answered: Writing Guidelines: Your papers should help you both to unde

  

Writing Guidelines:
Your papers should help you both to understand the Confessions better and to write intelligently,
clearly, and precisely about this text. As you write, you are to imagine an intelligent and curious
reader who has no knowledge of the Confessions or of Augustine.
For the short paper (5-6 pages), you must come up with a question about the Confessions that
relates to one of the following topics: God, creation, love and/or desire, habit, Manicheanism,
women, education, sin, and Augustine’s sense of self. You must state your question clearly in
one sentence and in the form of a question, You are to use at least two secondary sources relevant to your question. These sources are meant
to help you become a more sensitive and sophisticated reader of the Confessions. You are to
select these sources from among those I have assigned.
1) Be aware as you write of the question you are addressing. Take up the question directly
and be explicit about doing so; tell the reader the question that guides your paper.
2) Remember that this course is about the experiences, attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and practices
that Augustine writes about in his Confessions. Make sure your paper maintains a focus
on “getting at” what the text reveals about the question on which you are writing.
3) Be sure to anchor in the Confessions your response to the question you are addressing.
You need to reference the Confessions to support or illustrate any claims you make; it is a
good idea to introduce quotations from the text for these purposes.
4) When you quote from the Confessions or a secondary source, tell your reader what each
quotation means—interpret it for her—and tell her why it is significant to your question.
If you do not know what a quotation means, do not introduce the quotation into your
paper.
5) Provide details and write with precision.
6) Write for an intelligent and curious reader who has not read the Confessions and has no
idea who Augustine is.
7) Your paper should have an introductory paragraph. In this paragraph:
? Identify the Confessions as the text on which you are writing. Provide its date of
composition, and tell the reader something about its author and intended audience.
Ask yourself what your reader needs to know that will help her understand the focus
of your paper and it importance, and tell her this.
? Tell the reader what the driving question of your paper is. After reading this first
paragraph, the reader of your paper should have a clear sense of what your paper’s
focus is.
Your paper must have a bibliography, sometimes called a “works cited” page. Familiarize
yourself with the format for footnotes/endnotes as well as for the bibliography.
Divide your bibliography in two sections indicating the primary and secondary sources
you have used.
PRIMARY SOURCE
Augustine. Confessions, tr. F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006.
SECONDARY SOURCES
McCurry, Jeffrey. “To Love the World Most Deeply: The Phenomenology of the World
as Gift in Augustine’s Confessions.” New Blackfriars, 92, no. 1037 (January
2011): 46-54.
Notice that the bibliography uses a “hanging indent”: if the bibliographic entry has more than
one line (as in the entry above for McCurry), subsequent lines are indented five spaces.
14) Your paper must have footnotes or endnotes. Notice the differences in formatting
footnotes (or endnotes) and bibliographical entries.
Your first footnote will look like this:
Augustine, Confessions, tr. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006), 1.1, 25.
Jeffrey McCurry, “To Love the World Most Deeply: The Phenomenology of the World
as Gift in Augustine’s Confessions,” New Blackfriars, 92, no. 1037 (January 2011): 46-
54.
Footnotes (or endnotes) will indicate the page or pages to which you are referring. Citations of
the Confessions should include, in addition to page number, book and chapter number.
After you cite a text once, if you cite it again in the immediately following note, use “ibid.” If
you are citing the same part of the text, you do not need to indicate the part again. If you are
citing a different part of the text, you must add the necessary information. For example,
1. Jeffrey McCurry, “To Love the World Most Deeply: The Phenomenology of the
World as Gift in Augustine’s Confessions,” New Blackfriars, 92, no. 1037 (January
2011): 46-47.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 49.
4. Augustine, Confessions, tr. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006), 1.1,
3.
5. Ibid., 4.7, 61.
6. Ibid
USE THOSE SOURCES I PROVIDED ONLY PLEASE!
Confessions BOOK 1 is the PRIMARY SOURCE
here is a link to the book:
Citings for the sources
To Love the world most deeply source:
McCurry, Jeffrey. “To Love the World Most Deeply: The Phenomenology of the World as Gift in
Augustine’s Confessions.” New Blackfriars, 92, no. 1037 (January 2011): 46-54.
Love Source:
Van Bavel, Tarsicius J. “Love.” In Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald,
et al. Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1999. 509-16.