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All conferences will take place in my office, 319A.
Important: Please plan to bring to the conference ALL the materials you’ve found so far. Continue reading
With the MFA writeup due later this month, I’m posting today with guidelines for MLA citation of both artwork and wall placards you encountered during your museum visit. Obviously, information culled from the museum’s excellent website should be sourced using standard web citation rules.
In addition, I’m including guidelines for citing information culled from a course session or posted powerpoint.
Goya, Francisco. The Family of Charles IV. 1800, Museo del Prado, Madrid. 1998.607.
Wall text for The Family of Charles IV. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Nash, Kate. Class discussion, February 8, 2019.
Nash, Kate. Class lecture, slide 5, February 8, 2019.
In all cases, In-Text Citations should refer, briefly but unambiguously, to an entry in the Works Cited list, using the first word or words of that entry: (Nash) or (Wall text) or even (Wall text for The Family of Charles IV) if you reference several wall texts, and the one you’re currently referring to isn’t clear from context.
Your first major assignment, due in a few weeks, calls for you to write an “expository synthesis,” an authoritative report that brings readers up-to-speed with expert opinion on a topic. Whereas in an essay typically advances the author’s thesis, a report presents an understanding that is not, strictly speaking, the author’s.
That doesn’t mean your synthesis can’t be interesting or original. Look, for example, at the way New Yorker writer John Lanchester introduces “The Case Against Civilization”; while his mission is to provide a run-down of recent scholarship on the Neolithic Revolution, he opens by musing over the question of what technology he would miss most. So consider how you might give a personal “spin” to your synthesis of expert opinion.
“The truth of the Oak lies in the Acorn from which it sprouted”—that’s the premise of historical analysis, that we can understand the world by figuring out how and why it came to be this way. This upcoming unit asks you to choose some phenomenon of the present day—a cultural institution like professional football, a movement like gun rights, or a consumer product like skateboards—and seek a deeper understanding of that phenomenon by studying its past. Continue reading
The upcoming Campus Map and Philosophical Dialogue both present opportunities to practice Chicago Style footnote citations. After all, in-text parenthetical citations leave a relatively light footprint on the page, like so.1 Note the placement of the footnote: after the period ending the sentence, not before. This minor contrast with a parenthetic citation is especially striking when you end a sentence with a quotation:
There are two distinct steps to creating good footnote references:
For practice, try this Quiz: this quiz on Blackboard (scored for completion as HW).
Then, demonstrate mastery on this scored Quiz: this quiz on Blackboard.
I’m re-posting the Paragraph Transitions page so it’s easily available to you as you craft your final essay:
In drawing ideas or information from a source, you have three choices:
Let’s think about how you might use these different approaches to presenting a source, depending on the role of that source in your project. Imagine that you’re writing an essay that critiques the current system of higher education in the United States:
Post your answers to these questions in this Google Form.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, as an eBook or in printed form. At the BU bookstore.
Rhetoric 103 and 104 explore the evolution of rhetoric from the advent of writing to the digital age. The first four units, covered in Boston, center on changes connected to the Neolithic Revolution, the birth of Democracy, the Age of Exploration, and the Industrial Revolution. The final two units, covered in London, focus on discursive shifts prompted by Modernity and the Digital Revolution.
Together, we will analyze how persuasive language has shaped and been shaped by historical moments, influencing our engagement with politics, social relations, and the world around us. Each unit is focused on a specific “keyword”— literacy, citizenship, education, labor—that is both linked to the historical tipping point under discussion and being debated in our own historical moment. By reading, writing, and responding to one another critically in this class, we will learn what it means to be rigorous and ethical evaluators and producers of knowledge.
The course’s four credit hours will consist of the following: one joint lecture per week, two discussions per week, one-on-one meetings for instruction and feedback, and excursions in the Boston area linking your reading and writing to the world around you. This experiential component is meant to give you a broader perspective and to encourage more attentive interpretations of the various places you call “home.”