Essay Assignment—Writing About Cultural Values

Essay Assignment—Writing About Cultural Values

Read this entire assignment through in order to understand what to do.

Write down your due dates.  Plan time to draft your essay and see me several times for tutoring.  Remember to leave time to check your MLA.

• About five pages, not counting the Works Cited page.
• Pick ONE WORK that embodies a period you want to interpret. Include a picture of the work.
• You have to use authoritative sources only, at least three of them. You may not use the textbook as one of your sources at all.
• You need a thesis in your introduction paragraph; support this thesis in well-developed, coherent, and relevant paragraphs. All papers should be formatted according to MLA 8th edition.

Prewriting:  (Note: use research to help you prewrite and draft)

Find out about your work.  Note: you do not have to do all of the following questions; they are intended as a guide and as prompts to your thinking.

In order to prepare to write this paper, pick some prewriting technique such as the ACAPS technique for a text or the W (and H) questions if it is an object of some sort. Make sure you are not just filling in the blanks in your prewriting; you need this material for your paragraphs; for instance, you could look at the following areas:

• Understand how the work was accepted at the time and what it meant to the people of the time.
• Look at how the work and its meaning has changed over time and what that means about how cultural values have changed over time. What are the assumptions that that audience makes as they look at the painting, walk through the building, read the piece of literature, etc?
• Understand what the work means now by reviewing the secondary literature written by authoritative sources.

In the Introduction to Humanities class, analysis may be pointed at the question that we have asked many times: “how does it indicate the value system of the people who created it?”

1. What the materials in the work and the appearance of the work might mean when put in their context both historically and culturally.[unique_solution]
2. Does the artist’s personal life enrich the reading of the work at all? Has it been used as a distraction?
3. How does this work accept and reject trends that came before and, thereby, place itself in the longer stretch of art traditions.

Constructing the idea for your thesis:

Using all of the ideas from the other sections of your prewriting, construct your interpretation, your reading; reading is looking at a work as a part of its value-based system, its culture. In your interpretation, you should be able to talk about how the work indicates the value system of the people who produced it.  Your thesis statement should make a statement about how your object reflects the value system of the culture that created it.

READ ON!

Here are some notes on doing well for this paper.  Also, some reminders about the nature of good sources.

• If your plan is to describe your work first and then start discussing (thus dividing the structure of your paper into two sections), you are not on the right track. Description should be used to support some larger point.  Support the thesis/interpretation.

• What does the assignment mean when it says write about ONE WORK? It means that you should have one thing, something with a title or an address. I want to check your thesis, outline and sources.  Do not miss the deadline for submitting this assignment.

• If you can write out a lead-in for every source you use, chances are you are using pretty good sources. Let me share some examples.
  • Example of a good source with good introductory material:
    • Professor X from U of State says this sculpture indicates that this culture started to value the human individual even though its sculptors had always portrayed deities in previous eras (X 252). [Note: this source is well-integrated into the sentence.]
  • Example of integrating your source material, but the source is non-authoritative. Avoid non-authoritative sources:
    • com reports that this statue is twelve and a half feet tall.

• If you need informational sources, you might be able to say something like the following: This statue, standing twelve and a half feet tall (Dictionary of Classical Sculpture), represents a new direction for the . . . .

• Try to have a draft to share with me in my office a week before the paper is due.

• I strongly recommend allotting a good amount of time to the database search/research process.

Share your research paper questions; everyone probably has the same sorts of questions.  Read over this assignment a couple of times.

• Come to my office hours for tutoring! I am flexible about meeting times.
• You have to turn in your prewriting, drafts, and sources to the dropbox for credit. In order to get full 35 points of credit for this part of the project, you should submit work that shows the following:
  • the prewriting needs to show thoughtful work to generate an idea for the paper,
  • work on the thesis statement,
  • work to get to a good outline,
  • multiple draft that show you’ve met with a tutor at least once, maybe submission to Smarthinking
  • While you only have to submit the sources on your works cited page, you can also submit a working bib that indicates you did not just take the first three sources you came across.
• You have Smarthinking available to you as an online tutoring service,
• and the TLC for additional face-to-face tutoring. It is your responsibility to fix any errors before you turn in your paper for grading.

READ ON!

Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

A student in this class can replace this 200 point paper with some other endeavor that involves scholarship in the humanities.

Examples of such projects include the following:

1. The creation of a virtual art exhibit using images from various museums available for fair use in the classroom. Students must curate the exhibit, research the artworks and their contexts, and write up the results of their research as notes on the virtual exhibit.
2. A project to identify historical inaccuracies in the movie “300,” and write a paper detailing them. This involved considerable research into the ancient Spartans on the student’s part.
3. A project to research the medieval Spanish “Poem of My Cid,” comparing the historical facts to the idealized portrait in the poem, then showing how the idealized figure of “El Cid” influenced, first, the Reconquista of Moorish Spain, and then the Spanish conquistadors in the Western Hemisphere.

If you are interested in investigating a topic, come and meet with me about it so you can write it up before January 31^st.