Slade School of Fine Art Undergraduate Student Handbook 2015/16
APPENDIX 1 – HISTORY AND THEORY OF ART COURSEWORK ESSAYS
This section sets out the requirements for submitting essays and the criteria and marking schemes used
for the assessment of essays in the BA.
For more advice on the writing of essays see the Guidelines for the Writing of Essays, below. For
general requirements for History and Theory of Art courses, which include essays, see the History and
Theory of Art Courses, General Introduction, above.
Essay format checklist
Essays must:
 be written in English;
 be word-processed;
 be typed on one side of the page only;
 have margins of at least 2½ cm;
 have page numbers;
 be double spaced;
 include footnotes or endnotes (see Guidelines for the Writing of Essays);
 include a bibliography (see Guidelines for the Writing of Essays);
 be securely fastened together;
 include a separate cover sheet, available from the Intranet or the Slade Office; Include your student
number, the course title, name of course tutor, an accurately stated word count and date handed in.
*UCL Academic Regulations for Students: Undergraduate Programmes state that 'the names of
students must not appear on any summative academically assessed student work submitted for
marking' and 'that the marking of all summative academically assessed student work should be
conducted anonymously and marks entered against candidate numbers'.
Make sure that you submit three ‘presentation’ copies of all essays and Independent Studies.
Always keep a copy of your essay for yourself. Never hand in the only copies. The Slade School
cannot take responsibility for copies of essays or dissertations that are accidentally lost or destroyed.
Handing in essays
 All essays must be handed in on or before the handing-in date;
 Essays must be handed in to the Slade Office, not to the course tutor;
 All essays must carry a cover sheet, available from the course Moodle, which must be completed
and attached to the essay.
 When submitting three hard copies of their essay, students will also be required to sign a
document confirming that the work is original and not plagiarised and stating the word count of the
essay.
 In addition to submitting three hard copies of the essay by the deadline, BA students are required
to submit a copy electronically using Moodle. Details of how to do this will be sent to you in an
email. If you encounter any difficulties submitting your essay with Moodle you should email the
Courses and Student Support Officer, Lou Adkin, on l.adkin@ucl.ac.uk
GUIDELINES FOR WRITING ESSAYS
Essay titles
Course Tutors will normally issue a list of essay titles related to the topics of the course lectures or
seminars. You need to choose a title from this list. If you wish to write on a topic not included in the list,
you must consult with the course tutor first, otherwise you may fail your assessment.
Criteria of Assessment
When you are writing your essay you should bear in mind the criteria by which it will be assessed.
You will be credited for ambition of aim and scope, clarity, coherence, vividness and presentation, the
way in which ideas are related to specific works of art and cultural phenomena, and the use of evidence
and research. The evident aims and ambitions which you have set for the piece of work will be matched
with the ways in which they have been realised.
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Your markers will assess the essay under the following headings, so try asking the following questions
about your essay:

Presentation
Does your essay conform to the guidelines for formatting? Is it double-spaced, numbered, with correctly
laid out footnotes, all the relevant details of a bibliography and with your name on each copy? Does it
have relevant illustrations with captions to identify the images, artists and dates?
 Choice and realisation:
Have you chosen your subject well, selecting an appropriately sized field? Is this an ambitious subject
(e.g. make sure you are not just repeating material learned in lectures)? Have you set yourself goals
you have been able to achieve?
 Clarity:
Is your essay clear to the reader? Does the writing and the structure facilitate the communication of
your ideas? Do its sections hold together well?
 Examples:
Do you write good, vivid descriptions of well chosen art works or cultural phenomena? Do these
descriptions contribute effectively to your arguments?
 Research:
Have you familiarised yourself with the literature on your chosen subject? Have you looked at objects
carefully, read books, periodicals, etc. and do you exhibit your research in footnotes and a
bibliography?
 Argument:
Is your essay persuasive and well argued? If you have chosen not to write an argument, have you
convinced your reader that your subject is of interest and importance?
 Aims of essay writing
The aim of essay writing is to make your views known through a persuasive, coherent argument and to
reach conclusions that are backed up by evidence, not to express your unsupported opinions.
 Essay structure
Essays should be clearly structured, with an introduction, the development of the argument in structured
stages through a number of paragraphs following a coherent sequence, and a conclusion.
Each paragraph should make sense on its own. Each time you begin making a different point, you
should start a new paragraph. Try to keep related information together rather than jumping from one
subject to another without finishing what you want to say about the current subject. The beginnings of
paragraphs should be clear. Either indent them or leave a clear space between each paragraph.
 Getting started
Starting to write is often the most difficult part of writing the essay. Make sure that you leave yourself
plenty of time to write the essay. Start by noting down ideas or writing a rough plan of the essay. Don’t
be too critical of yourself at this stage. Don’t worry about what you start with, you can always add to it,
edit it or put the information in a different order. Go back and read what you have written. Ask yourself
which bits are not clear, where do you need to add more information or detail, which sections can you
leave out?
 Scope of the essay
It is important to limit your topic. You may run into difficulties if you take on too large a task. You may
state in the essay what areas you are excluding from the discussion and why. It is better to achieve a
limited task well than to take on too much.
 Be ambitious
Aim high – just as you would in making an art work.

Be clear
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Slade School of Fine Art Undergraduate Student Handbook 2015/16
You should try to write as clearly as you can. Imagine someone reading the essay: is each sentence
readable? Will they understand why what you are writing is important and what is at stake? Will they be
able to follow your argument? Have you provided enough 'signposts' to enable them to understand what
you are doing?
 Be interesting
How can you make your essay more vivid? Are your descriptions of works of art evocative and
accurate? Don’t just re-state familiar clichés. Try and say something interesting and original.
 Make a convincing argument
Can you persuade the reader to go along with your conclusions? Will your reader be convinced by what
you say?
 Be specific
Don’t make vague generalisations. Back up what you say with examples and discussion.
 Give examples
Each step in your argument should be exemplified by reference to works of art, literature, critical writing
or whatever is appropriate. Where relevant, works of art should be described in some detail. Include
illustrations if possible (see section on Illustrations below).
Use of short quotations is encouraged, but you should be careful not to use quotations to 'pad out' your
essay. If you do use longer quotations you must have a specific reason for doing so. This should be
made clear in your essay and you should analyse the quotation in detail in your essay rather than just
letting it stand and speak for itself.
References should be included for all quotations (see sections on Acknowledgements and Plagiarism
below).
 Read your own essay
Reading your essay aloud to yourself will enable you to discover whether your sentences work, or
whether they are too long or clumsily structured.
Acknowledgements
The guidelines set out here follow the Chicago Manual of Style Guide for referencing, this gives
information on referencing for both arts and humanities and social sciences subjects, please be sure to
follow the advice for the arts and humanities which uses a note i.e. footnote/endnote and a bibliography,
these are listed as N and B in this guide online. You can access the guide at:
www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.
Quotations
Use single quotation marks (‘---’) with double quotation marks (“---”) for quotes within quotes. Longer
quotations should be separated from the main text and indented.
Examples:
 Short quotations
In his book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. 1850-1980 Martin J Weiner
contrasts the growing ‘myth of an England essentially rural and essentially unchanging’ 1 with the
vision it supplanted of Britain as ‘the Workshop of the World’.2
 Quotations within quotations
‘Thus it is’ Jon Thompson tells us, ‘that the process of “empowerment” which began with David Smith
emptying out the solid sculptural form and using formal dislocation as a way of encouraging the act of
1 Martin J Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-
1980, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 55 (first publication: Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
2 Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, 1981,
58.
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Slade School of Fine Art Undergraduate Student Handbook 2015/16
reading, reaches its conclusion with Post-Minimalism and Arte Povera. “Poverty” had finally turned the
viewer into the one who “acts”.’3
 Longer quotations
Two letters from 1844 expressing Wordsworth’s concerns for the Lake District when an extension of
the railway into the area was proposed are discussed in an essay by John Frow in October in 1991.
Frow quotes from one of them:
[....] good is not to be obtained by transferring at once uneducated persons in large bodies to
particular spots, where the combinations of natural objects are such as would afford the
greatest pleasure to those who have been in the habit of observing and studying the peculiar
character of such scenes, and how they differ one from another. Instead of tempting artisans
and laborers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers, to ramble to a distance, let us rather
look with lively sympathy upon persons in that condition, when, upon a holiday, or on the
Sunday, after having attended divine worship, they make little excursions with their wives and
children among neighboring fields, whither the whole of each family might stroll, or be
conveyed at much less cost than would be required to take a single individual of the number
to the shores of Windermere by the cheapest conveyance. It is in some such way as this only,
that persons who much labor daily with their hands for bread in large towns, or are subject to
confinement through the week, can be trained to a profitable intercourse with nature where
she is the most distinguished by the majesty and sublimity of her forms.4
After discussing the concept of cultural capital (‘taste’) that makes itself apparent in these letters,
Frow goes on to observe ....
References: Footnotes and Endnotes
The aim of a note is to enable the reader to find the source.
 A first quotation or use of a text should be footnoted (at the bottom of the page) or endnoted (at the
end of your essay) in full. You can see some examples of footnotes, for the quotations given as
examples above, at the bottom of the page.
 Subsequent quotations from a text should use a shortened version of the full footnote.
 Consecutive references to the same text without reference to any other texts in between need only
give the author, title, date and page number (see the example in footnote 2).
Bibliographies
These should list all of the texts consulted in order to write the essay. They should be listed
alphabetically by author, putting the author’s surname first, and with the place of publication, publisher
and date but without brackets. When listing an article in a journal, all the page numbers for the article
should be cited in the bibliography. When listing from an online journal at the end include the date on
which you accessed the journal.
Examples of Footnotes/Endnotes and Bibliography Entries
 Books
References to books by a single author
Notes for books should take the form: author, title [in italics], translator [if any], (place of publication,
publisher or gallery, date should be in brackets) page reference e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1966), 96.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references) would be:
Alberti On Painting, 1966, 97.
3 Jon Thompson, ‘New times, new thoughts, new sculpture’ in Gravity and Grace. The
Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975, (London: Hayward Gallery, The South Bank
Centre, 1993), 34.
4 William Wordsworth, ‘Kendal and Windermere Railway’ letters to the Morning Post,
December 11 and 20, 1844 in John Hayden (ed.), Selected Prose, (Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1988), 81-82, quoted in John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of
Nostalgia’, October 57 Summer (1991): 148.
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In the bibliography this book would be listed so that place of publication, publisher and date
are not in brackets:
Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, trans. John R Spencer, New Haven
and London:, Yale University Press, 1966.
 References to essays in volumes of collected essays
If you refer to an essay in a collection, give the author and title of the essay [title in single inverted
commas (‘---’)] first, followed by 'in' and then the editor [name(s) followed by ‘(ed.)’ if there is one editor,
‘(eds.)’ if more than one editor], title [in italics], (place of publication, publisher or gallery, date of
publication in brackets) for the footnote or endnote give page number for the quote only. e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
Stephen Daniels, ‘The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’ in The
Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past
environments (eds.) Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 60.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Daniels, ‘The political iconography of woodland’, 1988, 67.
In the bibliography change the order of surname and first name of the author of the essay,
instead of the abbreviated eds used edited by and include page numbers of the whole
essay, but place them before details of place of publication, publisher and date of the volume.
Daniels, Stephen ‘The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’ in The
Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past
environments edited by Denis Cosgrove, and Stephen Daniels, 43-81, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
(Note: when there is more than one editor, it is only the surname of the first or main editor that is given
surname first followed by et. al. and is used to alphabetize the list.)
 References to articles in print journals
If you refer to an article in a journal, give the author and title of the essay [title in single inverted
commas (‘---’)] first, followed by the journal title [in italics], followed by volume and issue number of the
journal, with the date in brackets followed by a semi colon [ : ] and then page numbers, for the footnote
or endnote give page number for the quote only. e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
Karen Beckman ‘Gender, Power and Pedagogy in Coco Fusco’s Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A
Room of One’s Own (2005) and Operation Atropos (2006)’ Frameworks no.s 1 and 2, Spring
and Fall (2009): 127.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Beckman ‘Gender, Power and Pedagogy in Coco Fusco’s Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A Room
of One’s Own (2005) and Operation Atropos (2006)’, (2009): 132.
In the bibliography:
Karen Beckman ‘Gender, Power and Pedagogy in Coco Fusco’s Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A
Room of One’s Own (2005) and Operation Atropos (2006)’ Frameworks no.s 1 and 2, Spring
and Fall (2009): 125-38.
 Exhibition catalogues
References to exhibition catalogues of one person shows
The name of the artist may be used as the author, in italics. e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
Tony Cragg (London: Arts Council of Great Britain 1987), 25.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Tony Cragg, London, 1987, 17.
If this is the only exhibition by Tony Cragg referred to simply use:
Tony Cragg, 1987, 17.
In the bibliography:
Cragg, Tony London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987.
 References to exhibition catalogues of group shows
Begin the reference with the title of the exhibition, list the gallery or museum after the place where it is
located, ending with the date of publication of the exhibition catalogue, e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
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Slade School of Fine Art Undergraduate Student Handbook 2015/16
Gravity and Grace The Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975, (London: Hayward
Gallery, The South Bank Centre, 1993), 12.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Gravity and Grace, 1993, 12.
In the bibliography:
Gravity and Grace. The Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975, London: Hayward
Gallery, The South Bank Centre, 1993.
 References to essays in exhibition catalogues
These use much the same form as for essays in volumes of collected essays. e.g.:
Full footnote/endnote:
Jon Thompson, ‘New times, new thoughts, new sculpture’ in Gravity
Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975, (London: Hayward Gallery
Centre, 1993), 34.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Thompson, ‘New times, new thoughts, new sculpture’ 1993, 35.
In the bibliography:
Jon Thompson, ‘New times, new thoughts, new sculpture’ in Gravity
Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975, London: Hayward Gallery
Centre, 1993, 34.
and Grace. The
The South Bank
and Grace. The
The South Bank
 For references other than quotations
use ‘see’ to indicate a source for an idea. e.g.:
See T. J. Clark, 'Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of "Olympia" in 1895', Screen, vol. XXI,
no. 1, Spring (1980): 37.
or if you want to specify the topic with a full sentence, write e.g.:
On Manet, see T. J. Clark, 'Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of "Olympia" in 1895' Screen
vol. XXI, no. 1, Spring (1980): 38.
 Electronic sources
You may wish to cite references from ftp sites, telnet addresses, www and gopher pages, newsgroup
and discussion list postings, and e-mail messages. There is a Final Draft International Standard ISO
690-2, Part 2 of which specifies data elements and their prescribed order in bibliographic references to
electronic documents. The most commonly used sources from the internet for academic purposes are
online journals, please use the following format:
 References to articles in online journals
If you refer to an article in a journal, give the author and title of the essay [title in single inverted
commas (‘---’)] first, followed by the journal title [in italics], followed by volume and issue number of the
journal, with the date in brackets followed by the URL. In the bibliography give the date on which you
accessed it:
Full footnote/endnote:
Perry Anderson ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’ New Left Review no. 48, November/December
(2007), http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2695.
Short footnote/endnote (for subsequent references):
Perry Anderson ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’ New Left Review no. 48, November/December
(2007), http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2695.
In the bibliography:
Perry Anderson ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’ New Left Review no. 48, November/December
(2007), http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2695 accessed 19 March 2010.
For further details about how to cite references from electronic sources please refer to:
 Li, Xia and Crane, Nancy B. Electronic styles: a handbook for citing electronic information. 2nd.
ed., 1996. This is available in the Main Library on 1 week loan, shelved at Bibliography D 207
Li and there is also a Web version available.
 Harnack, Andrew & Kleppinger, Eugene. Online: the internet guide for students and writers.
1997. This is available in the Main Library on 1 week loan, shelved at Wilkins Cluster INT:HAR.
Electronic resources should be used to access articles that are published online but not otherwise
readily available in printed form or provide electronic versions of printed magazines and journals such as
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Frieze or The Journal of Visual Culture. Electronic journals recognised as scholarly sources are
available at www.ucl.ac.uk/library/. General web searches to sites like Wikipedia should not be used
instead of books, periodicals and articles set out in your course bibliographies, for general definitions of
subjects such as performance art, the avant-garde etc. Electronic versions of the extended Oxford
English Dictionary can be accessed via UCL’s Metalib available at www.ucl.ac.uk/library/. Dictionaries
and Encyclopaedias should aid your preliminary research process but are not in themselves sufficient
evidence of appropriate research.
Illustrations
You should include illustrations of works of art or other visual materials that you discuss in your essay,
especially if you describe or analyse that work in any detail. A good photocopy (colour or black and
white) will be adequate for this purpose, and you should provide either a caption for each illustration or
number each illustration and provide a numbered list at the beginning or end of your essay. Each
caption or entry on the list of illustrations should include the source of the picture, e.g.: the artist, the title
of the work or thing, date, the museum or collection where it can be found.
Collaborative writing
If you wish to collaborate with another student on a piece of writing, you must discuss this with your
tutor first and obtain permission. If you are given permission to go ahead, you must clearly state how
the collaboration has been carried out, and who is responsible for what parts or aspects.
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