Film Study

CHAPTER 12 PUTTING IT TOGETHER: A MODEL 8- TO 10-PAGE PAPER

Book Title: Film Studies Book Subtitle: An Introduction Book Author(s): Ed Sikov Published by: Columbia University Press, (December 2009) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/siko14292 .

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CHAPTER 12 PUTTING IT TOGETHER: A MODEL 8- TO 10-PAGE PAPER

HOW THIS CHAPTER WORKS

Th is chapter, the last one in the book, is a hands-on guide to writing an introductory-level fi lm paper. Footnotes serve as a running commentary on the pros and cons of the paper’s content, format, writing style, and so on. Every issue covered in these footnotes, even those that seem embar- rassingly obvious, is based on an actual student paper received by, read by, and graded by the author of this textbook over the course of twenty-fi ve years of teaching. Th ey range from simple points of common sense and grammar to more substantive issues of content and style.

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1 (page number) 1

Introducing Tyler 2 by Robert Paulson 3 Colorado College

A fi lm about male bonding through shared dissatisfac- tion and communal violence, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) presents a disturbing vision of American society, a culture that is overdue for drastic change. 4 Based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Pahlaniuk, Fight Club suggests that the depressing conformity of modern cor- porate life—interchangeable hotel rooms, impersonal air- ports, dull business suits, heartless jobs—needs to be con- fronted, challenged, and ultimately destroyed. The catalyst of change in Fight Club is an underground network of men who work out their frustrations by clobbering each other. The instigator of these fi ghts, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), in- spires men around the country to become revolutionaries, apolitical terrorists who act out their contempt for traditional American values in increasingly violent ways. 5 Fincher in- troduces this incendiary character with a subtle but profound tracking movement that reveals much more than it appears to at fi rst; beginning as a shot of Fight Club ’ s unnamed narrator (Edward Norton), alone in profi le, it proceeds to make Tyler seem to emerge out of the narrator — a crucial key to Tyler ’ s real identity. 6

Foreshadowing the violence that follows, Fincher sets up his introduction of Tyler with a scene of chaos: con- sumed with anomie, the narrator morbidly livens things up by imagining himself in a crashing airplane. 7 “Every time the plane banked too sharply on take-off or landing, I prayed for a crash,” he says in voice-over in a fl at, affect- less tone, as he holds a tiny cherry tomato impaled on a fork in front of him. He looks to his left, and Fincher cuts to a shot of the airplane window as lights from another small aircraft hurtle toward the plane. Fincher then cuts to a shot taken from the back of the plane for the moment of impact; the even rows of bland blue seats are suddenly shaken by an explosive blast on the left side of the image. Windows

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171 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

1 . Every page of your paper should be numbered, if for no other reason than the fact that it proves you have completed the assignment. If your professor has assigned a fi ve-page paper, prove it by ending on page 5.

2 . Every paper must have a title, and the title must be that of the paper itself, not the fi lm you are writing about. If this student simply ripped off the title of the movie and called his pa- per “ Fight Club ,” his professor would have no clue what the paper intended to discuss. Here, the title pertains to the sequence the student is writing about. It specifi es the paper’s topic without being overly pedantic, though more detailed titles—for instance, “Introducing Tyler: A Char- acter Splits in Two in Fight Club ”—are certainly acceptable. Unless your professor instructs you otherwise, you do not need to create a separate title page. If you do create a separate title page, that page must not be numbered; numbered pages begin on the fi rst page of text.

3 . Th is may seem ridiculous, but it bears stating directly: every paper must have the au- thor’s name on it. (Do you want your professor to be forced to identify your paper by process of elimination and grade your work with that pointless irritation in mind? I didn’t think so.) Unless your professor gives you specifi c instructions about the format, you may give yourself a by-line, as this student has done, or simply put your name at the top of the fi rst page. And by the way—do yourself and your professor a favor: staple the pages of your paper together. Staples prevent pages from coming loose and getting lost. Paperclips are far riskier for everyone concerned, and under no circumstances should you ever just fold the tips of the corners down. Th at’s just stupid.

4 . (A) Unless you are instructed otherwise, your paper should be double-spaced with 1- inch or 1.5-inch margins on the sides and 1-inch margins on the top and bottom of each page. Professors react badly to dumb tricks like widening the margins to an absurd degree and triple- spacing the text to make a paper seem longer than it really is.

(B) Film titles should be italicized or underlined; do not place them within quotation marks. Th e fi lm’s date (the date of its release) should appear in parentheses after the title the fi rst time you refer to it.

5 . It’s better to refer to a character by the character’s name rather than the name of the actor; if you want to identify the actor, place his or her name in parentheses after the character’s name.

6 . (A) Th is sentence, reproduced here in bold type for emphasis, is the paper’s thesis state- ment. Every paper must have one. (You should not set your own thesis statement in bold type unless your professor tells you to do so.) An eff ective thesis statement defi nes the argument that the paper sets out to pursue, and it does so in as detailed a way as possible, given the limita- tions of an individual sentence. Here, the writer is arguing that a particular camera movement, a lateral track, reveals an important clue to a character’s identity. Th e rest of the paper pursues this idea in concrete detail. A less eff ective thesis statement would attempt to say the same thing, only more vaguely. For example: “Fincher introduces Tyler Durden in an interesting way.” True, yes; substantive, no. Even if the rest of the paper went on to cite the same details this paper does, its weak thesis statement would spell the diff erence between a very high grade and a lower one.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 172

burst inward on both sides of the plane and newspapers fl y in all directions as the once calm cabin turns instantly into every air traveler’s nightmare—every traveler, that is, except our narrator, who has created this terrifying scene not as a nightmare but as a wish.

The camera pans slightly to the right before Fincher cuts to a close-up of the narrator, his eyes shutting refl ex- ively as pieces of white debris fl y past his face. 8 The cam- era tracks a bit to the left as sounds of screams mixed with rushing air are heard on the soundtrack. 9 Fincher cuts again, this time to a shot of the central part of the cabin. The camera pans to the right past mostly empty seats as a lone oxygen bag falls from the ceiling. 10 As the camera continues to pan, the entire side of the plane falls off, revealing the lights of a cityscape below. A passenger seated on that side of the plane disappears, apparently having fallen out of the gaping hole in the plane. 11 Another traveler, in medium shot on the right of the image, strug- gles in his seat against the rush of air. 12

Fincher cuts to another close-up of the narrator, this time taken from behind his seat. He has turned around in his seat and is looking behind him with his eyes half-shut against the rushing air and his mouth open in an expres- sion of shock. Debris continues to fl y past him from right to left across the screen.

“Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip,” the narrator dryly notes in voice-over. It’s an ironic ob- servation coming from him, given that he has no friends or family to act as the benefi ciaries of any insurance policies he might be holding. Aside from the connections he makes at his various support group meetings— connections that are fundamentally false, based as they are on his nonexis- tent medical conditions—this man is entirely alone in the world.

The ping of the seat belt sign accompanies the next shot—of the sign itself—and the sound brings the nar- rator back to reality, a state of mind Fincher wryly ex- presses with a front-and-center close-up of the narrator jerking his exhausted-looking head forward in his seat. The plane is once again calm; the crash was all in the

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173 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

(B) Counterintuitively, this paragraph was the last one the writer wrote. He waited until he composed not only the body of his paper but also his conclusion before he wrote the introduc- tion. Why? As it happens, he is the kind of writer who doesn’t know exactly what he’s trying to say until he has actually said it. Having written the body of the paper fi rst, he is in a much better, more knowledgeable position to compose an introduction, especially a thesis statement. He wasn’t sure where the paper would lead him until he had written a fi rst draft, at which point he could clearly defi ne his thesis. Th is strategy may not work for everyone, but if you are having trouble getting started, try it and see if it works for you.

(C) Note that the writer confi nes his subject to Fight Club , the fi lm at hand. Often, begin- ning writers feel a wrongheaded need to begin papers with grand statements about the way the world works, as though such claims give the paper weight it would not otherwise have. In fact, it creates the opposite eff ect. An example of this tendency is as follows: “American men are dissatisfi ed with the corporate culture in which they are stuck.” Th is claim may or may not be true, but it is irrelevant to the subject of the paper. Th at subject is David Fincher’s Fight Club , not American men in general. Remember: you are only setting out to prove that you know something specifi c about a given fi lm—not that you have confronted and answered the big questions of life.

7 . Anomie means a feeling of depressed, bored, and even suicidal alienation from society caused by the absence of benefi cially supporting social structures.

8 . For the sake of clarity, the writer has chosen to describe the sequence shot by shot in the order in which it plays out in the fi lm itself. Th is is probably the safest strategy for the be- ginner to adopt, since the sequence’s own order provides a ready-made structure that (presum- ably) already makes sense. Still, keep in mind that other structures are possible. For example, a paper may jump around from shot to shot within a sequence, as long as this structure (a) makes sense to the writer, and (b) the writer successfully conveys that sense to the reader.

9 . Whatever structure you choose for your paper, try to vary your descriptions of editing and camera movements from sentence to sentence. Here, the writer has chosen a variety of sentence structures to break up what would otherwise be a series of sentences beginning with “Th en Fincher cuts to a shot of . . . ” Th ere’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just boring.

10 . Is it a tracking shot or a pan? Th e writer wasn’t certain. But he decided to take the risk of being wrong rather than hedging his bets and being noncommittal.

11 . Th is detail—the disappearance of the passenger from the image—only became evident to the writer after multiple viewings of the sequence, the fi nal one in slow motion. Remember that your experience as a fi lm scholar is in certain ways more like that of an editor than an audience member. Don’t hesitate to run the sequence in slow motion or even frame by frame in order to collect data about its contents. Use the tools that DVD technology gives you.

12 . A handy rule of thumb for any writer is this: if you fi nd yourself using the same word in two back-to-back sentences, use a thesaurus to fi nd a synonym. Here, the writer noticed in his fi rst draft that the word passenger appeared twice in a row, so he used his word-processing application’s built-in thesaurus to fi nd the word traveler .

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 174

narrator’s perverse mind, expressing a deep-seated de- sire for excitement— any excitement, even it results in his own violent death. But to paraphrase the narrator’s much- repeated expression, this is “Jack’s reality,” and for the narrator, Jack’s reality is worse than death.

Take a close look at him. He is a handsome if bland- looking man who appears to be about thirty years old. He has dark hair with a conservative, businessman-type haircut. We can see the shoulders of his gray, conserva- tive suit jacket and the white collar of his dress shirt. He is centered on the screen; the very top part of his head is cut out by the frame. He is in crisp focus, but the background is out of focus. Still, we can clearly see some blue curtains in the center-left of the image, with some bright curved airplane windows on the far right in the background. The curtains match the blue of the seat; the windows, appear- ing white, match the headrest. It’s all terribly tasteful—and dull. 13 And, to the narrator, meaningless. 14

The aspect ratio is that of a fairly wide rectangle, which creates the effect in this shot of isolating the narrator against an empty-seeming background. There is another man in the image—he is seated in the row behind the man in close-up—but he is the only other person in the image, and he is indistinct. The narrator, in contrast, has a bright light shining on his forehead and nose, but his eyes are notably in shadow, although we can clearly see dark cir- cles under his eyes, indicating tiredness and a sense of profound boredom. Everything about this man is conven- tional, from his face and suit and haircut to his surround- ings on this utterly ordinary airplane. But this man’s life is about to change radically. And although he does not yet know it, he is the actual author of that change, a fact ex- pressed by one of Fincher’s most subtle but meaningful camera movements. 15

The narrator blinks twice, rapidly, as though to wake himself up, but Fincher accomplishes that task more pro- foundly by cutting to a shot taken from the narrator’s side. Seen now in profi le, the narrator blinks again and remains staring blankly forward as Fincher tracks his camera to the right. Whereas the beginning of the shot suggested that

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175 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

13 . With this paragraph and the one that follows, the writer uses the notes he took and the writing exercise he performed for the fi rst chapter of this book. It may seem at fi rst glance to be a simple description of the contents of the image, but it is actually the foundation of his argument about Tyler’s introduction. Th e contrasts Fincher creates between the narrator and Tyler would not have been quite as noticeable to the writer, and therefore to the reader, if he hadn’t described the narrator’s mise-en-scene in specifi c detail.

14 . Th is is a sentence fragment. Technically, it’s faulty syntax. But the writer has employed it as a stylistic device with which to end the paragraph. It’s okay to break the rules once in a while. Just make sure that you’re breaking them on purpose, and not because you don’t know how to construct a proper sentence. If your professor calls you on it, just say you did it for stylistic reasons.

15 . Th is is called foreshadowing . Th e writer is alluding here to an idea he will introduce and develop in the next paragraph and beyond. Foreshadowing is an eff ective device to employ because it piques readers’ interest without giving away too much too soon.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 176

the narrator was either alone in a new scene or else still sitting next to the African American woman he’d been speaking with before imagining the plane crash, the track- ing camera reveals that he is in fact seated next to a new character—a man both surprisingly different and oddly familiar.

This new guy is noticeably unlike the narrator. He is strikingly handsome, with chiseled features and a fl ashy, spiky haircut. He is wearing sunglasses—on an airplane at night. The window beside him has its shade up, but no light is coming in, which suggests that the sunglasses are purely a matter of style rather than practicality. Most no- table of all, though, is the new character’s red jacket with its wide lapels with two thin white stripes running verti- cally down their edges. The narrator’s shirt collar remains tucked neatly inside his dull gray jacket; this hipster’s wide white shirt collar, on the other hand, lands fl amboyantly over the collar of his jacket.

It’s the jacket’s color that stands out most against the blues, whites, and grays of the airplane interior. Aside from the narrator’s single-serving cherry tomato at the begin- ning of the imaginary crash sequence, and the fl ashing red light on the wing of the plane just before impact, this is the fi rst appearance of the color red in Fight Club in a rather long time.

Red is a strongly suggestive and evocative color, es- pecially in the context of its standing out against a fi eld of blues and whites. As the expression “seeing red” serves to prove, the color expresses great anger, even out-of- control rage. Indeed, the rest of Fight Club will explore the narrator’s desperate desire to be violent—not sim- ply to imagine violence being committed against him, as with the imaginary plane crash in which he is a passive victim, but to engage in violence as an active instigator. He blows up his own apartment, engages in underground no-holds-barred fi ghts with an army of equally violent coconspirators, and ultimately blows half his face off with a gun. 16 In short, there’s a lot of anger there, and his seatmate’s fl aming red jacket is the fi rst indication of it. 17

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177 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

16 . Although this paper is about Tyler’s introductory scene in Fight Club , the writer fi nds support for his point by referring to other scenes in the fi lm. Th ese other scenes do not require the level of descriptive and analytical detail of the scene under discussion, and in fact such minute details would distract from the argument at hand. But referring to other scenes lends weight to the writer’s observations by demonstrating his command of the whole fi lm.

17 . Is this character’s red jacket really “the fi rst indication” of the narrator’s rage in Fight Club ? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. For the purposes of this paper, what’s important here is that the writer asserts that it is so. He’s trying to convince his professor that his larger argument about the meaning of the sequence is valid, and he makes this claim with breezy confi dence and keeps pressing forward. Th e worst thing that can happen is that his professor may challenge him. He can live with that, as can his professor.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 178

Although this scene serves as Tyler’s introduction, we have actually seen him several times before. Fincher has inserted a few frames of him, in miniature medium shot, superimposed on Marla Singer’s body as she walks away from a support group meeting after enraging the narrator by her very presence. The narrator detests Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) because, as he puts it, her lie threatens to expose his lie—namely, that he has none of the illnesses for which he attends support groups. Neither does Marla, and he hates her for it. His rage at Marla incarnates itself, if only for a few frames, as an alter ego—one whose stylistic fl are matches that of the fl ashy Marla.

Fincher provides a more lingering look at Tyler several scenes later. As the narrator is traveling up an escalator at yet another airport, Fincher suddenly pans to the left—the shot is taken from a few steps lower on the escalator—to center on another traveler heading down the escalator next to him. The narrator doesn’t notice this other traveler, but the camera does—and we do, too. He’s wearing over- sized sunglasses and a white sports jacket over a yellow shirt. In this instance, Tyler appears not in the context of rage but of boredom. Like the narrator, he, too, looks as though he has seen a few too many interchangeable air- port interiors; his expression is blank as he heads down the escalator. But unlike the narrator, he is not wearing a bland corporate uniform. At least he counters his boredom with fashion.

When Fincher fi nally introduces him to the narrator on the plane, Tyler is reading aloud from the airline’s passen- ger safety card in the seat in front of him. “An exit door pro- cedure at 30,000 feet. Mm-hmm,” he says sarcastically. 18 As he continues to explain the pointlessness of evacua- tion plans with a knowledgeable air, Fincher records the conversation in a series of shot/reverse shots of the two men, thereby both contrasting and linking them. One is not seen without the other as they begin their relationship. Ultimately, Fincher reveals that Tyler Durden is a fi gment of the narrator’s imagination, but for the moment his use of a

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179 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

18 . To keep things moving, and also to keep them simple, the writer has chosen in this paragraph to quote only one or two lines of dialogue to convey the subject and tone of the conversation. Unless you are closely analyzing each line of dialogue, there is no need to provide extensive quotations from the fi lm. It’s better to summarize what the characters are saying by paraphrasing.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 180

shot/reverse-shot pattern seems to suggest the beginning of a friendship between two strangers. 19

“Blank faces,” says the man in the sunglasses as Fincher cuts to a rendering of cartoon passengers bracing for a collision—“calm as Hindu cows.” Tyler is pointing out that the oxygen masks that are supposed to fall from the plane’s overhead units in case of an emergency are actu- ally designed to narcotize passengers before they die vio- lent deaths. The narrator smiles; he’s pleased and amazed by his new friend’s logic.

“What do you do?” the narrator asks. “What do you mean?” the man in sunglasses replies. The narrator, of course, means to ask what profession

the man has, but the question has a deeper, more philo- sophical meaning—one the narrator appears not to have considered before meeting the man in the fl aming red jacket. By asking for clarifi cation, Tyler is calling into ques- tion more than simply the narrator’s need for chit-chat. He is striking at the very heart of the system under which men like the narrator—American men, businessmen, young and middle-aged men, average men—go through the mo- tions of their empty lives. If the question “what do you do?” refers only to what job one has, then doing some- thing in and with one’s life is reduced simply to being a meaningless, mindless drone in the service of a world that doesn’t care.

The narrator, surprised at his seatmate’s cut-through-it frankness, laughs nervously, only to be told that his laugh- ter has “a kind of sick desperation” to it. As the man in sunglasses begins to stand up, Fincher cuts on the ac- tion to a shot of his hand reaching for one of two identi- cal briefcases on the fl oor of the plane. The narrator looks down in the next shot and, with a tone of wonder in his voice, observes that he and his seatmate “have the exact same briefcase,” a further clue to the man’s real identity. What seems at this point like mere coincidence is in fact key to the narrator’s own split personality. “And this is how I met . . . ” the narrator says in voice-over, “Tyler Durden,” he reads from Tyler’s business card.

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181 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

19 . Notice the writer’s use of the words “seems to” in this sentence. Why has he used them? In this case, the writer is making the point that what appears to be a new friendship be- tween two strangers is in fact something else: the creation of a split personality. Student writers often insert the expressions “seems to” and “appears to” as a way of hedging their bets on the points they are making. Th ere is no reason to do this. Simply make the assertion you want to make, and save “seems to” and “appears to” for situations in which you are discussing the diff er- ence between appearance and reality.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 182

Tyler’s response is hilarious: “Did you know if you mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concen- trate you can make napalm?” The creation of incendiary substances is, for Tyler, as matter of fact as a conversation with one’s seatmate on an ordinary airplane ride.

Tyler soon insults the narrator, who has told him that he is “by far the most interesting single-serving friend” he has ever met. It’s a good line, and the narrator knows it, but he tips his hand by going on to explain it to Tyler, as though its meaning was not already clear. “Oh, I get it,” Tyler responds. “Very clever. How’s that working out for you?” Tyler then gets up from his seat. “Now a question of etiquette as I pass: do I give you the ass or the crotch?” Fincher pans to the right as Tyler moves in front of the narrator—giving him the ass—and cutting the narrator out of the image. Tyler walks away from the camera and the narrator, presumably heading to the restroom.

Tyler’s attitude is worth describing in more detail, espe- cially in light of the fact that the narrator’s next line reveals that the two men come to live with each other. If Tyler rep- resents the narrator’s unfulfi lled desires, what is it that re- mains unfulfi lled in the narrator? As a corporate cog, the narrator has mastered the art of airplane small talk, but as Tyler points out, such cleverness has been of little real use. It’s a way of passing the time, nothing more. Tyler, on the other hand, doesn’t hesitate to be rude. He delivers the line “How’s that working out for you?” with a smirk, suggest- ing that he knows the score better than the narrator—that he doesn’t buy into the need for meaningless pleasantries exchanged between strangers, but instead cuts through them to something more genuine underneath. 20

He proves it with the “ass or the crotch” line. Every air- plane traveler has experienced the awkwardness of this decision—which part of one’s intimate anatomy to con- front a stranger with when squeezing out of a seat—but it’s a social interaction that always goes unremarked. Ex- cept by Tyler Durden, who not only fl outs social conven- tions but trumpets their destruction. Tyler is right: whether to present one’s back or one’s front to a complete stranger

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183 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

20 . Th is paragraph and the one that follows do not set out to provide revolutionary ideas, but simply to explore the meaning of a few lines of dialogue. Remember: you are not expected to write the last word on the subject. If inspiration strikes you and you come up with a truly brilliant observation, so much the better. Your real task, though, is to explore the sequence and its meanings to the best of your ability, and to get the job done by the deadline. Everything else is icing on the cake.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER 184

is an etiquette decision, but conventional etiquette de- mands that the decision remain completely unspoken. Ty- ler speaks it. From the destruction of superfi cial politeness to the creation of napalm with household chemicals, Tyler is an incendiary personality.

Ultimately, Fincher reveals that Tyler Durden and the unnamed narrator are the same man—that the narrator has created Tyler as an alter ego who acts out all of his unfulfi lled desires. From the simple if brutal fi ghts between them to the destruction of skyscrapers, the narrator’s an- ger fi nds satisfaction in acts of increasing violence. Only by blowing half his own face off with a gun near the end of the fi lm can the narrator reclaim his integrity as an indi- vidual, an act that suggests futility by way of its own im- possibility. After all, no one could survive such a gaping wound.

The revelation that Tyler is actually an aspect of the nar- rator himself may come as a surprise. But in looking back on Tyler’s introductory scene, it’s clear that the secret has been suggested all along, if not explicitly revealed. With the fi rst shot of Tyler in that scene, David Fincher has provided a subtle indication that Tyler is an outgrowth of the narrator and his barely suppressed rage. By tracking the camera to the side when introducing this seemingly new character, Fincher effectively makes Tyler appear to emerge from the narrator’s own body. When the camera tracks to the right, the narrator visually splits in two. To use psychological language, out of a troubled ego, an ego ideal emerges. 21

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185 PUTTING IT TOGETHER

21 . (A) Th e concluding paragraph of a paper should do more than just summarize what the writer has already written. If the paper has succeeded to any extent, a routine summary is worse than no conclusion at all. Why? Because the reader already knows what he or she has read and does not need to have it repeated in even shorter and simpler terms. Instead, the conclusion should go beyond repetition by broadening the topic—by demonstrating that the writer not only has command of the sequence but of the fi lm as a whole. Th e writer may also go one step further, as this student has done. (See the following section.)

(B) Th e word ego means the self as a distinct individual, and the term ego ideal refers to the part of the ego that maintains an overly romanticized, impossibly perfect vision of one’s self. Th e student who wrote this paper happens to be a junior psychology major, and he saw no reason not to put his knowledge of another fi eld to use in his fi lm paper. It’s not only acceptable but even advisable to demonstrate the breadth of your general knowledge when writing a paper, as long as your point is germane and you don’t get sidetracked by secondary topics. In this stu- dent’s case, he assumed that his professor would be familiar with the terms ego and ego ideal. Th at can be both a fair assumption and a risky one. It’s fair in this case because, throughout the semester, his professor often used psychological language in his lectures, and the student saw no need to defi ne the terms for him. It would have been a bit riskier if psychology had played no role in class. When in doubt, just remember the cardinal rule of good writing: be clear. If you bring in material from other disciplines, you may provide a brief explanation if you think it’s necessary, but don’t go off on tangents.

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