Introduction
Classics, like all disciplines, has its own features and peculiarities. This can make writing a paper for a Classics course daunting; it can sometimes feel like there’s a secret code professors and other students know that you may not.
The goal of ClassicsWrites is to make clearer some of the inside information that classicists take for granted. Anyone can write a good Classics paper, and there’s no reason that the information needed to do so should be kept secret. The basic rules are the same as other disciplines and subject areas: do your research, cite other people’s ideas as appropriate, and base your arguments and interpretations on sound premises. This might look a little different if your premises are 2,500-year-old texts preserved on scraps of papyrus, but the concepts are the same.
How to Use this Guide
The information that follows is a mixture of two kinds of resources: the tools you need to do research in Classics and the tools you need to write a Classics paper. There is overlap between these two categories! If you’re sitting down to write a paper for a Classics course—maybe your first—then you might feel overwhelmed or out of your element. Don’t worry! The discipline of Classics works on the same principles as every other academic discipline, it just has a few oddities in what sources we use and how we talk about them