Template for Ophelia Syndrome

A TEMPLATE FOR YOUR PAPER—You may use any of this.

Opening:  In his essay, “Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome,” Thomas G. Plummer encourages college students to think for themselves rather than having others do their thinking for them.  He begins with a negative example from Hamlet, where Polonius and Laertes question Ophelia about Hamlet.  QUOTATIONS

The obvious question to students is, do you want to be like Ophelia?

Plummer defines thinking by quoting other thinkers (S.I. Hayakawa, Carl Jung, Alfred Korzybski and John Keats (to name a few).  QUOTATIONS

Middle: Plummer offers five treatments to help students learn to think for themselves modeling  them in the open form he uses to write the essay.  For example, one treatment is to learn to know and trust yourself.  Plummer suggests keeping a journal, including a dream journal.  He then quotes from his own journal and tells a dream.  He writes comic verse (also idle thinking).  QUOTATIONS

He encourages fostering idle thinking, ie. Hot baths, watching TV, daydreaming etc.

He uses personal anecdotes, dialogues and scenes to show what it means to think out of the box.  QUOTATIONS

WAYS TO QUOTE:  (always in the present tense).

Plummer claims that, “______.”

Plummer gives an example where …

Plummer writes,

Plummer says,

Plummer quotes

Plummer asserts

Plummer agrees that

Counter argument: While Plummer’s enthusiasm for becoming independent thinkers is persuasive, he does recognize the risks for students to do so.  Quotations where students tell him how dangerous school feels.  They run the risk of teachers who are full-blown Poloniuses and want the class to run their way.

Conclusion.  College students have an opportunity in college to hear many points of views and to begin the process of sorting out what they think and who they are, but learning to think is a lifelong process.  Even Plummer has a mid-life crisis at 40. QUOTATION  Jung’s idea of individuation doesn’t happen in a four-year undergraduate program or even in midlife, but is an accumulation of trial and error in dealing with

the uncertainties that face every living being.

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