Category: Blog Post

How to Write a CC Paper

After several years of teaching at Columbia and two years of teaching Contemporary Civilization in the university’s Core Curriculum, I’ve found that students often share common difficulties in writing argumentative essays. Since I’m no longer teaching at Columbia, I decided to write up some advice that has proven helpful to my students in CC, many of whom were unsure of how to approach these assignments. Although I had CC in mind as I wrote this document, I imagine that my suggestions are applicable to courses in a wide range of humanities disciplines: certainly classics and philosophy, but even literature (for those of you in LitHum).

You can download my write-up as a PDF. Like the other content on this site, the PDF is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to distribute it to students and teachers alike.

July 26, 2016

Dissertation Available on Columbia Academic Commons

Columbia University now hosts a PDF of my dissertation, Quintilian’s Theory of Certainty and Its Afterlife in Early Modern Italy on their open-access repository, Academic Commons.

The dissertation also has a permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8KP8293.

July 20, 2016

Update: Columbia LaTeX Dissertation Template

In the last stretch of editing, I made some significant changes to the template I used to format my dissertation according to the guidelines set by Columbia’s Dissertation office. I changed the typography (particularly spacing) to match the university standard, and I’ve fixed the page numbering for the various front matter elements. If you are just starting to write your dissertation and are worried about getting the formatting correctly (a major hassle, to be honest), you may want consult the template I’ve posted on Github, especially if you’re considering using LaTeX. For a more thorough treatment of the “memoir” LaTeX class that I used for writing, you also might want to scope out this very helpful manual (PDF).

April 6, 2016