Gingrich Library: Painting I -- Fall 2017: Writing and Citations

Writing Tips

Raphael. Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami. 1511-12. oil on panel. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

The OWL at Purdue is an excellent online resource to help you cite properly.

There are also a number of Free Citation Tools online.

Also, consider making an appoint ment at The Writing Center!

Writing About Art

Writing About Art. Munsterberg, Marjorie.
Writing About Art has been revised repeatedly in response to comments from students and colleagues.
A short guide to writing about art / [electronic resource] Sylvan Barnet.
Among the new features of the sixth edition are new guidelines for using the World Wide Web and the Internet for art-historical research, five new checklist (e.g., a checklist for evaluating Web Sites), ten new illustrations, and the style guide published by "The Art Bulleting." Several sample essays are also included, accompanied by analyses that show readers the particular strengths of effective writing.
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Also available as a print book in the stacks at: 808.066 B261s5
Writing about art / Henry M. Sayre.
This straightforward guide prepares students to describe, interpret, and write about works of art in meaningful and lasting terms. Designed as a supplement to Art History survey and period texts, this efficient book features a step-by-step approach to writing-from choosing a work to write about, to essay organization, to research techniques, to footnote form, to preparing the final essay. For beginners as well as more advanced students.

Avoiding Plagiarism

When it is time to gather all of your notes and start writing the paper, avoid the most common mistake - plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only taking large parts of someone else's work and not attributing credit to that author; paraphrasing sections of a work, even using synonyms and citing the work, is also plagiarism.

Use direct quotations to support the paper's thesis.
Rethink and rewrite the author's original idea and express it in a new way.

Even if the ideas are rewritten, the source of the idea must be cited and the author given credit.

For further information, see

interactive site at University of Texas at Austin
interactive site at Prentice Hall publishers
or the material on paraphrasing from the OWL at Purdue.