A Short Guide to Writing About Art (The Short Guide Series)

Barnet, Sylvan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321101448 ISBN 13: 9780321101440

Publisher: Pearson, 2002

A Short Guide to Writing About Art, Seventh Edition, the best-selling text of its kind, equips students to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculpture, and architecture, and prepares them with the tools they need to present their ideas in effective writing.

This concise yet thorough guide to “seeing and saying” addresses a wealth of fundamental matters, such as distinguishing between description and analysis, writing a comparison, using peer review, documenting sources, and editing the final essay.

This text is a perfect complement to any art course where writing is involved.

From the Back Cover:

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.

About the Author:

Henry M. Sayre is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Oregon State University-Cascades Campus in Bend, Oregon. He earned his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Washington. He is producer and creator of the 10-part television series, A World of Art: Works in Progress, aired on PBS in the fall of 1997; and author of seven books, including A World of Art, The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams, The Object of Performance: The American Avante-Garde since 1970; and an art history book for children, Cave Paintings to Picasso.