Some professors at Purdue assign a unique written genre called the “paper day paper,” which is as much text as the writer can fit onto a single legal sized sheet of paper. Although they are not rigorous research essays, paper day papers are composed for oral delivery to an audience for Q&A. We share them in seminar and have great conversations over them. Paper Day Papers exhibit textual analysis and conceptual synthesis. I share my archive of Paper Day Papers here as “Paper Daze” mostly because they were fun to write, but also because they were a venue where I felt like I could take risks in my writing. Looking back, paper days also afford something irreplaceable–a community of scholarship sustained by a common curriculum and a dedication to listening deeply.
