Wednesday, November 4, 2009

For Credit: Problems with the ECCO assignment?

Feel free to post here any particular difficulties or challenges you are finding in navigating the ECCO site or finding a suitable text for this writing assignment.

Deadline: Friday (11/6), start of class.
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4 comments:

LaurenBurke said...

There is so much preliminary work that goes into choosing a text for this assignment. I find myself becoming impatient while navigating the site, because I am finding interesting material that I could potentially write about, but I also want to continue searching to see if there is something better!
Also, my first search resulted in many texts that were extremely long. It was difficult to decide if I should just take an excerpt from one of those readings or keep looking for a piece that is able to begin and end within 2-10 pages.

November 5, 2009 at 11:20 PM
eoneal said...

I agree with Lauren. The task of picking a text seems more challenging then writing the assessment itself. The topics given are so broad, and encompass so much, it is hard to narrow down the search to only one text to write on, when looking at all of the options in totality each individual text seems like just a small piece of the overall story. I have also run into the problem of the texts being extremely long, entirely too long to narrow down to a 3-4 page paper. Should we just continue searching until we find a suitable text that is shorter?

November 6, 2009 at 1:05 AM
Michael Kim said...

Agreeing with them -- it's difficult for me to "stick" with one particular topic and finding a source that would best illustrate it when I am suddenly deciding to find so many different options to look at even one text; the moment I grasp an idea of what I want to write about I suddenly think of a different idea within context to that source then at the same time I become curious if there are better sources out there that might touch on the topic I chose.

And at the same time, the length of the paper itself does truncate a lot of my initial anticipation on what to write if I know there is a limit to how much I could expound on a specific topic -- thus needing to spend much more energy focusing instead of exploring the ECCO system

November 6, 2009 at 1:47 AM
KW said...

Your instructor here. Your paper doesn't have to be a comprehensive treatment of the large topic you've taken as a framework for finding a text. A paper that says, essentially "Here's an interesting thing I found--and this is what's interesting about it" (cast in more sophisticated interpretive terms, of course) is fine. Keep in mind, too, that writing about an excerpt from a longer work is fine. In 3-4 pages, you can't really take on a 300-page text and say anything particularly interesting about it--but you can closely examine an episode, a few startling verse paragraphs of a long poem, a subsection of an argument. That's why I put in the "2 - 10 page excerpt" limitation, which bears ONLY on what you explicitly address and cite in your paper--you are welcome to read more widely in the text you choose in order to understand its overall structure, purpose, and context.

There's also the fact that you need to hand in a print-out of the material you write about: C18 texts run long (as you've no doubt discovered!) and I don't want to kill that many trees.

Hope this clarification helps!

November 6, 2009 at 7:50 AM

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