PAPER ASSIGNMENT
Write a term paper about the bulding I choose: Houses of Parliament, London.
Format
The term paper for this class will be a thesis-guided argumentative academic paper that is to be at least 2000 words long. It must contain a thesis statement that states your paper's main scholarly idea. This thesis should be explained and supported by sufficient analysis and interpretation. The paper should adhere to college level grammar and syntax. Be aware that every architectural part has its proper name or term. Using the right terminology makes the reader more confident about your knowledge of the subject you are writing about. There should be at least one illustration as well as correctly formatted foot- or endnotes.
Most of the formulations and statements in your paper will be arguments. These are usually presented in individual paragraphs, which should be organized in an easily recognizable narrative sequence that presents and argues your topic in the most convincing manner. In general, use language that connects you to the reader of your paper. Inform the reader of your position towards the paper topic and the thesis you are making. Use a formal academic tone and complex sentence structure for the arguments you make, but also introduce a rhythm with more personal comments about the information you provide.
Close your paper with a conclusion, in which you tie your solution back to the initial question and thesis of the paper. Since your reader knows now more than before reading your paper, it might be interesting for him/her to learn the larger context of your topic. Through this, your reader may remember your paper more vividly.
Revise your paper until you have reached a simple and direct way to present your thesis and arguments.
Topic
The paper topic is described earlier in this syllabus. The paper should present "productive" knowledge. This type of knowledge is different from "acquisitive" one that you simply copy from existing publications. The paper must answer questions of "why," not just of "what." It should contain propositional thoughts about architecture, e.g., how it fits into the everyday life of a place and its people, or how it evolved over time, or how the problems it faces today have developed through its history. To accomplish this task, you should formulate a speculative idea, which you then explain with, and analyze against, the existing body of knowledge about architecture. Beginning the paper with a question about this idea will be the best approach to finishing this assignment.
To a large part, analyzing means collecting (believable and convincing) evidence that support your paper's topic. For this paper, most evidence will come from established and accepted research texts on the topic you have chosen. You must explain objectively how the evidence you picked supports your thesis. It is this connection that is most important to the reader of your paper. To complete this successfully, you must take good notes from your research reading, making sure to record faithfully what you quote directly from your sources. These notes must then be organized carefully into themes-your own ideas about the topic, as well as, accepted scholarly points of view.
Academic Paper Standards
Your paper must satisfy the following standards. If you can answer these questions successfully, then you have succeeded in writing a convincing and captivating paper. Use the questions as a final checklist to make sure your paper demonstrates the highest level of intellectual reasoning:
What is the main purpose of your paper?
What is the key question you are answering?
What is the most important information in your paper?
What are the main inferences or conclusions you are making in your paper?
What are the key concepts you expect the reader to have to understand your paper?
What are the main assumptions underlying your paper (that you expect the reader to follow easily)?
What is the main point of view you have taken in your paper?
Parts
This assignment will be done in two steps: 1. Building Choice and Description
Submit your building choice and describe the exterior of this building. This assignment is part of the Short Writing Assignments.
2. Summary of Scholarly Text
Submit a short summary of the scholarly text you have chosen as the main critique, analysis, or interpretation your paper will consist of. Identify the thesis and main arguments of this text.
3. Short Outline of the Paper
Provide a bulleted list of the contents of your paper. 4. Final Submission
This must be a clean, formatted version of your paper. It is to be typed double-spaced with pitch no larger than 12, and must include foot- or endnotes, and a bibliography. You will provide a properly designed and formatted title sheet, and you may add illustrations. When you hand in this paper, staple all sheets in the upper left corner.
GUIDE TO WRITING A RESEARCH PAPER
Familiarize yourself with the formatting conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style. The class web site has a link to this.
Parts of the Paper and Typing
A paper consists of a title page and the text. The title page should include the name of the university and college, the exact title of the paper, the course, the date, and the name of the writer. All should be suitably capitalized, centered, and spaced on the page. The text ordinarily begins with an introduction followed by the main body of the paper. It also includes foot- or endnotes.
The paper should have a margin of at least one inch on all sides. If it is stapled or bound, a left margin of 11⁄4 inch is preferable. It should be typed with lines either double-spaced or 11⁄2 spaced. If page numbers are used, they should be arabic numerals and placed on each page in a consistent format.
Acknowledgement of Sources, Fair Use, and Plagiarizing
In academic writing, a large part of the evidence one uses to support one's claim comes from acceptable sources. These are mostly books or articles printed in journals and magazines. Either an author quotes directly from such a source, or paraphrases an argument. In all such cases, it is proper academic practice that any researcher acknowledges all assistance received in researching and writing a paper. This refers to any ideas you include in your paper that are not your own, but which you read about in a scholarly book.
Two major issues are involved in this: (1) Cultural artifacts--works of art and architecture, books--are protected by copyright. (2) Science and the arts must be allowed to progress, limiting the creator of a work from preventing those who came after from using prior works for the advancement of knowledge.
To satisfy both issues, the law has worked out the fair use doctrine. This doctrine provides that use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
However, every writer must acknowledge his/her indebtedness for material when she quotes directly from a work, paraphrases or summarizes someone's words, or appropriates an idea that is not common knowledge. If you do not give credit, you plagiarize, which is a serious breach of the rules governing academic work.
Quotations and Footnotes
If you are in doubt as to whether or not to give credit, give credit. Any idea you get from a research book must be acknowledged. However, definitions in a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a textbook, or information communicated by a professor in a class, can be considered common knowledge, and so there is no need to acknowledge this source.
External sources can be integrated into your paper through direct quotations, summaries, or descriptions.
Distinguish between short and long quotations. Short quotations (fewer than five lines) are enclosed in quotation marks and run into the text. Long quotations (longer than five lines) are set off from the text by double spaces before and after the quotation, single spaces for the quotation, and indenting it five spaces from the left margin. You may identify the author of the quotation, either before or after it. In general, when mentioning people in a paper, one should include first and last names in the first instance, and thereafter only the last name. Quotations should be smoothly integrated into the text of your paper. In most cases, the proper introduction of a quote can accomplish this.
Acknowledgement of a source is done through foot- (or end-) notes. Number these notes consecutively using a raised numeral (no periods or parentheses) after the quotation. Usually, the number goes after the period point of the sentence in which the quotation is cited. The text of the footnote goes to the bottom of the page, three lines after the text (Endnotes follow the text of the paper). First, indent five spaces, then write the raised numeral, skip one space and type the text of the footnote.
Types of Footnotes
In architectural history, the citation norm is the one proposed by the Chicago Manual of Style. Here is how one cites books and articles correctly:
First reference to a book:
1 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1992), p. 3.
Second reference to an already cited book:
2 Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 4. First reference to an article:
3 Joseph Siry, "Adler and Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (March 1996):6-37.
Second reference to an already cited article:
4 Siry, "Guaranty Building," p. 30.
Chicago Style has also introduced a second method of citation. You provide a bibliography at the end of the paper, and instead of footnote numbers, you add the shortened reference consisting of last name of author, year of publication, and page number in parenthesis after the quote: (Morgenthaler, 2011, 193).
Further Reference Works
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers
Sylvan Barnet, Writing about Art
Tom Spector & Rebecca Damron, How Architects Write
Institute a few short writing exercises: 1. Written description of a fac¸ade, of a building (Give students a few photographs to work from). 2. Summary of a building analysis (use Herdeg and Unwin books). 3. Analysis of a philosophical/theoretical text: e.g., Harbison's Built, Unbuilt ..., and have students evaluate the background of the ideas in the text; are they architectural, personal, social, sensual, etc., what is the origin of the ideas listed (are they in the writers being, intellect?). 4. Summary of a visual analysis focusing on psychophysiological examination. 5. Summary of a stylistic interpretation.
Divide classes into sections:
Detailed introduction and explanation of a building
Jeopardy questions
Methodological problems (what kind of interpretative perspectives are there)
Writing format problems (how do architectural historians convince readers that their interpretations are the right ones?)
Critical thinking exercises (comparing two different opinions of the same thing).