Descriptive Essay About New York
Anastacia Iacono
Have you ever received feedback in a piece of work saying 'be more critical' or 'not enough critical analysis' but found yourself scratching your head, wondering what that means? Dive into this bitesize workshop to discover what it is and how to do it:
Being descriptive shows what you know about a topic and provides the evidence to support your arguments. It uses simpler processes like remembering, understanding and applying. You might summarise previous research, explain concepts or describe processes.
Being critical pulls evidence together to build your arguments; what does it all mean together? It uses more complex processes: analysing, evaluating and creating. You might make comparisons, consider reasons and implications, justify choices or consider strengths and weaknesses.
Academic writing requires criticality; it's not enough to just describe or summarise evidence, you also need to analyse and evaluate information and use it to build your own arguments. This is where you show your own thoughts based on the evidence available, so critical writing is really important for higher grades.
We're not looking for a list of summaries of individual sources; ideally, the important evidence should be integrated into a cohesive whole. What does the evidence mean altogether? Of course, a critical argument also needs some critical analysis of this evidence. What does it all mean in terms of your argument?
Critical writing is going to require critical language. Different terms will give different nuance to your argument. Others will just keep things interesting! In the document below we go through some examples to help you out:
Note: Using original historical sources from diaries and journals housed at the Museum of Old York archives, James Kences has created a colorful and descriptive essay on the art and craft of tannery as practiced in the 18th century in York and elsewhere.
In a diary that was kept from 1769 until 1786, Moody recorded his daily routines. Interspersed among brief notes related to weather, events in town, and even astronomical phenomena, such as the comet that appeared in the late summer of 1769.
While it might seem strange that the son and the grandson of ministers would choose to become a tanner, his kinsman, Nicholas Sewall, who arrived in York in the first decades of the eighteenth century, had already set the precedent.
The tannery would have consisted of a group of shallow pits dug into the ground. The diary referred to "2 pits next to the road," and there were allusions to other pits as well. The animal hide, or skin was gradually converted into a usable piece of leather by being subjected to lengthy treatments in these pits. The process required several weeks.
It was an unpleasant working environment, as the odor generated would be hard for most to endure. The treatments could include a variety of ingredients that can be traced back to remote antiquity. Tanners regularly utilized such substances as animal excrement, and when any of these materials were placed in stagnant pools in large quantities, the stench must have been overpowering.
The tanner depended upon the animal hides provided by his customers, many of them local farmers who had recently slaughtered livestock. It should hardly be surprising that cowhides were mentioned often, but they did not represent the only hides received, notes Edwin Tunis, a popular writer and illustrator of the 1960s.
The finished leather, after months of labor, was mostly intended for shoes. "To calf skin for your wife's pr. of shoes," was a transaction of 1773 that involved John Garey, and there are many others, referring to shoes for adults and children from the list of local families. "Sole leather," Tunis has observed, "came from the butt of a bovine hide, the thickest part near the backbone. The thinner belly parts of cowhide made uppers for heavy shoes and boots."
A basic description of the tanner's work from 1764: "the preparing of skins or hides in a pit, with tan and water, after the hair has first been taken off, by putting the skins into lime-water." In reality, there were multiple phases, physical exertion with various tools, and for high quality in the finished product, extreme care had to be exercised. The entire operation was closely monitored.
For tanning, hemlock or oak bark ground in a mill was used. Ichabod Jellison was owed five pounds for "one cord hemlock bark." James Allen supplied oak bark. For the milling, John Plaisted's horse was hired. The horse, fixed to the outer end of a pole connected to a center rotating post, turned in a circle to move a grinding stone, breaking the bark into small fragments. The pulverized bark in a water solution was known as woos.
The animal hides were layered into the tanning treatment, and the diary made direct references to this activity, with as many as four layers described. Thus, in September 1784, we found "ground bark, and layered my sole and upper leather into the fourth layer." The ooze was gradually strengthened to make it suitable for tanning. Hemlock imparted a distinctive reddish hue.
At least eight men called themselves tanners in Colonial York. Daniel Bean and Nathaniel Webber, both active during the 1750s, were closest to Moody's generation. Given the traditional character of the trade, it is very likely the working area for any of the other tanners would have resembled the subject of this essay. There would have been the grouping of pits, a bark house, and a bark mill. The same would have been true for hundreds of other sites in the New England Provinces and beyond to the entire length of the Atlantic seaboard.
style guides active reading This is a listing of the academic resource centres at York. The Counselling and Development Centre has a collection of information resources for students on a variety of subjects, such as study skills and time management. essay trouble shooting guide
Many students are unclear about what makes a research essay original, given that so much of the substantive content is taken from sources. Although you do rely on the research materials of others, a research essay is not just descriptive and it is not just a summary of what other people have said. You make an original contribution to your essay in the following ways:
First, read the question carefully. Then break it down into its constituent parts and create an initial essay outline based on this breakdown. Dissecting the question in this way helps you identify the areas you have to research and focuses your attention on all parts of the question.
One of the current public debates is about the effectiveness of the use of censorship to deal with pornography. Compare and contrast the anti-censorship and pro-censorship positions. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each position. Conclude by choosing sides: how would you deal with the pornography problem?
Too often students begin writing their essay before they are properly prepared. This is usually very frustrating and can lead to writers' block, mainly because they don't really know what they want to say and they have not yet developed a clear structure in which to say it. Often the problems that students have writing essays have little to do with their ability to write and more to do with fuzzy thinking. Do your thinking work before you begin to write.
Students often begin to write before they are ready because they have run out of time. In order to avoid poor time management, you should prepare a `time schedule' as soon as you are given an essay assignment. This involves making a list of all the steps necessary to complete the assignment with an estimate of how long each step will take. You should then block out the time necessary over ALL the weeks available to you. Do not try to do all the work in a short period of time. This reduces the time available to synthesize the material.
Evidence shows that one of the keys to success as a student is effective time management skills. For more information, see TIME MANAGEMENT FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS" in your kit. If your skills in this area are very weak, sign up for a workshop with the Counselling and Development Centre, 145 Behavioral Sciences Bldg, 736-5297.
Scholarly material comes in two forms: journals and periodicals, and books (which are either integrated texts written by one author or an anthology of articles written by different authors). Avoid using journalistic material from newspapers or popular magazines unless specifically required by your assignment.
It is important to select appropriate resources. Often students read too much irrelevant or outdated material. Read introductions and conclusions of articles and books to assess whether they are suitable to your task. Check the date of publication to ensure that you are reading current material. Do not rely too heavily on one or two sources: read widely looking for a variety of viewpoints.
Finding and selecting sources depends on excellent library skills. Take advantage of the workshops offered by the Scott library to introduce students to YORKLINE, periodical use, CD-ROM, library research etc.
Once you have selected your sources, you will go through a secondary selection process deciding what material will help you to develop your arguments. You will include only a portion of what you have learned into your final essay. Trying to incorporate too much material into your essay can create as many problems as using too little material. The point is not to regurgitate and reproduce all the material but to select relevant sources that will help you answer the question and defend your thesis.
When you are gathering information, carefully note all your sources. Be clear in your notes the sources of direct quotes, indirect quotes and even general approaches to material. Be sure that you reference all the material carefully and correctly. It is very difficult to go back later and figure this out. Note that disorderly research can often lead to plagiarism.
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