A Short Guide to Writing About Art [Paperback]

Sylvan Barnet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1996 | ISBN-10: 0823049809 | ISBN-13: 978-0823049806 | Edition: 5

Key Benefit: A Short Guide to Writing About Art, Eighth Edition, the best-selling book of its kind, equips students to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, and prepares them with the tools they need to present their ideas in effective writing. Key Topics: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. Market: This book is a perfect complement to any art course where writing is involved

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

* 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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Back Stage Books; 5 edition (December 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823049809
• ISBN-13: 978-0823049806
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,797,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Handy reference work, September 28, 2000

By 

Susan E. Wood "Susan" (Rochester, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short Guide to Writing About Art (Paperback)

My Art History department adopted this book as its official style-manual a few years ago, and we assign it as a textbook for our writing and methodology class. To my great dismay, however, our bookstore has had some trouble ordering it this year, and so I have encouraged my students to "cut the Gordion knot" by ordering it from Amazon. The chapters on choosing a topic and organizing an argument are, I think, useful and well-written, but the greatest value of this book is Chapters 9 and 10, which provide clear instructions for writing footnotes and bibliography. This may be a mechanical task, but it is a frustrating one for many students, because there are so many possible formats to use (MLA, Turabian, etc.) Barnet's system has the virtue of being designed specifically for research papers about art and art history, and the format he recommends is clear and logical. The book also reprints the instructions for contributors from the Art Bulletin, the most prestigious art-historical journal in this country, and so will be of value for graduate students and recent PhD's preparing their first works for publication.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars wow!, April 7, 1998

By 

Lydia (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short Guide to Writing About Art (Short Guide Series) (Paperback)

I was quite surprised, but I really like this book. I was having a lot of trouble writing an art history paper and this book really helped clarify my thoughts. The book asks pointed questions that helps you focus your thoughts. I would strongly recommend this book to someone writing an art history paper.

89 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful in some ways, not in others., July 4, 2003

By 

Ryan "The Doctor" (Meadville, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short Guide to Writing about Art (7th Edition) (Paperback)

I recently read the 6th edition of this book in hopes that it would help me to improve my ability to understand and write about art. I found that the book is a direct, well-written primer for someone finishing high school or beginning their undergraduate degree, but for someone with a bit more experience, it turns out to be a mixed bag.

I know next to nothing about visual art. I'm the quintessential "knows what I likes, and likes what I knows" type of guy. On the other hand, I'm a graduate student in English, so I'm well-practiced in writing essays and in applying various theoretical and critical methods. I read this book in the hopes that it would help me to better understand art. That is, I wanted to learn, as Sylvia Barnet puts it, "How does art mean?" The beginning of the text does introduce some basic questions and ways to think about different kinds of art, ranging from painting, to sculpture, to architecture, to photography, to video art, etc. However, this is not meant to be an instructional book to teach someone about art. It is more like an assistant text for a freshman-level art history course. A great deal of the book is spent discussing how to organize essays, sentence structure, revising, formatting, and some instruction on critical methods. But, again, this book is not a book on writing. It's not about art, it's not about writing, so what is it? Well, like it says, it's about writing about art. A good deal of this book was useless to me, but some of it was enlightening. If you've already got some experience studying the visual arts, or some experience writing, or you just want a really indepth study on either, pick out something else. If, however, you just want an easily understood, basic primer on writing and art, this isn't a bad choice at all.