Ten-minute Papers

Reading is a dialogue, an interaction that requires active questioning. The meaning of what one reads cannot be understood without some attempt to imagine what question the reading is answering or might answer. Good questions can lead you into an active and creative dialogue with the readings for this course and open up ancient texts that would otherwise stay closed to you.

We take our questions to our reading in many different ways. Some questions try to recover the original question a writer thinks he or she is answering. Some questions ask for clarification of difficult terms or phrases or ideas. Some challenge the reading by imagining that an implicit question could be answered in a very different way (Why didn’t Aristotle answer that …?). Some questions take contemporary concerns to historical writers as one way of exploring what contemporary relevance their work has. Some questions are demands for the reasons behind the claims that are being made, a way of discovering a writer’s reasoning. Some questions even question whether the questions being asked are the appropriate or important ones. There are many more kinds of questioning.

In these brief papers, develop a question that arises in your own interaction with the assigned reading. Then try to answer the question. Take about ten minutes to do this. You should be able to come up with a paragraph of about 7-10 sentences.

Try to develop questions that you might eventually want to use to write your short paper. The ten-minute papers are good places to make quick explorations of ideas to find out whether they are interesting for you and whether they seem promising for a more developed treatment.