Writing About Art
Writing Assignment Guidelines This week’s assignment is devoted to creating an outline for your Final Essay. It will help you organize your thoughts and ensure that you are including all of the necessary criteria for a successful essay. For your final assignment you will write a critical essay in which you describe, analyze, and interpret a work of art of your own choosing from anywhere in the Sayer textbook, however, you may not choose something that you have already written about. The final essay should be at least 1000 words. With this in mind, select a color reproduction from anywhere in A World of Art that occupies at least half a page that you would like to use for your final essay. Begin to jot down notes on this work regarding its Expressive Qualities, Cultural Narratives, Form & Content, and the Materials, Tools and Processes used to create it. Do some outside research to provide some background information about the artist and the historical context of the work. Review the assignment criteria for the final essay as well. The assessment criteria there will help you with this outline as well. As long as you cover all of the requirements for this outline (listed below) you will receive full credit for this assignment. We will give you feedback on this outline so that you can apply it to the writing of your final essay. Assessment criteria In assessing your outline, we will be looking for: v You discuss one work of art that you have not used previously in this course. Focus on only one work of art that will be thoroughly discussed in your final essay assignment. Look through the entire textbook for a work that you will enjoy writing about. Remember to choose an image that occupies at least one half of the page. v Your outline includes brief statements regarding the descriptive qualities of the work. Make sure that you touch on Expressive Qualities, Cultural Narratives, Form & Content, and the Materials, Tools and Processes used to create it, and some of the vocabulary that will be used for the final paper. v Your outline includes brief statements showing how you will analyze and interpret the work. Do not omit this aspect. How do the descriptive qualities relate to the meaning of the work and how will you interpret the overall meaning of the work? v You include a citation for the work of art you select. Please use MLA style. You should include at least three sources outside of your textbook to show you did research for this final essay. At least one of them should be included in this outline. Please see the Purdue OWL Handout found on Canvas under the Academic Integrity Folder for information on how to go about doing this properly. v You may format or organize your outline in any way that you like, however, the outline below contains all of the areas that must be covered
in the paper. If you choose not to use the outline provided, that’s okay, but you must still cover all of the criteria. This outline is for your benefit, so organize it in a way that makes the most sense to you. Submission of the assignment Submit your assignment in the drop box for Writing About Art Assignment. Make sure you use the drop box that corresponds with your grading group. Points will be taken off for late submissions and, because this assignment must be completed prior to the Final Essay, any outline that is more than a week late will receive a zero.
Outline Format Since this is an outline, you may use bullets to represent information that you will discuss in the final paper Title of the Essay Introduction Include name and textbook source for the work of art you choose. Give background information on the artist and historical context. Historical context may include but is not limited to: time period and historical events, country of origin and historical influences unique to that region, other artists living and working at the time, biographical information about the artist and the artwork you chose. Talk a little bit about why you chose this work of art. Expressive Qualities of the work Include a description of the work. Cultural Narratives present in the work In addition to dealing with the content of the actual work, you may refer back to some of the background information you set up in the introduction in order to contextualize it. Formal Qualities of the Work Elements and Principles of Design as they relate to the work. Two or Three Dimensional Materials and Processes Talk about whatever is appropriate to the work you chose. Conclusion Discuss what you have learned about this work and artist through this process. A one or two sentence conclusion will not be enough. Really think about what you have learned. How did your ideas about the work of art change as you learned more about it?
Remember that 1000 words for this essay is a minimum. It is not a guarantee for an A grade. You must show that you have done some research and thought carefully about the work of art that you chose. Describing, Interpreting and Analyzing are also an important part of this writing process.