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Appearance
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What is Appearance?

Appearance as a subject of academic inquiry spans a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, literature, cultural studies, and the life sciences. Students encounter this topic in courses that examine how physical form, style, and presentation shape individual identity and social experience. What makes appearance academically compelling is the tension between surface and substance — the way bodies, objects, and images communicate meaning before a single word is spoken. It connects personal experience to broader questions about how society assigns value, normalcy, and belonging based on what can be seen.

The papers archived under this topic approach appearance from strikingly varied angles. Some engage with it through literary analysis, examining how characters and narratives in works of world literature use physical description to develop theme and meaning. Others take a psychological or biomedical direction, exploring how body image, abnormal psychology, or conditions affecting physical form intersect with mental and social well-being. Cultural and artistic perspectives also appear, with papers examining how visual artists and religious imagery construct ideas about the body and beauty. Still others address appearance indirectly through social and population-level issues, where physical type and form carry institutional consequences.

A strong essay on appearance needs a focused thesis that connects the visible to the meaningful — explaining not just what something looks like, but what that appearance does socially, psychologically, or culturally. Evidence drawn from close observation, case analysis, or textual examples tends to carry the most weight. The most common pitfall is treating appearance as trivial or purely aesthetic, when the strongest essays recognize it as a site where power, identity, and social norms actively converge.

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Paper Undergraduate
Mental status examination in clinical psychological assessment
Mental status examination involves an evaluation of the client's self-presentation, manner with others, orientation towards the world, general level of alertness, thought processes, and his or her mood.
Research Paper Doctorate
Susan B. Anthony's role in organizing the women's rights movement
Susan B. Anthony was foundational member of the women's rights movement. Though the vote was the first of almost all essential changes in the way women were viewed socially and legally the vote was only the beginning.
Paper Doctorate
The ethics of plastic surgery funding based on medical necessity
The Ethics of Plastic Surgery Funding Based on the Reason for Surgery and Other Factors: A Literature-Based Briefing
Paper Undergraduate
Irony and structure in Guy du Maupassant's "The Necklace"
The structure of Guy du Maupassant's "The Necklace" is laden with irony. A beautiful woman, born into a tiresome middle-class position, marries a middle-class man. She plots and plans to make a show of herself at a…
Paper Undergraduate
Financial bias and disclosure in economic research ethics
¶ … ethics within the field of economic research. The first step will be to introduce the topic of ethics. This introduction will explain the basic definition of ethics and some of the fundamental concepts.
Paper Doctorate
Hume and Kant's competing theories of causation
The purpose of the present paper is to compare the views that Kant and Hume had on the concept of causation. We will begin by discussing Hume's argument that our idea of causation is just the idea of constant conjunction.
Paper Masters
Oral candidiasis: types, symptoms, and clinical presentations
Oral candidiasis is a condition where the fungus Candida albicans collects on the lining of the mouth (Mayo Clinic 2011). It is the most common fungal infection of the oral cavity (RDH 2011).
Paper Undergraduate
Geosyncline formation in the Neoproterozoic Wonoka canyons
Geosynclines such as the Neoproterozoic Wonoka canyons now located on the southern portions of the Australian continental land mass form as sediments deposit in submarine basins, eventually leading to the compressions…
Research Paper Doctorate
Shaken baby syndrome: causes, injuries, and medical identification
The Shaken Child Syndrome is considered to be an acute form of violent head disturbances. It is attributed as the most common reason of the severe neurological damage as a consequence of child violence.
Paper Undergraduate
Deetz's theory of organizational transformation through deliberative democracy
Introduction The critical enterprise consists, ideally, of three aspects: (1) explanation and critique of current systems and the historical currents that have given rise to them, (2) an alternative vision of organizations and society that resolves the problems and oppressions in the current systems, and (3) an account of how one moves from the current system to the envisioned one, either naturally or through planned change. Critical research on organizations has generally been weakest in terms of this third aspect. No doubt this is due, in large part, to the Sisyphean tasks of explaining the subtle and often hidden means of control that pre- serve current systems and going beyond them to en- vision alternatives that are exceptionally difficult to distill and express in terms that make them plausible to most readers. Living in a world dominated by current ideologies and disciplinary practices, many people experience difficulty understanding that there are alternatives, much less accepting them as plausible and attainable. Having devoted extensive labor to developing these two aspects, critical scholars have tended to pay less attention to explaining how one transforms the organization or the process by which transformation takes place.