Writing About Art

Appendix II: Writing the Paper           

1. Know what the assignment is! The 19th century is not the same as the 1900s and a painting is not a sculpture.  Read the assignment carefully and ask questions before you begin work.  Always, always, check the due date and plan your life accordingly.
2. If the subject of the paper is a work in a museum, go to the museum as soon as possible.  This is not the same as checking the website.  It means actually going and looking at what has been assigned.  Regardless of the topic, make sure you know everything about the work(s) as a physical object.  This includes size and the materials from which it has been made. Other questions may be important.  If it is a sculpture, does it have one point of view that is primary?  Is there one place from which everything makes sense?  If it is a painting, is there an ideal viewing distance?  What happens when you get closer or move farther away?
3. Write down all your visual observations.  Don’t worry about putting them in order.  The most important thing is to notice as much as you can, and take notes that will make sense to you later. Remember, a reproduction is not the same as the work of art it reproduces. If you are not able to see the original, you must take this distortion into account.
4. If your assignment is a visual analysis, your notes from the museum visit will become the basis of the finished paper.  Organize them in a way that will make sense to someone who has not seen the work.  The groupings you create will form an outline of what you want to say, with each group becoming a paragraph.  If a paragraph is very long, if it even comes close to being a full page of text, separate the material into several paragraphs.  Sometimes it is easiest to write the topic sentence last, when you see what you have written.
5. Even a research paper must begin with careful visual observations.  They will determine the direction of your research.  Once you have identified the questions you wish to study, you should begin looking for relevant material on the Internet or in a library catalogue. Sometimes a single source is enough, but a research paper probably requires more than that.   (What does the assignment say?)  It is best to assemble a list of more sources than you expect to use, since some of them may be unavailable and others may turn out to be useless.
6. No matter what the topic, you will have to decide which sources are authoritative. This is not always easy, even for an experienced historian.  Sometimes a fact that is repeated by everyone is wrong, and it comes from a single source no one has bothered to check.  The Internet is especially problematic.  Make sure you know how to judge the reliability of a website.  Generally speaking, the ones that end in .edu, .org or .gov are better than those that end in .com.
7. A good place to start is Grove Art Online, which includes a bibliography at the end of each article. If you find a single source that seems reliable, figure out where its information comes from. Does it have a bibliography, or perhaps notes that provide references?  Another place to start is JStor, a searchable archive of periodicals.  A book review in Art Bulletin often surveys all of the relevant scholarly literature on the subject before getting to the book being reviewed.  This type of review offers a quick way to get at least one person’s opinion of what is useful and what isn’t.
8. Once you have a list of possible sources, you have to find them.  It is very unlikely that everything you need will be available online.  Try to find books and periodicals in your local library. Remember, you can get most material through interlibrary loans.
9. An annotated bibliography is DIFFERENT from the bibliography that comes at the end of your paper.  It consists of complete references to the sources you found, cited in the proper form for a bibliography, and a summary of the contents of each one.  Give an idea of what the reader will find in the source and how it might be useful for your research topic.  An account of a work written by its maker, for example, will be interesting in a different way from a factual historical account of its creation written by an art historian.  It is not that one is true and one is false (although that also might be the case), but that the points of view and purposes of the two writers are entirely different.  Some sources might be useful for pictures, and another because an excellent index allows you to find the information you need.  Perhaps the bibliography is exceptionally complete and gave you lots of leads.
10. PLAGIARISM.  Once you begin your research, you must keep track of your sources and exactly what each one said.  Plagiarism occurs when you use someone else’s words or someone else’s ideas without indicating the source.  Changing individual words in someone else’s text, even changing every word in the relevant passage, and not citing the source is still plagiarism. You have stolen the idea even if you haven’t used the same phrases to express it.  This can happen by accident if you have not kept good notes, because you can’t be sure of where you read what.  In addition, make sure you keep track of exact pages and websites so that you will be able to cite them properly.
11. Even before you have assembled everything you need, you should begin to outline your paper.  It is only by actually using the material you have that you discover what is missing.  Ideally, you will have the time to find what you need to know as you discover what you need.  This will not be possible if you have waited until the last minute to complete the assignment.
12. Any paper, no matter what its length, must have a structure.  The unit of an essay is the paragraph, which presents the material on a single subject in a logical order.  It must begin with a topic sentence, which states the subject to be discussed.  Underline your topic sentences and see if they make an outline of your paper.  They should.  Then make sure that the paragraph really is about the subject of the topic sentence.  You may have written a fine paragraph, but not one that fits the topic sentence.  Keep the paragraph and change the first sentence.  Or keep the topic sentence and fit it to a new paragraph.
13. A long paper should have an introduction, several paragraphs about the subject of the paper, and a conclusion.  A short paper need not have a formal introduction and conclusion.  In all cases, however, the first sentence or sentences must tell the reader what the subject is.  If the paper is an analysis of a work of art, give the basic facts about that work right away.  Even a beautifully written paper will not make sense to a reader if the subject is not clear.
14. A direct quotation from either a primary source or a secondary source can change the pace of the writing or explain an idea more vividly than a paraphrase would.  If it will run more than a few lines in the body of the text, it should be single-spaced and set off as a single block, indented five spaces from the margin.  The note indicating the source should come after the period at the end of the quotation.
15. You must cite your sources in a consistent and comprehensible way, so that a reader can find the exact place you found your information. Most art historians use the Humanities version of the Chicago Manual Style.   Those forms for notes and bibliography follow.