Information for courses at Furman University taught by C. Blackwell, Fall 2018.
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The main project for this class will be a digital edition of an English translation of an ancient work. This assignment will be accomplished in parts. The result will be the “project” and the “final essay” noted on the syllabus. Together they will constitute 40% of the final grade, but they will be graded incrementally.
Edition A version of a text created according to stated goals and values.
Electronic Text A text encoded in some digital form: web page, pdf, word processing document, image.
Digital Edition An edition of a text that can be read digitally.
(1/4 of the 40% of Final Essay Grade, 10% of final grade.)
A Keynote or Powerpoint (vel sim.) presentation of no more than 7 minutes, teaching an audience about your chosen story or figure, offering basic information and compelling illustrations.
You will prepare a script for your presentation, in the form of a Markdown document.
You will prepare a presentation following your script. This will consist of a few slides, either showing easily-digestable information or an illustration (or both).
You will present your work to the class, following but not reading verbatim from your script.
| Points | Graded Item |
|---|---|
| 2 | Script: grammar, syntax, spelling |
| 2 | Script: technical aspects, Markdown, .docx conversion |
| 4 | Script: content |
| 2 | Presentation: tasteful design |
| 2 | Presentation: on time |
| 6 | Presentation: content |
| 2 | Presentation: delivery |
| 20 | Total Points |
For this, you can rely on the text alone; you do not need to do original research. At a subsequent stage, you will have to find other sources for the topics discussed in your passage.
Due Monday, November 12.
(1/4 of the 40% Final Essay Grade, 10% of final grade.)
Take the content you generated for your presentation, and some additional research, and write an introduction to your essay from Nepos or Plutarch.
Your introduction should have the following parts:
A description of Plutarch or Nepos, his dates, a little about his life, and a general description of what he wrote.
A description of Lives of Emminent Commanders or On the Excellence of Women in general. What is the overall theme? How does the author introduce it? What are its parts (you do not need to provide a complete list, but perhaps say “The work contains [numer] of essays…” and a few examples apart from the one you are dealing with).
A discussion of your special essay: its topic, a brief overview of its theme, and what seems to be the point. This is the hard part. I can talk with you about this if you get stuck.
A short bibliography. This should include the works you cite in the body of your essay.
“Further Reading”. One or two books, resources, or articles for people who want to know more.
Write this in a Markdown file, saved in /vagrant/fyw/writing/ in your VM.
10/10/2018 Draft of script for presentation due. Create a Markdown file in …/fall2018vm/fyw/writing/. If you are in the VM, you can do this with touch /vagrant/fyw/writing/presentation_script.md; then you can open it in Atom and type. You will get these back with comments on Friday, 10/12/2018.
10/15/2018 Presentations start. 3 per class on 10/15, 10/17, 10/19, and 10/22.
10/31/2018 Annotated Bibliography. Find 3 or 4 sources that provide helpful information or insight into your topic. At least one of them must be related to the author (Plutarch or Nepos); at least one must be related to the topic (Lysander of Sparta, the Trojan Women after the Trojan War, etc.). Choose sources that are scholarly but that would be helpful to someone coming to this topic without any prior knowledge. In an electronic document (your choice for this one), give a correct citation to each source, followed by a short paragraph explaining what someone might expect to learn from the source. I expect this to be about one page long; if it is two pages, it is too long.
11/12/2019 (Monday). Rough draft of the paper on your ancient essay.