Conventions & Strategies in the Humanities
The Humanities: are the fields of learning and research that concern themselves with human
experiences and include English studies, the arts, philosophy, and languages and so on.
Humanists, in their writing, tend to reflect in some way on the culture of society by examining
the texts that a culture produces. A text can be written, visual, or oral.
Some Characteristics:
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Knowledge can come from the self and the work or from what others have written or said
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Evidence for an assertion or thesis comes from the work or text

A thesis is supported by a series claims (arguments)
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Validity or proof comes from the persuasive power of the claims and then the examples or
textual evidence that support the claims. Since many of the texts are written, humanist use
quotations as evidence that supports their claims.

Humanists work with both primary texts (works of art, novels, plays, poems, paintings and
so on) and secondary texts (what others have said about the novel or play and so on).
Common Genres:
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Literary interpretation of a work

Development of a new critical theory (like feminism) to apply to a work
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Application of a theory to a work
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Critical evaluation of an article

Research Paper

Proposals
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Position Paper
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Reviews of novels, plays, films, performances and so on
Style:
Style is a result of all the many choices a writer makes from subject matter to vocabulary to the
construction of sentences, punctuation, and organizing the text. As a student, you will discover
that there are various academic styles related to disciplines. The style manual you use in the
humanities is the Modern Language Association or MLA. Occasionally, humanists use APA
because a particular journal requires it.
Features:
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Style depends on the rhetorical situation
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Use of “I”
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Use of active voice
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Use of jargon or specialized language in academic work. This is particularly true of writing
that discusses or applies a critical theory to a work. For example, if we were giving a novel
a Marxist reading, we might use vocabulary from Marxist literary theory. We might talk
about the “class structures” and the “proletariat.”

Use of informal vocabulary if appropriate for rhetorical situation

Use of colorful vocabulary
Hansen, Kristen. A Rhetoric for the Social Sciences. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1998