From a cultural history of the essay to incisive contemporary rethinking of its usefulness in the classroom, from guides on how to write a seminar paper to guides on how to assess them,Making the Grade offers desperately needed clarity on a complex genre. The contributions in this book should be standard for every first-semester graduate student and every first-semester professor who wants to prepare undergraduates for graduate-level writing or who wants to prepare graduate students for professional publication.

Kevin A. Morrisonis provincial chair professor in literature at Henan University and author of several books including, most recently,In the Footsteps of Jack the Ripper and His Victims: Study-Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Sites, and Historical Reenactment (Palgrave, 2019).

Introduction: The Graduate Classroom Staple

Kevin A. Morrison

Part One: The Seminar Paper: History, Conception, Experience

1. Essaying Assessment and Assessing the Essay: The Graduate Seminar Paper as Disciplinary Performance

Phil Robinson-Self

2. The Cost of Ambiguity: How Students Experience the Graduate Seminar Paper Genre

Gabriel Morrison and Thomas Deans

Part Two: Argument, Ethos, Intervention

3. The Seminar Essay as Academic Literary Criticism: Strategies for Entering the Scholarly Conversation

Almas Khan

4. Writing with Authority: Ethos and the Seminar Essay in English Studies

Elizabeth Vogel

5. A Scaffold for Scholarship: Re-vising the Seminar Writing Assignment

Janet G. Auten

Part Three: Reading, Writing, Revision, and Presentation

6. Setting Up for Success: Strategies for Managing Research and Writing

Marilyn Gray

7. Time Management is Everything: Useful Tips for Graduate Students

Natalie M. Dorfeld

8. Peer Review, Revisited: Graduate Writing Groups

Mark Celeste

9. Presenting Research Ideas in a Seminar Setting

Lucinda Becker

Part Four: New Directions, Expanding Possibilities

10. Digital Methods and Visual Essays in the Classroom

Lisann Anders

11. Structural Shifts and the Graduate Literary Essay: Examples for the Twenty-First Century Classroom

Shanthini Pillai

12. Not for Everyone: Experiments in Assessment

Kevin A. Morrison

Coda: Demystifying the Seminar Paper

Jessie Reeder