一、课程信息
科技史英文写作
课程号：08409040
课程体系：硕士专业选修课、博士写作必修课
学分：2
考核方式：book review, fellowship application, job cover letter, or research prospectus of 1,000- 1,500 words. 10 minute presentation of research, along with Q&A at the end of term.
教学方式：讲授+讨论
负责教师：雷震 John Alekna
二、课程介绍：
The object of this course is to offer training for relevant graduate students in English language writing and research methods with the goal of facilitating international publication. Towards this end, each two-hour class will be split into two sections:
1. The first hour will be devoted to lecture and discussion of research methods, further explicated below.
2. The second hour of each class will be devoted to the group critique of students’ English language samples.
Research Methods
The course’s methods section will be divided into three broad topics across the semester: research, forms of academic writing, and forms of writing in the history of science. Research methods topics will include: national, university, and private archives, digital secondary research, citation methods, primary source analysis and paleography. The middle weeks of the semester will be devoted to discussions of forms of professional and academic writing, in particular fellowship research proposals, job application letters, books reviews, peer-reviewed articles, and dissertations. The final five weeks will be dedicated to common forms of writing in the history of science. The class will discuss strengths and weaknesses of biography, prosopography, materials studies, technological transfer, and full field histories. To conclude, the students will give brief presentations in English on their own research in the style of a major conference, and reply to peer questions.
Group Critique
The group critique, positive and constructive in nature, will focus on vocabulary, grammar, style, and argumentation with an eye toward improving the clarity and firmness of rhetoric. Each sample will be limited to one or two pages in length in order to facilitate close analysis, and maybe taken from one of the two course writing assignments, viz; a) a book review or fellowship research application of 1,000-1,500 words, and b) a publication or research prospectus of around 2,000 words. Writing samples may also be volunteered from other English language compositions. I would ideally expect one (or at most two) students to offer short examples of their work each week.
In this way, the group critique writing workshop aims to offer practical training through the analysis of real student writing. It takes a lot of courage to submit your writing to the scrutiny of others, but that is the job of an academic. A volunteered piece of writing will emerge much stronger for having been read and critiqued by so many eyes. We expect there to be strengths and weakness (and even mistakes) in every piece, so there should be no fear of embarrassment. Any weaknesses will be similar to those your classmates make, and we will all learn by observing how to strengthen your writing’s deficiencies. In my experience, students will often want to share a piece of writing with the workshop before they must submit a journal article, conference proposal, or job letter so that the final draft is as strong as possible. Early drafts are welcome as well.
What sort of critique will we engage in with the writing samples? Obvious mistakes in spelling and grammar will be pointed out, of course, but more emphasis will be placed on the style, clarity, and persuasiveness of the writing. How does one produce good English prose? It is a challenge even for native speakers. An enduring guide to good writing is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style; this will be our Bible. First published in 1918 and revised in 1959, Elements of Style sets forth important principles that every writer should abide by, and which we will apply to our writing samples in class. I will distribute a digital copy of Elements but I encourage everyone to purchase their own copy and consult it frequently. We will begin each class with a series of questions about the writing sample:
• What is good about this piece?
• What is the topic or argument?
• Who is the intended audience?
We will then turn to questions of style, as outlined in Elements:
• Use the active voice.
• Short sentences are better than longer.
• Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
• Put statements in positive form.
• Use specific, concrete language.
• Omit needless words.
• Present a progressive argument: i.e. building on itself with evidence toward a conclusion.
• Express coordinate ideas in similar form (parallel construction).
• Keep related words together.
• Keep to one tense.
I encourage comments, questions, and all forms of participation from the class as we work through these points in class. Teaching will be conducted, as far as possible, through the Socratic method which emphasizes questioning over lecturing. The goal, once again, is to help students gain practical experience correcting and improving prose so that they can apply that knowledge independently to their own work. I am very much looking forward to this portion of the class. Writing workshops were one of the most enjoyable aspects of my own graduate experience, and I hope you will similarly look forward to a productive time together. Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions or comments.
三、课程大纲与参考文献
Weekly Syllabus
Research
1. Introduction
a. Describe research projects
2. Archives
a. National Archives
b. Universities
c. Private Foundations
3. Digital secondary research
a. Google scholar
b. University databases
4. Citation
a. Major style books (Chicago etc.)
b. Yale East Asian style guide
5. Analyzing Primary Source Documents
a. Several documents from various periods
b. Key questions when reading primary documents
6. Paleography
a. Original documents from various periods
Forms of Academic Writing
7. Fellowship & Postdoc Research Proposal & Job Application Cover Letter
a. SSRC writing guide
b. What does it look like?
8. The Book Review
a. What are the goals of a book review?
b. Read recent reviews from Isis
9. The Article
a. What goes in to an article: form, length, function
b. What are recent topics in Isis?
10. The Dissertation
a. What are the goals of a dissertation?
b. What are recent dissertation topics at Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton?Forms of Writing in the History of Science
11. The Biography
a. Mary Terrall, “Biography as Cultural History of Science” Isis. 97:2 (June 2006)
b. Mary Jo Nye, “Scientific Biography: History of Science by Another Means?” Isis.97:2 (June 2006)
12. Prosopography
a. Charles King. Gods of the Upper Air (Penguin Random House, 2019)
b. Lewis Pyenson. “ ‘Who the Guys Were’: Prosopography in the History of Science,” History of Science 15(1977) 155-188
c. Steven Shapin and Arnold Thackray, “Prosopography as a Research Tool in History of Science: the British Scientific Community 1700-1900” History of Science 7(1974) 1028
13. Case Studies: Episodes and Materials
a. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage, 2015.
b. The Great Cat Massacre
c. The Great Rat Massacre of Hanoi
d. Alexander Yersin “The Bubonic Plague at Hong Kong”
14. The Field History & Historiography
a. McEvoy, John G. The historiography of the Chemical Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science. (Routledge, 2015.) Intro, Chapters 1-3, 6
b. James Reardon-Anderson, The Study of Change: Chemistry in China, 1840-1949. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.)
c. Why are institutional and departmental histories less common in the West?
15. Comparative Work and Technological Transfer
a. Seely, Bruce Edsall. "Historical patterns in the scholarship of technology transfer." Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 7-48.
b. Edgerton, David. "From innovation to use: Ten eclectic theses on the
historiography of technology." History and Technology, an International Journal 16, no. 2 (1999): 111-136.
16. Presentations
a. Student Presentations:
i. Based on their publication or research prospectus final project
ii. 10-15 minutes per presentation
iii. Questions from audience
