HIS 2035
The Ancient Middle East
Fall 2024
Reading response assignment
Due: Thursday, September 30, 2024,
BEFORE CLASS (via Brightspace)
Instructions:
This assignment requires you to read a
particular article that will be posted on Moodle approximately two weeks in
advance of the due date. You will need to “respond” to the article by answering
the following questions:
- What is this article about? Briefly summarize its
contents and conclusions. (Be careful not to rely on the abstract (if there is one) or just
the introduction when you do this.)
Write approximately
200 words for your summary
- Note and explain two things that were new
to you (new information or new ideas,
perhaps a particular term that the author did not explain, or the name of
a key figure). (Was the topic itself new to you?) Why do you think these
things are important to know about?
Look up these new
terms/ideas, define them, and note where you found the information in your
bibliography.
- Bibliography: Include the complete bibliographic reference to the article
itself, as well as bibliographic references for the two sources
that you used in the “new things” section (above).
These must be
formatted correctly. I recommend Chicago style, but if you are
comfortable with MLA or APA and can do them correctly, those are also
acceptable. (You do not need to include footnotes in this short assignment,
unless you are comfortable with a footnote citation style and can do it
correctly.)
Here is an example
of a bibliographic reference for a journal article in Chicago style:
Satterfield, Susan.
“Livy and the Pax Deum.” Classical Philology 111, no. 2 (April 2016):
165–76.
Here is an example
of a bibliographic reference for a web page in Chicago style (there is
some flexibility on this, depending on the information in any given website):
Yale University.
“About Yale: Yale Facts.” Accessed May 1, 2017.
https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.
Total assignment should be in the
range of 500 words, not including bibliography.
This is intended to be a short assignment.
We will be discussing the article in
class on the day that it is due, therefore assignments must be handed in prior
to class (via Moodle as PDF). But bring
a copy with you to class, so we can have a robust discussion.
This assignment is PASS/FAIL. It is
worth 10% of your course grade.
Late assignments will be penalized
for half their value (i.e. if you hand it in late, you will only receive 5% of
the course grade for it).