Assignment 1: Critical review article (including publish and revision)
The end product of assignment will be a 750-word critical review article on a topic of your choice, relevant to your study programme. The writing process will consist of several stages:
write an initial, but complete publish of the article for peer review
send in the publish together with a cover sheet to tell your reviewers what you’re
aiming to do, and where you might need advice
revise and edit your publish based on your peer reviewers’ comments and your own reassessment of what you’ve written
formally submit the revised final version, together with the initial publish and the cover sheet.
What counts as a “critical review”?
What we’re looking for is an essay focused on one particular piece of work (see below) that describes what it covers, analyses what it is trying to do and how it does it, and evalutates its usefulness, relevance or value for a particular audience.
You should not simply produce a judgment on the quality of the work, although you may find you need to do so as part of your analysis. You will need to produce evidence for your interpretations of the work: this may include examples from the work itself, responses from other critics or researchers who have also dealt with the work, or research literature that’s focused on other topics but makes relevant points.
Choosing a topic
The focus needs to be on a single piece of work of some kind, rather than a general topic area: for instance, The Selfish Gene would qualify but “genetics” would not. You can take a broad definition of “Piece of work”: it doesn’t have to be a publication. It’s a good idea to choose something that interests you personally, and that will give you some useful practice in an area you’re likely to be working on later on:
HSTM students who are interested in going on to research might want to choose a history monograph or journal article. Alternatively, you could choose a museum gallery or exhibition, a TV documentary, a popular history book, a podcast series, or a historical fiction novel, TV series or film.
SHC students might choose a research article or a museum or science centre exhibition, a public engagement event, a radio or TV show, podcast or social media channel, a popular science book, or a novel or fiction TV show or film that features science (or engineering, medicine, healthcare, etc) in some meaningful way.
If you’re not sure whether what you’re planning is appropriate, ask the course co- ordinator for advice.
Audience
The intended audience for the critical review article is fellow professionals: either history researchers or science communicators, as appropriate. Think about what these people already know, what else they will need to know to understand your source, and what they might find particularly useful, interesting, important, annoying, or harmful from your source.
Step 1: the publish and cover sheet
You will need to submit the initial publish by Friday 4 October at 10:00.
This is not an official coursework submission: we just need to collect it electronically in time to circulate to the other students for the peer review stage. We won’t be using the Turnitin system that’s used for assessment submissions: details of how to submit will be available on the Blackboard site for this course.
The publish doesn’t need to be technically polished but it should be complete, covering all the ideas you expect to address in the final version. It should be at or near the same length as the final version – 600 to 750 words – and written as full paragraphed prose, not an outline or notes.
The first page of the publish document should be a cover sheet, filled in to explain some features of the review that your peer reviewers need to know about. Copy the cover sheet questions from the template available on Blackboard and include them at the top of the publish document, separated by a page break.
page 14
Step 2: peer review
During Week 2, all students will be arranged into small groups to provide peer review comments for each other’s work. After the publishs have been submitted, you will be given online access to the publishs submitted by the other students in your group.
You will need to review the publishs and complete the feedback in the online system before the Week 3 class on Wednesday 9 October, when we’ll be discussing the results and how you can use them to improve your publish.
You don’t need to do technical copy-editing as part of the review: we’re not looking for corrections on grammar, typographical errors, etc. The only time you should suggest a correction is if you’ve found a factual error, or an argument that doesn’t work.
Instead, you need to be giving your peers feedback on how well their critical review is constructed, how convincing their critique is, and how it could be improved. Do they need more examples? Clarification of terms? More evaluative statements? Reorganisation of the structure?
Step 3: revision and final submission
After the peer review and our class discussion on revising and editing, you’ll have the chance to go back and revise your review based on the feedback you’ve received.
This does not mean you have to integrate every bit of feedback, but your revision needs to show that you’ve considered the feedback and edited the publish to improve it.
The maximum length is 750 words, excluding the title and any references. 750 words is the upper limit: there is no “10% rule or other leeway.
The deadline for submission is Thursday 17 October at 14:00 (2pm). Submission will be via the Turnitin system used for most assessed coursework at this university: full details will be in the course area online.
You should submit a single document in .docx format, containing
1. your initial publish
2. your cover sheet with information for peer reviewers
3. your final version after revision
in that order, separated by page breaks.
My notes:
1) use as many sources as needed
2) pick from SHC students because that is my course.
3) stick to 750 word limit Max