Week 15

For instructions on how to set up your OU account and to upload information to the web, Laura Gibbs's site has step-by-step explanations.

You all know how to blog now, so continuing the intellectual conversation should be easy.

Week 14

Ask your committee members what parts of your research would make publishable pieces. Remember that editors need writers, so don't fear rejections.

For book publishers, do your research about the kind of books in their catalog. Here's a list of publishers' addresses.

Week 13

The AAA has more information on how its code of ethics informs its policy. The SAA site also has a list of resources on ethics.

What ethical issues does your research bring up?

Week 12

Grammar does matter, but not in the ways you might think. Take the grammar test without consulting outside sources. Rely on your writerly instinct.

For a readable and flexible guide to the rules, consider this book by June Casagrande.

Week 11

Be frank about the three things that frustrate you most about writing. What holds you back from reaching your goals?

Week 9

Consider the eight arguments posted in the content section of D2L. Which ones are most effective? What do they have in common.

Think about how you can improve your own argument.

Week 8

I've posted a short paragraph in the content section of D2L. It's not meant to make fun of archaeologists because all the subdisciplines are guilty of this kind of vague writing.

Rewrite the paragraph in more vivid prose. Use Strunk and White as a guide.

Week 7

To help you think about organization, please post your table of contents or the order of the sections of an article you're writing.

There's helpful advice from a book editor here.

Week 6

For your posts this week, consult the plagiarism test under the content section of Desire2Learn. Which of the three paragraphs constitutes plagiarism and why?

I've also put under the content section the style guides for the SAA and AAA. This will give you some guidelines for how to cite sources.

Week 5

Here's the link to the site with examples of raw data from fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan.

For this week, we'll address how do you write about humans, past and present. The poem can be any form, any length. The goal is to have you experiment with a new writing style.

Week 4

Now that we've spent a few weeks talking about good writing practices, we'll turn to the specifics of working with data.

I've asked you to post about what you consider your primary data. Please bring in an example of how you organize your information. It can be in chart form, fieldnotes, or some other database.

Week 3

It's clear from our discussion that there's no single way to write well. What all our examples do have in common is a clarity and precision that we can certainly emulate in our own projects.

If you'd like to see what authors consider good writing, The Atlantic Monthly has a regular column called "A Close Read" that takes apart a passage from a book and explains how it works.

Week 2

This week we'll have a shortened class to allow time to attend the job talk at 4:30 in Dale Hall 31. Be sure to bring to class a copy of what you consider to be good writing.

If you'd like to read more about Alan Sokal's hoax in Social Text, see the collection of articles on his site. There's more information about the bad writing contest at the site of the journal Philosophy and Literature.

Week 1

For this week, you'll have to sign up for a free blog using Blogger. There are step-by-step instructions at this site. Be sure to e-mail me the address you created.

Once you have set up your blog, refer to the assignment for the first week on the syllabus. It asks you to read George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language." Write a short paragraph about how this piece from 1946 relates to your writing project. Post your response on your blog.