Towards the beginning of nearly every semester, a student comes to me and says something like this:  "I've written lots of papers for lots of classes, but I just don't know how to write a paper in philosophy!  What should I do?"  The answer I usually give is the following:  "Well, you should make sure you understand the question and then you should answer it clearly and carefully."  There really is no mystery involved in writing philosophy.  Nonetheless, I have prepared the following guidelines for how you should go about writing the papers for my philosophy classes.  Much of the advice I give here will no doubt strike you as obvious, but then many of the mistakes we make when we write really are quite obvious (in retrospect, anyway).

I've divided my remarks into the following sections:

• What to do before starting to write
•  General remarks about philosophical writing
•  Editing and rewriting
•  Working with the text:  quoting, paraphrasing, etc.
•  Writing about arguments
•  Writing an introduction
•  Writing a conclusion
•  Grammatical pet peeves and other miscellany

• It is a good idea to begin by rereading the relevant texts again in light of the question you plan to answer.  This will bring to mind things you may have forgotten or failed to notice when you read it earlier.  If you are writing about a small piece of a larger text, it is very important to locate it in its wider context.  Although the question may ask you only to explain a single paragraph, you won't be able to explain that paragraph effectively if you don't understand how it fits into the work as a whole.

• Also make sure that you have spent some time just thinking about the question itself.  I think it's a good idea to let the question percolate for a while before you start to write.  And, of course, if you don’t have a clear grasp of what the question is asking, you will not be able to write a paper that is to the point.

• It might be helpful to get a group of people together to talk about what the question is asking and about what one might do to answer it.

• Make sure that you answer the question, the whole question, and nothing but the question!  First, address the question you are asked.  (Again, it is crucial that you are clear about what the question is.)  Second, do not neglect any part of that question; your answer must be complete.  Third, beware lest you pursue some interesting--but only marginally relevant--tangential issue.  Your paper will be evaluated as an answer to the question you were asked to answer.  Even a brilliant essay will fare poorly if it does not answer the question.

• Do not try to compose your paper, from start to finish, in one session--especially not the night before it is due! Very few people are able to dash off a good paper in one sitting.  Make sure you have the chance to write a first draft and then to return to it after some time has passed.  (You will be surprised at how different a paper sometimes appears "the morning after.")  Many of the tips that follow will be most beneficial when you have a draft in front of you.

• As you write, think about your intended audience.  You should NOT write your paper to me.  (If you were to think of yourself as writing to me, you might feel strangely about explaining things to me that you know I already know.)  Instead, imagine your audience as someone who is intelligent and interested in the subject but who has not studied it.  (Think of yourself, before taking this class, or perhaps of your roommate.)  Your job in writing this paper is thus a lot like my job when I lecture:  it is to teach someone how to understand something.  Your paper should not be utterly mysterious to a fellow student who might happen to pick it up.

• The principal virtue of philosophical writing is clarity.  As you reread each sentence of your draft, ask yourself:  “Is this point expressed clearly?”  If you find a sentence that can be interpreted in more than one way, figure out how to make it clear what you mean.

• When you use an unfamiliar term or a “technical” term, i.e., a term that we have given some specific meaning in this class, be sure to define it.  For example, you should define “elenchus” or “dualism” if you choose to use these terms in your paper.  In fact, when the concepts involved are crucial, such explanations are often essential parts of your paper!

• Do not be afraid to re-use the same terms over and over, especially when they are key terms in an argument.  Your essay may be littered with occurrences of “piety” and its cognates, for example, if you're writing about the Euthyphro, or with terms like “valid” and “sound.”  Do not use different terms merely for variety’s sake.  If you mean to talk about the same concept throughout, use the same term throughout.  Heavy use of a thesaurus is typically harmful here; try to say exactly what you mean as plainly as you can.

• Very often, what distinguishes an excellent paper from a merely decent paper is the depth and quality of their explanations.  The decent paper may not make any obvious mistakes or omit anything crucial; it often just does not communicate its message as clearly and effectively as the excellent paper does.  Thus, always try to find ways of strengthening your explanations.  Examples will help here.  Almost all philosophy relies on the use of examples, both for illustrative and for persuasive purposes.

• Proofread your paper carefully.  Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors can distract a reader and divert her attention from your argument.  (See my grammatical pet peeves, below.)  When these mechanical problems become serious enough, they impair your ability to get your point across effectively.  But even where they do not seriously affect the content of your writing, they may give your reader the impression--a false one, usually--that you simply don’t care enough about your work to run it through a spell-check program.  If you want your work to be taken seriously, make sure that it is free of obvious mistakes.

• If you know you have some difficulty with the mechanics of writing, please go to the writing center for help.  It will make a big difference in your writing career if you make a concerted effort to fix these problems.

• As you reread your paper, think about whether it is organized in the best way.  Would it be more effective if this paragraph went here, and that one went there. . . ?  Examine each paragraph in this same way, seeing whether the sentences are arranged in a logical structure.  Very often, our first efforts need a rather serious structural overhaul.  By the way, notice that I often structure a question so that there is a rather obvious way to structure your answer to it!

• Continue to look for opportunities to improve your paper, such as adding an example here, rewriting an awkward sentence there, and so on. . .  There is almost always something you can do to make your paper better.  Don't have the mindset that your goal is to finish your paper so you can forget about it!

• You may end up with a first draft that is far too long.  This isn’t a bad thing.  In fact, you might start by writing without worrying about the length requirement.  At a later stage, you can go back through your work and see whether there are sentences or paragraphs that aren’t really all that necessary or that can be made more concise.  Be especially wary of redundancy and excess verbiage.  It is a good idea to overwrite the first time because you can better evaluate what is truly important if you include everything in the beginning.  Don’t immediately quit just because you hit the page limit; it may be that your paper would be better if you eliminated some of what is there now and replaced it with something more essential or more interesting.  Incidentally, if you find yourself with not enough to say, you’re almost certainly missing something.  The problem here should be to confine your paper to x pages, not to stretch out your paper to x pages.

• At the very least, you must read your paper before you turn it in!  I have graded papers in which the pages were out of order, in which the same paragraph is repeated twice, and in which the first sentence contains five or more mistakes.  Such things simply should not happen!

• Students often shift tenses when writing about a primary text.  Don't.  You should write about these texts in the present tense:  "Plato says" not "Plato said."  Think of the text as "alive" every time you open it.

• As a general rule, you should not rely on quotes in these short papers.  A series of quotes creatively strung together is not a paper.  The purpose of quoting a passage is only to make it convenient for you to talk about what the passage says (and so that the reader doesn’t have to look it up, too).  Thus, you should not use a quote to answer a key part of the question.  Answer in your own words instead.  (And, since your paper must be so short, I think it is a good idea to avoid quotes altogether, unless you plan to focus carefully on what a particular sentence of the text is saying.)

• Your task is to explain a text in your own words.  A very close paraphrase does not do this.  If all you do is to change the word order around or to substitute synonyms, you do not really explain the text.  You must read it, mull it over, and figure out how to explain it in your own way.  It is a bad idea to try to explain a text while looking back and forth from it to the computer screen.  You will end up reproducing or amending it rather than truly explaining it.

• While quoting is often a bad idea, you must get in the habit of providing textual references.  Whenever you make a claim about what is said in the text, it is appropriate to provide a specific reference to back up your claim.  Do not make claims like “Plato believes that. . .” without supporting them.  You can simply make parenthetical references such as (Euthyphro 5a).  I don't care about the form of these references, but I do care that you make them!

• The process of providing references to the text is invaluable because it forces you to be engaged with the text you're writing about.  One of the worst things that can happen when you're writing a paper about a philosopher's work is that you produce an essay that is wholly disengaged from the text.  The more your paper is informed by and engaged with the text, the stronger it will be.

• You do not have to refer to my lectures.  Nor need you make references to any of our handouts.  But do not simply copy material from the handouts; as always, write your answers in your own words.

• You may not look at each other’s papers.  Nor may you look at papers written by students from previous semesters.  To do so is to flirt with academic dishonesty.  I strongly encourage you to talk with each other about the questions, but each of you must write your paper on your own.  You may, however, show your paper to someone who is not enrolled in this class to see if it is written clearly and effectively.

• You are not expected to consult any sources other than our text, your notes, and the handouts.  In fact, I suggest you talk to me before looking at outside sources, for they can sometimes be more confusing than helpful.  But if you do look at someone else’s work, you absolutely must say so.  If you rely on or paraphrase from a work, you must cite it.  A failure to do so gives the impression that something shady is going on.  Even if you just read through a book, but do not specifically use anything from it, you must list it on a bibliography.  (Otherwise, no bibliography is necessary.)  If, as occasionally happens, I can tell that you’ve consulted an outside source that is unacknowledged by you, we will be faced with the unpleasant problem of determining whether this is a case of plagiarism of someone else’s words or ideas.

• When you are writing about an argument, it is often a good idea simply to list and number the premises and the conclusion of that argument.  You can do this by indenting and single-spacing the argument, just as you would a quotation.  Feel free simply to use the version of the argument given on a handout or written on the board.  (Here is one place where you don't have to say something in your own words--although you do have to go on to explain the argument in your own words!  Merely to list the premises of an argument is not to explain it.)  This allows you to explain and evaluate an argument more easily and effectively, since you can say things like “Premise 1 states that. . .” or “This argument is unsound because Premise 3 is false. . .”

• Make sure to use terms like “valid” and “sound” in the senses we’ve given them in this class.  An argument is valid just in case its logical structure is such that it is impossible for its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false.  An argument is sound just in case it is valid and its premises are in fact true.  Do not say things like “Socrates has a valid point,” and when you say that an argument is valid or sound, mean it!

• Be careful with “success verbs,” like “prove” or “establish.”  If you write “Euthyphro proves that P,” you thereby imply that Euthyphro’s argument for P is successful.  If you only mean to say that Euthyphro tries to prove that P, say so.   “Argue,” however, is not a success verb; to say that someone argues for something is not to imply that she succeeds in her argument.  Generally, be careful about what you, as the author, commit yourself to.

• In almost every philosophy paper, you will be evaluating some argument.  If you disagree with the argument, then your task is to give an objection to it and to explain why the objection succeeds, perhaps by considering and rejecting a response to your objection.  If you agree with the argument, do NOT simply applaud it at length.  Instead, present an objection to it and explain why it fails.  A good philosophy paper develops a dialectic, i.e., a back-and-forth exchange between conflicting viewpoints.  Towards this end, do not hide the problems that may occur to you while you're writing!  Bring them out and make them part of your paper.

• Do not feel as though you have to defend a particular point of view in your papers.  It is fine to write a paper that criticizes an argument whose conclusion you admire or that praises an argument whose conclusion you deplore.  There are, after all, rather awful arguments for true conclusions and rather compelling arguments for false conclusions.  Remember that it is one thing to react to an argument for a conclusion and another simply to react to the claim that is the conclusion itself.  Suppose, for example, that I believe in God.  If someone advances the claim that God doesn't exist, I will simply disagree with him.  But if someone advances an argument against the existence of God, I cannot simply disagree with her argument's conclusion.  I have to reckon with the argument she's given.  And while I might not accept the argument's conclusion, I might recognize that it is a stupidly or a cleverly constructed argument.  In the latter case, I might not even be able to figure out just what has gone wrong with her argument, even though I remain convinced that something has in fact gone wrong.  But the important thing to see is that the discussion is now about whether I agree with her reasoning and not about whether I agree with her conclusion.

• DON’T begin with a very general introduction, e.g., “Plato was born in Athens. . .” or “Abortion is one of the most difficult moral issues of our times. . .”  You should instead dive right into the question.  Remember, you’re not writing a book here, only a very short paper.  Don’t waste space.  If what you're writing doesn't really help to answer this question, don't write it.

• DO briefly tell the reader what your paper is about and what your main thesis is.  Thus, if you are writing about Euthyphro’s second attempt to define piety and Socrates’ criticism of that attempt, you might write something like this:

Euthyphro’s second attempt to define piety states that piety is what is dear to the gods.  Socrates argues that this attempt leads to a contradiction, for the very same action might turn out to be both pious and impious.  In this paper I will argue that Euthyphro could have adopted a relativist conception of piety and thereby tried to convince Socrates that the alleged contradiction is not in fact a contradiction at all.

• Often you will be in a better position to write an introduction after you have written the main body of your paper, for you will then have a better idea of what your argument really is.  Remember, you will sometimes end up defending a thesis somewhat different than the one you first set out to defend!

• DON’T feel as though you must summarize your results.  You have written a very short paper; the reader recalls your argument and will only be annoyed if you repeat yourself.  (Of course, if you have written a rather lengthy and complicated paper, some sort of summary might be appropriate.)

• DO find some nice way of wrapping up your essay.  This does not mean that every facet of the question must have been addressed.  There is nothing wrong with defending a qualified conclusion, such as “Euthyphro’s second attempt to define piety can be defended against this Socratic criticism,” rather than an unqualified conclusion, such as “Euthyphro’s second attempt to define piety is successful.”  In fact, you will probably not have argued for the latter conclusion in your paper, since it requires that you have shown not only that this criticism fails, but also that there are not any other criticisms that might succeed against Euthyphro’s second attempt (or whatever argument you're writing about).  Make sure that you do not claim that you have shown more than you have actually shown in your paper.  It is especially tempting to exaggerate your accomplishments in a grand-finale-style concluding paragraph; resist this temptation!  In fact, sometimes a nice way to conclude your paper is to point out a problem that still remains for what you've argued.  (Ignore the "rule" which prohibits introducing new thoughts in a conclusion.)

• Mistakes so common they've become pet peeves:

can not/cannot  "I can not breathe" means that I am capable of not breathing, which I am.  I can, after all, hold my breath (or I can die).  But "I cannot breathe" means that I am not capable of breathing, i.e., I am suffocating.  There's a big difference here, obviously.  You should react to the former statement with a yawn, but to the latter with immediate medical attention.  Usually, what you mean is "cannot."

its/it's   It's never acceptable to use "it's" as a possessive.  "It's" is a contraction of "It is."

 there/their/they're "There" is a place.  "Their" is a possessive.  "They're" is a contraction of "They are."

• Please spell the names of great philosophers (and even decent ones) correctly.  It is "Descartes" and not "Decartes" or "Descarte."  It is "Hume" and not "Humes," and "Mill" rather than "Mills."  Notice that Judith Thomson's last name is not "Thompson."  As far as the possessive forms go, it is preferably "Socrates'" and "Descartes'," or perhaps "Socrates's" and "Descartes's," but never "Socrate's" or "Descarte's."

• Try not to split infinitives.  That is, avoid placing an adverb between "to" and a verb like "argue."  So, say that Plato tries to argue effectively rather than that he tries to effectively argue.  There are certain times when it is acceptable to split an infinitive, but it shouldn't be a general habit.

• Feel free to use the first person ("I").  Do not overuse it, of course.  Your paper should not read like a diary entry.  But it is quite natural to use "I" to tell the reader what you, the author, think about something.  So when you're ready to say what you think, use "I" to do it.  When used sparingly and effectively, the use of the first person can be quite powerful.

• Avoid sexist language.  Do not exclusively  use masculine pronouns without giving it a second thought.  One acceptable policy is simply to use feminine pronouns throughout your writing.  Another is to alternate masculine and feminine pronouns.  You may use "he/she," but it usually makes for a pretty ugly sentence.  One thing you just cannot do is to use "they/them/their" rather than "he/him/his."  "They/them/their" are plurals.  Do not use them as singulars.  Many of us do this in speech--I know I do, sometimes--but it should not be done in formal academic writing.  Think of another way to finish your sentence.  If you want to use gender-free language, make use of "one" and "someone" (although this often gets awkward), or use a proper name (but not always masculine names!) or shift to the first person plural or perhaps even to the second person.  (This problem is most acute when you're discussing cases or examples.)