writing the middle east: reader-focussed texts
Tue 10AM-12PM 2.2051
This is not your standard academic writing course. Forget the five-paragraph essay and the “state your thesis in the introduction” drill — here, we’re interested in writing that actually does something for a reader. Building on the texts you’re reading in Studying the Middle East, you’ll pick one or two that get under your skin — texts you want to push back on, extend, or pick apart — and turn that engagement into a 5,000-word response essay. But the real work of this course is learning how to write it well. We’ll draw heavily on reader-centered approaches to academic writing: instead of asking “what do I want to say” and instead of writing as if being examined, you’ll learn to ask “what does my reader need, and why should they care.” It’s a shift that changes everything — how you open a piece, how you build an argument, even what counts as a good sentence. Expect less “correct academic style” and more: what makes writing worth reading.
Week 1 — 13 Oct — no session on campus
before week 2: write 1–2 pages about any topic you care about, explicitly trying to help a specific community understand better something they already want to understand well. The topic needn’t be ISME‑related yet.
Week 2 — 20 Oct — what writing is for
Week 3 — 27 Oct — problems, not topics
Week 4 — 3 Nov — argument vs. explanation
Week 5 — 10 Nov — no session on campsus
choose one ISME paper you’ve read so far that sticks with you — because it excites, irritates, or puzzles you. Write 1–2 pages about that reaction, addressed to a reader community of your choice. Don’t explain what the paper says; write about what’s at stake in your response.
Week 6 — 17 Nov — readers as communities
Week 7 — 24 Nov — extracting the buried problem
Week 8 — 1 Dec — responses from other disciplines
Week 9 — 8 Dec — no session on campus
using one ISME paper as a starting point, write 2 pages imagining the same question tackled with a different method (ethnography instead of philology; corpus linguistics instead of archival work; game analysis instead of a survey). Write as if this were the opening of an essay arguing for that alternative way of seeing.
Week 10 — 15 Dec — problem genealogy
Week 11 — 5 Jan — questioning concepts
Week 12 — 12 Jan — no session on campus
think about where you are writing from — institution, city, language(s), disciplinary background. In 2 pages, describe your own vantage point and how it shapes what you notice, care about, or find troubling in Middle East debates. You can mention ISME papers as examples of other vantage points, but keep the focus on articulating your own.
Week 13 — 19 Jan — asssumptions and commitments
Week 14 — 26 Jan — temporal re-scaling: write a piece that zooms out or in temporally
Week 15 — 2 Feb — last session on campus
Week 16 — 9 Feb — no session on campus
Suggest your final paper topic until 5 Jan; this is mandatory to take the examination of the module. Submit the paper of 5000 words as mark-down (!!!) via email (from your fu-berlin email address) until 12 Feb for the first deadline, or 26 Feb for the second deadline.
It is encouraged to write the papers in pairs or groups with fellow students; if you do so, you will all get the same evaluation.
The paper is evaluated on a pass/fail basis, so it doesn’t count towards the final grade.