought it, excitedly bringing it home to study. My mother always said,
"Listen to what the Dormouse said, 'Feed your head!'" I knew this was a line from Grace
Slick and The Jefferson Airplane, but my mom meant for me to carefully study whatever
made me curious. She insisted that this was the only way to really learn something. So I
studied Twombly--for weeks.4 What I found was that his work is about the process of
making marks while he's in certain moods. Each drawing becomes as different, as
particular as his emotions and thoughts at a particular time can make them. By particular
I mean 'unique.' Each painting--like a real emotion--is never repeated, though it has
elements--again, like a real emotion or even a thought--that are common to other
paintings, other feelings, other memories. Twombly, I think, has found a way to respect
and admire the curious sense of discovery that children can follow for hours. By not
trying to paint any "thing" specifically, he is free to let his emotions and thoughts
determine what the character of his marks will be.5 In some way, it is like Twombly has
learned how to let the painting paint him: I mean, make him different and new. After a
few weeks of reading about him and looking at photos of his paintings, I realized that this
openness was what my job with disabled kids required of me to be successful. I can't
make them into some image of what I think they should be: that's cruel and impossible
besides. But if I let them show what they are, at any particular moment, then I might
discover a new way to help them, or even just experience being with them in a unique
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moment. My work learning computer languages and programming methods kind of
requires a similar openness and willingness to discover what something has to teach me.
Although programs are a lot more structured than a child or Bolsena, the experience of
closely tracing the lines of code and the directions of the program's flow are much like
each other.6 I never thought that a painting that looked like a rough draft of graffiti on a
city wall would teach me about either my job or my future career, but I guess knowledge
lurks in the most unlikely places, waiting for you to find it.
Twombly's Bolsena gives a viewer much to study, but it gives up its treasure only
over time. The viewer has to become open to the experience of being reminded of many
ordinary things in life, like a child's doodles or a university student's labored note pages,
in order to really understand how Twombly is helping us capture and hold onto some
fleeting moments of life. Bolsena is a painting that suggests a "form of behavior" that is
as much about catching some strong sense of childhood discovery and simple pleasure in
making marks as it is about abstract and complex issues like cultural memory and human
perception. For me, this painting has been like a lake: I can enter it and swim for a time,
taking pleasure. When I leave its colors and waves of lines, I'm subtly changed in the
ways that I see the world around me. And when I need to return, to calm or inspire
myself, it is waiting for me, like a cherished memory, a devoted friend, or an ancient and
life-sustaining idea.
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End Notes
1
Twombly began using industrial materials for his art projects early in his career. In the
50’s and 60’s, he could only afford inexpensive materials which turned out to be house
paint and canvas drop cloths. His artistic genius shines even though he had to use
“humble” rather than “classical” refined materials.
2
During this period, the Viet Nam War was raging. Protests against the war were
prominent not only in the United States, but western European nations as well. It’s
interesting that Twombly’s paintings from that time don’t directly evoke that war or
social conflict at all. Perhaps he saw working on classical themes and working with
modern expressionist methods as an antidote to all the newspaper and TV images of
war and social unrest. Perhaps he saw this approach to art as a way to transcend the
temporary chaos of any particular moment of social history.
3
My psychology professor, Dr. Rosalind Marquise, has suggested that abstract paintings
give a great gift to viewers: the formlessness and scribble of the paintings mirrors and
exteriorizes states of feeling and emotional consciousness. Emotions, Dr. Marquise
insists, do not have the crisp edges and clear details of ideas. Instead, emotions are
more like overlapping clouds of color. She argues that this process is very different than
the effect of classical “representational” painting which made images into narratives of
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symbols the focus of the viewer’s experience. These kinds of paintings are more about
ideas than emotions, more about figuring out a story than experiencing a moment.
4
I’ve even tried making drawings and smaller paintings in Twombly’s style—just to see
what it feels like. It’s been a pretty illuminating experience. Making by hand a
coherent, interesting abstract work is a lot harder than it looks. And I think I’ve learned
a lot about how I select an “interesting” image over a “dull” one. That is, I think I’ve
discovered a way to become conscious of my selection process.
5
By “thing” here I mean “idea” or “symbol.” I think that by keeping symbolic marks to
a minimum, he preserves the feeling, the effect of on-going process, of flow in the act
of making a work of art.
6
It’s when I’m discovering what a program needs to do that I feel like Twombly.
Though I have an endpoint, a goal, to get to, I’ve found that I must open my attention
up to following surprising directions and unusual patterns, directions and patterns that I
ordinarily never would have planned. The world of computer code—like ink and paint
daubs on an open canvas—seems nearly as complex as the world of mixing color and
experimenting with non-representational shapes.
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Works Cited
Krauss, Rosalind. "Cy's Up" in Art Forum International, September 1994 (v. 33: n. 1).
71-74, 118.
Phaidon. The Art Book. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1994.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Size Down" in Art Forum International, September 1994 (v. 33: n. 1).
71-74.
Varnedoe, Kirk. Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 1994.
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Works Consulted
Eichenberg, Fritz. The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, Techniques. New York:
Harry N. Abrahms, 1976.
Hunter, Sam. 20th Century Painting. New York: Abbeville, 1980.
Lippard, Lucy. Eva Hesse. New York: New York UP, 1976.
Sporre, Dennis J. The Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987.
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