How to fix a short paper

If you are a college student, this post is for you.

Is your paper longer than the word limit? Is your thesis statement just a list of points you plan to cover in the body paragraphs (i.e., “listy”)? Do you have a gut sense that the paper’s structure might be “off”?

Below is some advice I just sent to students. In fact, I wrote it in response to a student who’d asked for feedback on a draft of their final paper.

Each paragraph needs to begin with its point, and each should have just one. Here are a few strategies on how to reorganize a paper. Doing these things often leads to a better thesis statement because they force the writer to closely examine the steps in their argument.

  1. Start by pasting just the first sentence of each paragraph into a blank document.
  2. Read over the list of sentences to see if the argument can be gotten from them alone.
  3. Any gaps in the logic point to structural weaknesses in the overall essay.
  4. Go through each paragraph with two differently colored highlighters. Use one color to highlight each key point you want the reader to take from that paragraph. Use the other to highlight evidence (including argumentation) in favor of key points. If there is more than one key point in a paragraph, the paragraph needs to be broken up, and the essay may need to be re-planned.

Public opinion essay prompt 1, vintage 2025

In his famous essay on belief systems, Converse (1964, 8-10) writes about how involvement in a group can cause attitude constraint. He says this process involves learning two separate things: “what goes with what” and “why.” He then speculates that the second form of learning (why) will happen more slowly than the first. Based on what we’ve read so far, as well as personal experience, do you think he is right about the order in which people (a) bundle issue positions and (b) get ready to explain why those positions should be bundled?

Please give your answer in 3-5 pages, double-spaced. Remember that less can be “more” if circumstances call for it. The rubric I will use is here: https://jacksantucci.com/docs/syllabi/short_paper_rubric.pdf. I can imagine answers in both directions.

List PR to fix cumulative voting

Cumulative voting is an electoral system in which the voter can give more than one vote to one person. Its purpose is to prevent a district’s largest faction from winning every seat. When parties enter this picture, they face three related problems. One is to decide how many candidates to run. Another is to decide which people these will be. The third is to get voters to mark the general-election ballot in a way that gets the slate elected.

Yesterday, I discovered a paper in which two political scientists propose a way to relieve parties of all three tasks: make a vote for a candidate also count for the party slate, allocate seats to parties in proportion to their vote shares, and give those seats to the candidates with the most votes in each party. This is known in the literature as free-list proportional representation (FLPR).

Cumulative voting famously was used to elect the Illinois lower chamber in three-seat districts, 1870-1980. The context for the above reform proposal seems to have been increasing party factionalism. Saywer and MacRae (1962) refer to party committees’ increasing difficulty in deciding how many candidates to run and who they should be. FLPR would have obviated these dilemmas. Sawyer and MacRae also note that it might have obviated primaries as well.

I also found a paper that mentions a potential majority reversal due to voters’ ballot markings at some point in the 1950s. This paper also notes a gripe that the minority party sometimes had a larger share of seats than its apparent share of votes. I say “apparent” because it is not straightforward to compute a party’s vote share with a multiple-vote rule. FLPR might have helped with these issues too, although the small district magnitude of three would have made it hard to get fine-grained proportionality.