A Short Guide to Writing About Art

A Short Guide to Writing about Art offers invaluable advice for any art course where students write papers. It addresses a wealth of fundamental matters:

• description versus analysis
• som critical approaches to art (e.g., formal analysis, cultural materialism, gender studies)
• getting ideas for an essay
• engaging in peer review
• developing paragraphs
• organizing a comparison
• using bibliographic tools, including the Internet
• quoting sources
• writing captions for illustrations
• avoiding sexist and Eurocentric language
• editing the final draft
• documenting sources, using either The Chicago Manual of Style or The Art Bulletin style
• preparing for essay examinations

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.