Essay Guide

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Present your essays professionally. On the cover page give the title and number of the essay question you have chosen, the name and number of the course, and your name, student number, and tutorial time. An assignment cover sheet is available for you to use on the Art History website under ‘Resources’. Please type your essay. Excellent computer facilities are provided in the Student Information Commons. Use one side of the paper and leave wide margins. Number the pages and write your name on each page. Keep a copy for your own reference while the essay is marked, and to safeguard against loss.

 

Allow plenty of time for both preparatory research and for writing. Be sure to write a first draft for careful reading and editing and leave time for more than one draft before final submission. Coursework counts 50% in Art History and students often improve their grades or even manage to pass a course on the basis of coursework.

The aim of formal essay writing is to engage your critical reading and writing skills to craft an articulate and polished essay. It provides an opportunity to consider a topic in depth, combining the synthesis of source materials with your own conclusions based on those materials. It follows that students are expected to show independent thinking and not simply re-hash the opinions of scholars. However, an essay should not be based on your opinions alone. Back up your ideas with the rigorous analysis of course materials, texts and articles. An essay is your dialogue with the scholarly community.

 

Begin by considering the question and the issues it raises. Plan your essay to present a coherent discussion that sticks to the point, and works towards a compelling conclusion. Be sure to take note of the required project length. In structuring your essay, begin with an introduction that draws the reader into the arguments of the essay and includes a clear statement of what you plan to do (but avoids just repeating the question). This should be followed by the development of this proposal through sustained analysis of specific ideas. Always support your ideas with the analysis of artworks. End with a conclusion that pulls the threads together rather than provides a bland summary.

 

The style of your writing is as important for communicating your meaning as the style of a painting is for communicating an artist’s intentions. Originality can lie in the way you write about your topic, as well as in the ideas you develop. Use quotations sparingly: do not simply string together quotations or paraphrase other writers. When you do use the ideas of others, it is essential that you acknowledge them, even if you are not quoting them exactly. So be sure to reference other writers that you are drawing upon, whether verbatim or in précised form (see details on how to do so below). Plagiarism is tantamount to theft in an academic context and will be severely penalised.

 

Write complete sentences in good, clear English, using standard grammar. Organise your material into paragraphs that group related points together and indicate to your reader when you are moving on to a new idea. Be sure to check your grammar and spelling, and proof read your final essay at least once. Use the Spell Check function on your computer but remember that it picks up letter groups that do not match real words, but will not find errors in sense that result from typographical mistakes (e.g. it would not pick up “but well not fund errors on sense than result form typographical mistakes”). Consult a dictionary if you are unsure of spelling. Look out for common errors like misuse of the apostrophe. Its main function is to indicate possession, differentiating singular and plural, as in “one boy’s toys” or “two boys’ toys”. The apostrophe also indicates elision as in “can’t” in place of “cannot”, though such informality is rare in academic writing. A tricky example is “it’s” which means “it is”. In this case the possessive is indicated without an apostrophe, as “its”. (e.g. It’s common for a tree to lose its leaves in winter.)

References and Bibliographic style

 

Referencing works of art

 

It is standard practice to cite the title of a work of art in italics (or underlined if you don’t have a facility for italics). The work should also be identified with other information, as many works have the same title. Always give the location of the work in a city, building or museum. You should also try to give a date, the medium and the size of the work.

 

e.g. Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews. 1748. Oil on canvas, 27.5 x 47 in. National Gallery, London.

 

Particularly if you are referring to works that are not well known, it is very useful to your reader if you include photocopies of works, or references to the source of an illustration.

 

Quotations in an essay

 

If you quote from another publication, you should indicate this by enclosing short quotations in quotation marks ‘like this’.

 

A longer quotation is presented as an indented paragraph without quotation marks like this one. It is normally three lines or longer. The fact that it is a quotation would also be indicated by references, giving the source, which are numbered like this.¹

 

References in an academic essay

 

You must always give a reference for a quotation, but also when you paraphrase a writer, or cite individual interpretations drawn from your reading. It is not necessary to cite the source of well-known information, or factual material gained from lectures (although you might acknowledge issues and ideas derived from a lecturer’s particular approach). References may be presented as endnotes at the end of your essay or, preferably, as footnotes at the bottom of each page. Footnotes are easier for the reader and are easily achieved with current computer programmes. They should be numbered consecutively throughout the essay, indicated in the text by a number in superscript, like this¹ – or in parenthesis, like this (1) – which is matched in the notes. It is not acceptable merely to list a number referring to an entry in your bibliography: notes give the specific page reference while a bibliography does not (and should not!). References should include the following:

 

Author’s initials, Author’s surname, Title of book, Place of publication: publisher, date, page reference.

[e.g. M. Jacobs, The painted voyage: art travel and exploration 1564-1875, London: British Museum, 1995, 47.]

 

This reference is for a book. Note that all titles of publications are in italics (or underlined if you do not have this facility available), and should not be underlined or enclosed in inverted commas as well. However, single quotation marks without italics or underlining are used for the titles of journal articles and essays. In the case of journal articles, give

 

Author’s initials, Author’s surname, ‘Title of article’, Title of journal volume number (issue number): page reference, date.

[e.g. C. Speck, ‘Edith Cavell: martyr or patriot’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 2 (1): 83, 2001.]

 

In a note give only the page specific to your reference. Be sure, however, to give full pagination in your bibliography. For an essay in a collection or a book, the form is

 

            Author’s initials, Author’s surname, ‘Title of essay’. In Editor, Title of book, Place of publication: Publisher, date, page reference.

[e.g. D. Solkin, ‘The battle of the Ciceros: Richard Wilson and the politics of landscape in the age of John Wilkes’. In S. Pugh (ed.), Reading landscape. Country - city - capital, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990, 42.]

 

A second reference may employ only the author’s surname and page number (e.g. Solkin, 43), unless more than one work by the same author is cited, in which case a short title should be used to differentiate them (e.g. Solkin, ‘Battle of the Ciceros’, 43). If a second reference follows directly on the first, Ibid. with the relevant page number is sufficient, although it is acceptable to use a short title in every case if you prefer. If the page number is the same, you need not repeat it. Here is an example of acceptable formatting for notes.

 

¹ G. H. Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, 67.

²  J. Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis, London: Faber, 1968, 35.

³  Ibid., 106.

⁴  D. Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, New York: Phaidon, 1970, 105.

⁵  Golding, 93-95.

 

If you cite a quotation by an author that you found in the work of another author, you must give both the original reference and the source in which you found it, thus

 

e.g. K. Andrews, The Nazarenes, Oxford, 1964, 25, quoted in [or cited by] H. Honour, Romanticism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, 348.

 

It is dangerous practice to omit a double reference and pretend that you had consulted the primary text, as you will not have seen the reference in its original context and will not be aware of any misquotations or idiosyncratic interpretations – which will then be assumed to be attributable to yourself!

 

In the case of a reference from an electronic publication, you should give the same details of author and title, followed by the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and, because websites are changed regularly, the date on which you consulted the site. Remember that websites are not all subject to painstaking checking like print publications, so are often not reliable. Beware particularly of sites without an individual or institutional author.

 

e.g. Auckland Art Gallery, ‘Collections, Bequests and Donations’ <http://www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/aboutus/history/collections.asp>

            14 December 2003.

 

As well as giving sources and references, footnotes and endnotes may also be used to supplement the content of your essay, as with additional supportive data, fuller evidence or further examples that you feel would clutter up your main text unnecessarily. They might also be used to acknowledge an alternative point of view.

 

Bibliography

 

Each essay must include a reading list of the books and articles consulted in writing the essay, even if they are not cited in footnotes. The bibliography assists the reader to find these works, and enables the marker to assess the range and depth of your reading. But the effects of ill-chosen or inadequate reading will also be evident in the essay itself, so there is no point in fabricating a bibliography of books that have not been read.

 

The works consulted should be listed in alphabetical order according to the author’s surname, which is therefore placed before the first name (or initials), unlike the form in notes. The entry is otherwise almost identical to that in the notes, although punctuation may vary. In addition, full pagination should be given for articles and essays.

 

Alpers, Svetlana. ‘The Museum as a way of seeing’. In I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds.) Exhibiting Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 25-32.

Baxendall, Michael. Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Escobedo, Helen. ‘Site-specific sculpture or the mythology of place’, Leonardo 21 (2): 141-44, 1988.

Fernie, Eric. (ed.) Art history and its methods: a critical anthology. London: Phaidon, 1995.

 

You will notice that not all scholars use the same referencing system. Some, for example, place publication details in parenthesis; some use ‘p’ to indicate a page reference, and you may prefer this for clarity. Some give initials rather than first names for authors and others omit the publisher, although we recommend including both of these because they are very useful in tracking down a reference. There are style manuals that you may consult, such as the one published by MLA (the Modern Language Association). You might also want to investigate the use of Endnote software on your computer. No single system is ‘better’ than another, although the department recommends the one outlined in this essay guide. The important issue is to include all the information in a clear and consistent form.

 

Contemporary conventions for references

 

Many scholars today favour a form of referencing that came to the humanities via the social sciences. Although content notes may still be used, references are not given in the form of footnotes, but included in the text in parentheses, using only the author’s surname and the date of the publication with page reference e.g. (Pound 1983: 54). This bypasses the use of Latin conventions like ibid., and of lengthy bibliographical details in notes, which are anyway to be found in the bibliography. In this system, the entries for the bibliography are arranged for easy reference under an author’s name by date rather than by alphabetised titles. If there is more than one item in the same year, they are differentiated by a, b, c, etc., as in the example below:

 

Pound, Francis. 1982a. ‘Spectator Figures in Some New Zealand Paintings and Prints’. Art New Zealand 23: 40-45.

Pound, Francis. 1982b. ‘The Real and the Unreal in New Zealand Painting: a Discussion Provoked by Brown and Keith’s Introduction to New Zealand Painting’. Art New Zealand 25: 42-47.

Pound, Francis. 1983. Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand. Auckland: Collins.