As my second semester teaching M.A. students starts to wind down, I've been thinking about the skills that I want M.A. students to have and the assignments that best develop or refine those skills--and I'm interested in hearing my readers' thoughts as well.
Personally, I'm not a believer in the 25-page term paper. I suppose a doctoral program could argue that 25-30pp. approximates the length of an article or a dissertation chapter, and thus it's important for students to master projects of that size. But a) RU is not a doctoral institution, and b) I was myself a doctoral student, and most of my own seminar papers were utter, flailing, blithering crap. Producing three 25-page papers, in less than a month, on subjects that I knew little about (in one semester: Keats, Spenser, and the respective attitudes toward culture of T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold) did NOTHING to prepare me for the much longer and more intensive process of researching and writing my first dissertation chapter.
So although there's virtue in learning how to write a paper of that length (and I definitely think M.A. students should write a couple of them during their time in the program), they have to be built up to. In each of the two M.A. classes I've taught, then, I've described our final paper as "15+ pages." More importantly, I've tried to devise shorter written assignments that prepare them for that final paper.
In my Milton class, my first assignment was a conventional close-reading essay; I wanted to get a look at my students' writing and interpretative skills, for one, but I also wanted to make sure that they were comfortable analyzing poetry and using the technical vocabulary of poetic analysis.
In my Dunne class this semester, I came up with what I think a much better version of a close-reading assignment--which was to have each student produce an "edition" of one of Dunne's poems based on the manuscript and early printed editions (a selection of which are available here). In making their editions, each student had to establish a copy text, provide a textual apparatus with variants, and then write a narrative explanation and analysis that justified, in literary terms, the choices she'd made.
It required a lot of preliminary work, but in the end produced better results. I think the interpretative work felt easier to my students (because the stuff they were focusing on was more obvious and more seemingly pragmatic: why prefer this word to that word? why leave the comma in or take it out? does spelling change the meaning in this case?), while actually demanding much more of them. We talked a lot about how manuscripts circulated in the Early Modern period and how they made it into print; whether and to whom authorial intention matters; and what editors do and where the texts in their Norton or Penguin editions come from.
The second paper I assigned in both classes was more straightforward, but no less practical: find an article or book chapter in a reputable scholarly source, and then write a short essay that engages with it--summarizing, critiquing, noting any theoretical biases or omissions or areas for further study.
My feeling is: if students can close read and if they can deal with secondary sources in a critical, responsible way, then they can write a longer work of scholarship--whether it's 15 pages or 25. But isolating and focusing on those skills matters.
From your experiences as teachers or students, what kinds of skills do you think are most important for grad students to work on--and what kinds of assignments have you found that do the trick?