Penn Professors on Writing in English

Dr. Josephine Park

About the Professor

Dr. Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. Her book Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008), which was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies, reads a modern history of American literary alliances with East Asia. Her present research examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, modernist poetics, theories of race and subject formation, immigration, and transnationalism.

Dr. Park's University Webpage

Personal Writing Process

Dr. Park’s writing process emphasizes pre-writing. She begins with something that interests her—a poem, novel, or film—and reads or watches it many times, taking notes on elements that she finds striking. Next, she reviews existing scholarship on the topic to decide where to position herself as a scholar, and after doing so, begins research with an argumentative framework. After completing her research, she reflects, outlines, and writes a draft all at once. Professor Park then goes through several revisions of her work.

Writing Tips

Cautioning students against mere plot summary, Dr. Park urges students to discuss the text and write argumentatively. She tells students to be aware of how their writing style influences their persuasiveness: are they technically proficient? Is the rhetoric of their piece convincing to the reader? Dr. Park suggests workshopping writing and reading work aloud to students of all ability levels: "You wouldn’t believe how much you can fix by doing something as simple as that!" Most importantly, Dr. Park stresses coherence in writing, that is, "putting everything in the paper in the service of the idea."