CLST 277-WI: The World of Late Antiquity Fall Semester 2006 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Writing Exercise 1

Goals

• To gather information from a documentary text: practics skills of analysis in reading
• To summarize your information clearly and concisely: practice skills of exposition in writing
• To prepare for in-class work on analysis and building arguments

The approach:

1. Read the two documents Lee presents as items #2.11(a) and 2.11(b). For the time being, do NOT read Lee's introduction, but study just what the documents themselves tell you, and study closely. What information or assertions do they both contain?
2. Identify patterns of information both documents contain, both with regard to the specific information and with regard to the types of information. Formulate hypotheses about why this information or this type of information would have been important for these documents to specify. What additional information would you need in order to confirm or refine your hypotheses?
3. Sort the information you have gathered and, for the written part of this exercise, make a list (just a list of correctly-formed sentences, for now, not a whole essay) that concisely summarizes the patterns you have identified. The question your list implicitly addresses should be,
   With what elements do these two documents each follow a common pattern? Aim for a page, more or less, with each item of your summary-list presented as a paragraph. For ease of legibility, make it word-processed, double-spaced, 12-point Times Roman.
4. Doublecheck Strunk and White, chh. I, III, IV, and make sure you are writing clearly and correctly.
5. In preparation for class Friday 8 September, now read Lee's introduction to item #2.11, as well as item #1.15, and re-read the documents in item #2.11. Think further about your hypotheses. What do these documents tell us about what happened in summer 250?
6. Come to class Friday 8 September with your summaries in hand, ready to contribute to collaborative discussions of your theme. The summaries will be collected in class.

Revised 5 September 2006 by jlong1@orion.it.luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/depts/classics/