Fill This Form To Receive Instant Help
Fill This Form To Receive Instant Help
Homework answers / question archive / Starting with a primary source (a text or texts, or pieces of art, actually written or created in antiquity) that you will concentrate on
Starting with a primary source (a text or texts, or pieces of art, actually written or created in antiquity) that you will concentrate on. The whole aim in starting this early is to make writing the rest of the paper as easy and painless as possible when the time comes. If you have an idea for writing about any of the primary-source texts we have already read, or combining them with each other, that's fine. Otherwise, your first step is to pick a primary source you will work from to come up with a thesis. The topic must cover women in the ancient world, but it can certainly compare them to women in modern times or other historical periods. Don't hesitate to write me for suggestions, or to spend some time on this site looking around at the topics they cover. The worst possible way to do this is to start with a broad idea---"Women's role in agriculture," "Priestesses' role in religion," "Young girls' uncertainties about marriage,"---because you will never find the evidence you need to support it. We have now read nearly every non-fiction text there is about women in ancient Greece (from Rome there are only tiny scraps and bits of letters). You need to pick a text you like, and work from there. Don't hesitate to email me for suggestions or texts you might find interesting, and here is a list of past paper topics that students were able to use to produce high-quality work with a minimum of scrambling around. The single biggest mistake people make, year after year, is making this post without having read their primary source; please be sure to read through your source several times to be sure you can actually get a thesis out of it!
When you have decided on a topic, search for it on JSTOR and in GoogleBooks and GoogleScholar. If you find a book the library does not have, you can ask the library to get it for you via ILL by going to this page on the library site. Remember that you are never allowed to cite or quote secondary-source information from Wikipedia, or from any other website that is not peer-reviewed, but that you can use them for ideas and starting points, as long as you can then find the information in more reliable sources. (You are free to use web collections of primary sources, however. Perseus.org contains free translations of every single classical text, and theoi.com has an enormous selection of translations of mythological texts as well.
This may be either a draft or an outline, or a combination of the two; if you aren't sure how to proceed, please consult with me about strategies. To get credit for this, it must:
? If you did not do so the first time it was posted, watch this video on required formatting and read over the written instructions. I don't grade on this, but in the last version of the class I was asked to report on each person's use of citations for assessment purposes.
First Drafts Due This Week!
Share a copy of “NAME topic First Draft” (e.g. “WEST Euripides Ion First Draft,” the new file you were instructed to create and work in after submitting your Outline) with me as early as possible this week, definitely by Friday night. You can keep working on it through the weekend, but you need to make something available for your fellow students for them to comment on. Once I get a paper from you, I will then share links with you to the two papers you will be commenting on. .
To get full credit for turning in this draft, it must:
- Include a working thesis supported by both primary- and secondary-source evidence
- Have at least 3 acceptable secondary sources and employ quotes from those sources in context (direct quotes, not paraphrases with citations)
- Include multiple relevant quotations from at least one primary source to support the argument
- Include at least 1200 words (roughly 4 pages of prose text with regular margins TNR 12 pt. font, double spaced)
- Not include any sections which are unrelated to defense of the thesis (extraneous background information, plot summaries, historical info unrelated to thesis defense). A brief note here and there is fine, but any paragraph whose topic does not directly argue for your paper's thesis should be removed.
*After submitting your draft, do not continue to work in “NAME topic First Draft.” Save a copy of “NAME topic First Draft” as “NAME topic Second Draft,” and continue your work there. Your grade for the second draft will depend in part on how much progress you have made since the first draft.
Here are some general points about presentation and format. Be sure to fix these in your own papers, and help one another out by pointing them out. Last year I was told I had to enforce/grade on these things, but this year no one has said I have to. The History dept. has always required citation of quotes with page number and year, but other than that I don't care about formatting. I will definitely make suggestions/corrections, and I might insist/beg/implore you to change your formatting, but I won't count off for it.
Sources and Citing: Determining acceptable sources for research is one of the most difficult hurdles for history students. In general, if it appears in a book published by a legitimate press, or in a refereed academic journal, it is an acceptable source, whether or not your access to it was from an online source such as JSTOR or GoogleBooks. Within the History department, sources such as Wikipedia or other respectable websites are perfectly acceptable for use in gathering background information or bibliography on your topic, but they should not ever be cited or quoted from.
Citations. All classes taught in the History department require
1. Secondary sources should be quoted directly rather than paraphrased, and must be cited with author, year and page number. See the full handout.
2. For primary sources always use in-text citations , e.g.: (Aeschylus, Eumenides 281-292) or (Homer, Odyssey 4.321-322) or (Euripides, Medea 237-245) You can put them in your bibliography, but you don't need to for purposes of this class.
3. “Common knowledge” is straightforward factual information available in a history book or encyclopedia, and does not need to be cited. Some examples:
“Women were given full suffrage in the U.S. by 1920 and in England by 1928”
“The Civil War lasted from 1861-65.”
“Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Already member? Sign In
