This week, we’ll be looking at how academic writing in the humanities is similar to and different from humanities writing in non-academic genres (our focus for Week 6). This is the last week in our humanities unit.

We will have Optional Zoom Class on Monday (10/5) at 10:50am.

Due Dates

Annotations on an academic article: End of Friday, October 9.

Academic version of Week 6 analysis: End of Monday, October 12.

Unit Reflection: End of Tuesday, October 13.

Goals for This Week

• Compare academic writing about the humanities to the non-academic genres we studied last week
• Apply the genre of academic writing to your analysis from last week
• Reflect on what you’ve learned about humanities criticism

Overview of Tasks

1. Write your way into the week
2. Read examples of academic humanities criticism
3. Choose 1 example to closely annotate with your observations
4. Convert your analysis from last week into academic-style paragraphs
5. Reflect on this unit and write about it

Detailed Instructions

Step 1: Write Your Way Into the Week

Here are your thinking questions for this week! Please spend 5-10 minutes freewriting about them (or ignoring them and freewriting more generally), which you can then share with me if you wish or keep to yourself. If you don’t want to write, please at least read the questions and think about them!

1. In your experience, how should each body paragraph of an academic essay be structured? In other words, what does each body paragraph need to include, and what order should those things come in?
2. In your experience, how is academic writing stylistically different from the genres we studied last week? What is normal in academic writing that is not normal in non-academic genres, and what is normal in non-academic genres that would be weird/inappropriate in academic writing?

Steps 2 and 3: Read Examples of Academic Humanities Criticism and Annotate One

Since early 2018, I’ve been working on converting my thoughts about Shrek into an academic essay. It’s not finished yet (and I haven’t made progress in quite some time), but I would like you to read a couple paragraphs of what I have so far. I have left my own annotations on the paragraphs to talk through my writing choices with you.

Click here to view the PDF of my comments. Or here if you need a .docx file.

Then, please skim all of the following articles to get a sense of the content and structure and then choose one (or more) to closely read and annotate using Hypothes.is.

The first article is by a graduate student studying psychology, the second is by a graduate student studying anthropology, and the third is by an undergraduate student studying film and new media. Even though psychology and anthropology are considered social science instead of humanities, people from all majors can do humanities criticism!

1. “A Case Study of of Transgender Representation in Video Games: Mass Effect’s Hainly Abrams”
2. “Making Sense of Memes: Where They Come From and Why We Keep Clicking Them” (there are two pages, so when you reach the end of the first page make sure to click through)
3. “The Feminine Threat: Reconsidering the Damsel in Distress in Early Disney Films”

Another thing I want you to notice is how the titles of most academic essays are structured. They very often follow this pattern: “Short Fun Phrase: Longer More Descriptive Phrase”

In your annotations, in addition to commenting with any comments/questions you have, please pay attention to the style and structure of the articles and note your observations, along the lines of my own annotations on my paragraphs.

Step 4: Write Your Own Academic Paragraphs

I am NOT asking you to write a full essay (although you can if you want to).

Instead, I want you to write 3 or more paragraphs that adapt some aspects of your analysis from last week into academic writing, using the appropriate level of analysis and detail. Pretend that these paragraphs will belong to a much longer essay.

For example, in my Twitter thread, only one of my tweets was about the Robin Hood scene in Shrek, but that one tweet became nearly 2 pages of academic writing.

If you want to get some practice writing introductions and conclusions, one of your paragraphs can be an intro or a conclusion to your imagined full essay, but at least two of your paragraphs should be body paragraphs. (See below for how I will grade this)

Step 5: Write Your Unit Reflection

Here are the instructions for your Unit 2 Reflections.

Grading

1. Annotations on an Academic Article  — 2 pts, completion
2. Academic Paragraphs Version of Analysis (Week 7)  — 7 pts, see below
3. Unit Reflection — 5 pts, see link above for rubric

This week, the first week in our unit on Humanities Criticism, we will be studying how to write reviews. Reviews are also another subgenre of News Writing, in which a critic provides a description of a piece of work (a book, a movie, a TV show, a music video, etc.) and then analyzes its qualities, content, and shortcomings.

Because we are writing about cultural/artistic items, it will be more difficult to do the “imaginary writing” element of the class this unit. However, if there’s a “book within a book” or “musical within a movie” you like, you could write an imaginary review of that. For example, if you watch Pose, you could write a review of one house’s performance at one of the balls, rather than reviewing the TV show itself. If you like Harry Potter, you could write a review of one of Gilderoy Lockhart’s books and pretend you are publishing it in the Daily Prophet.

Optional Zoom Class: Monday, 9/21, 10:50am. We will check in with each other, discuss anything you want to talk about that’s come up in previous weeks, I will run through reminders/things that your work has made me think about, and then we’ll go over the activities + assignments for this coming week.

Due Dates

All assignments for this unit will be due by the end of the day on Monday, September 28. While we normally have things due on Sundays, CUNY is closed on Monday for Yom Kippur, so you get an extra day.

There will be no penalty for late work for anything in this unit.

Goals for This Week

• Analyze the genre of reviews/criticism to learn how they are structured and styled
• Reflect on the role of first drafts in “the” writing process more generally and your writing process specifically
• Evaluate a piece of media and write your own review/criticism of that work

Overview of Tasks

1. Write your way into the week.
2. Read the chapter about how to write reviews.
3. Read or Skim some different examples of reviews. Annotate as you go if you find it useful.
4. Post a comment to my discussion prompt based on what you read.
5. Read the article “Shitty First Drafts” before you begin your writing process. Annotate as you go if you find it useful.
6. Write a review/criticism of a piece of media of your choosing.

Detailed Instructions

Step 1: Write Your Way Into the Week

Here are your thinking questions for this week! Please spend 5-15 minutes freewriting about them (or ignoring them and freewriting more generally), which you can then share with me if you wish or keep to yourself. If you don’t want to write, please at least read the questions and think about them!

1. If you are trying to research a movie (or book, or TV show, etc.) ahead of time to decide if you will like it or not, what information do you want to know about it?

2. If you watched a movie (or read a book, etc.) and want to know what other people thought about it, what kinds of things do you hope they will talk about in their review (so you can see if you agree or disagree)?

3. How does the place where the author is publishing the review affect what you’re expecting from it and how they should go about writing it? (For example, an Amazon review, a review in a newspaper or magazine, a review on social media, etc.)

Step 2: Read About How to Write Reviews

This chapter is from a book called On Writing Well. Zinsser (the author) draws a distinction between “reviews” and “criticism,” and he explains how they are similar and how they are different. I think there can be some overlap between the two.

Click here for the PDF. I don’t think Hypothes.is will work on this file, since my free trial of the software I used to convert the other PDFs to a Hypothes.is-readable format is now expired.

Step 3: Read or Skim Some Examples of Reviews

1. A review of a book called Fattily Ever After — while we do see the journalist’s opinion of the book this is more summary/description than criticism
2. This review is a joint review of two different books on the same theme.
3. “I Regret to Inform You That I’m Team Jacob Now” — a piece of criticism in which the author re-reads the Twilight series and discusses how her opinion has changed
4. “Son of the Black Panther” — a more complex piece of criticism on the Black Panther comics written by John Jay English professor Jonathan Gray.

These are all reviews of books, but feel free to also look up reviews of music, movies, or something else, if that interests you more. In either case, try to look at several different examples.

You can leave annotations using Hypothes.is on these reviews if you want to/would find that helpful, but I am not requiring annotations as a graded activity this week.

Step 4: Post a Comment in Response to the Discussion Prompt

Please respond to both of these questions.

1. Based on the reviews and examples of criticism above, what do you think are the “rules” for writing a good review/piece of criticism? What do these articles have in common? Either in terms of content, structure/order of ideas, or writing style.
2. Write a generic outline for writing a review and/or piece of criticism. (Please make it more specific than “intro body conclusion,” since that applies to most kinds of writing.) Try to write your outline so that someone not in our class could look at your outline and use it to write a review/piece of criticism of their own.

Step 5: Read “Shitty First Drafts”

Just about every single thing you’ve ever read is not a first draft. If you write a first draft and feel frustrated/bad about yourself because you feel like it isn’t very good, that does not mean you’re a bad writer.

Nonetheless, I know it can be stressful to share your writing with others– both teachers and peers. So, before you begin writing your review this week, please read this article on the magic of shitty first drafts and give yourself permission to write badly.

Click here for the PDF. It’s only 2.5 pages!

You can leave annotations using Hypothes.is on these reviews if you want to/would find that helpful, but I am not requiring annotations as a graded activity this week.

Step 6: Write a Review or Piece of Criticism of a Piece of Media

Writing a review will be easier/faster, but writing a piece of criticism will better prepare you for the rest of this unit. It’s up to you which one you choose.

Full instructions/rubric here.

Your reviews are due by the end of the day on Monday, September 28. You can post them here on the course site or upload them to Blackboard.

Welcome to Unit 2: Humanities Criticism! We will spend three weeks on this unit, bringing us to mid-October.

What is/are “humanities”?

As a very general definition, the “humanities” are all of the academic disciplines that study things that humans create or ideas that humans think about, such as language, literature, religion, art, media, culture, philosophy, ethics, history, etc. In modern universities, this is set apart from the sciences (both natural science and social science) and “professional studies” (business, law, marketing, criminal justice, education, nursing, and anything else that is basically training for a specific kind of job).  But, the term comes from the Renaissance, when students at universities either studied “humanities” (human stuff) or “divinity” (training to be a priest) or medicine.

What is “humanities criticism”?

In academic situations, “criticism” doesn’t mean complaining about or critiquing something, like the word “criticize” generally means. All it means is that we’re going to think deeply and analytically about humanities topics. Sometimes that will mean criticizing stuff. Sometimes it will mean analyzing both the good things and the bad things, or just trying to discover layers of meaning. It is extremely likely that you have all done humanities criticism before, such as if you’ve ever had to write an essay about a piece of literature in English class.

Essentially, “humanities criticism” is its own unit because most kinds of humanities writing are more similar to each other than they are to writing in other areas of study. (An essay for philosophy class and a lab report are very different, for example.) There are still differences in writing expectations for each area of the humanities, and there are many different genres of humanities writing. In this unit, we’ll be studying reviews, social media commentary, and academic criticism.

Writing For This Unit

There is no single “unit project” for this unit, like there was for news writing. Instead, you will be writing three different pieces of humanities criticism spread out across each week of the unit.

These are:

1. A review of a piece of media of your choosing (book, movie, TV episode or TV show, album, or something else)
2. A social-media style analysis of a humanities topic of your choosing (you can write it like a Twitter thread, a TikTok video, an Instagram story, or as you would for another social media platform)
3. The same content as #2, but written as academic-style paragraphs.

Grading/Checklist for This Unit

The Humanities Criticism unit as a whole is worth 15% of your overall grade, equivalent to the News Writing unit.

Here is a list of all graded activities for the unit and their point values:

1. Discussion reply (Week 5) — 2 pts, completion
2. Review of a Piece of Media (Week 5) — 7 pts, see rubric
3. Response Post to Examples of Informal Humanities Writing (Week 6) — 2 pts, completion
4. Social Media-Style Analysis (Week 6) — 5 pts, see rubric
5. Annotations an Academic Article (Week 7)  — 2 pts, completion
6. Academic Paragraphs Version of Analysis (Week 7)  — 7 pts, see rubric
7. Unit Reflection (Week 7) — 5 pts, see rubric

Total: 30 points = 100% for the unit
100% for the unit = 15% of your final grade.
**I will input all the math into Blackboard so you don’t have to worry about calculating what this means for you**