JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art¹ is a welcome addition to the growing but still inadequate group of texts aimed at helping translate writing-across-the-curriculum theory into successful practice. Two kinds of books are needed: one, a comprehensive survey for use in the composition classroom that introduces beginning students to the conventions and complexities of academic writing in general; and two, small individual volumes designed to help more advanced students write well and in an appropriate style and form for their courses in the various academic disciplines.

The pioneer work by Elaine P. Maimon and her Beaver College colleagues, Writing in the Arts and Sciences, although uneven in its treatment of different kinds of academic writing, serves those composition instructors, trained in English language and literature, who want a text to help them teach students about writing in all the major fields. A Short Guide to Writing About Art is a groundbreaking model instructional tool for faculty members, outside of departments of English, who wish writing to be an integral part of their courses but who are concerned that they have no expertise in the teaching of writing.

Sylvan Barnet, Chair of the English Department at Tufts University, understands the problems faced by most across-the-curriculum writing programs. He knows that "it is a truth universally acknowledged (among English teachers) that the cure [for poor student writing] is not harder work from instructors in composition courses; rather, the only cure is a demand, on the part of the entire faculty, that students in all classes write decently" (p. v). He hopes to convince faculty members that with the aid of a writing guide such as his, which offers careful explanations of the principles of composition together with sample essays by students and professionals in a particular field, they can require and obtain a reasonable quantity and level of written work.

Barnet understands the problems of comprehensive writing programs not only from the instructor's but from the student's point of view. He recognizes the difficulties students confront when assigned, perhaps for the first time, a paper in, say, art history. For those with basic writing problems, Barnet tries to make his guide serve as a general writing handbook by including various sections from the successful composition textbook he co-authored with Marcia Stubbs, Barnet & Stubbs's Practical Guide to Writing, The art history student will judge it particularly helpful that the author has reworked these materials so that all the references are now to artists and works of art. Thus the student checking on where to place an apostrophe will find: "Augustus John's sketches (his last name is John), Jasper Johns's recent work (his last name is Johns)" (p. 116).

For the student baffled by the language of an unfamiliar discipline, Barnet defines the meaning of terms such as "iconography "  "value " "saturation," and "composition." Particularly helpful for the student about to tackle a very common kind of art history assignment is the author's careful explanation of the differences between "description" and "formal analysis."

Recognizing that most students taking their first art history course have neither read nor written an essay on art, Barnet offers selections by both student and professional art historians. He includes student themes that are "conspicuously impersonal" and "more personal" ("is there a more unnerving work of art than Munch's lithograph of 1896?" begins one), thus making the surprisingly-needed-to-be-made point that there is more than one way to approach a writing assignment.

The selections from art historians are more varied and all are extremely well chosen. Perhaps the most useful of the writing samples is Rudolf Arnheim's short discussion of  Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. An excellent model of analysis, it is particularly helpful because it focuses on what is unfamiliar to most novice students of art, the visual, rather than the literary aspects of a work. Arnheim's words show the reader how Michelangelo uses certain lines and contours to render his Adam passive and his Creator dynamic and life-giving. The analysis not only illuminates an individual painting, it suggests a way of looking at art.

Barnet is probably most helpful to his student readers when he offers them guidance in how to look at—or what to look for—in a work of art. A long section of his book called "Asking Questions to Get Answers" (pp. 21-38), includes scores of possible questions that art historians pose as they examine paintings and drawings, sculpture, architecture, and photography. "If the picture is a portrait, how do the furnishings and the background and the angle of the head or posture of the head and body (as well as the facial expression, of course) contribute to our sense of the character of the person portrayed?" "Are figures harmoniously related, perhaps in a similar stance or shared action, or are they opposed, perhaps by diagonals thrusting at each other?" "What is the purpose of the building?" "Do the form and materials relate the building to its neighbors?" As students use these questions to develop the substance of essays, they learn to think as well as write like professionals in the field.

A Short Guide to Writing About Art provides a model for the kind of book that should be written for every academic discipline. Its imitators, however, might wish to consider some of the decisions that Barnet made in writing his text and determine how completely they want to follow his lead. One of his most important decisions was to keep to a mere 144 pages. Anticipating the complaint, "Another book for the student of art to read?" he offers Williams James's anecdote of the unwed mother's defense: "It's such a little baby," and adds that "it is short enough to be read in addition to the readings the instructor regularly requires.

However, while most students will find the slim lines of this volume very attractive, some may feel, as many do about Strunk and White's masterpiece of brevity, that they want--and need--more of a good thing. Students are more likely to refer to a writing guide as they need help than read it straight through, and the added weight of valuable additional materials—such as a glossary of terms, a selection of writings on architecture and photography, information on what art history teachers look for in a student essay—might please rather than dismay.

If we compare this volume with one Barnet wrote some years ago in his own field, A Short Guide to Writing About Literature, we find that the earlier book is twice as long as the new one. Why? Are literature students less likely to grumble at being assigned a writing text in addition to their other readings than are students of art history? Perhaps. But surely, it was Barnet's intimate knowledge of student needs combined with his expertise as scholar that produced a satisfyingly complete guide to literature, while his less expert command of the field, fortified by his justifiable desire for brevity, resulted in a somewhat less serviceable text on art.

Barnet tells us in his Preface that he consulted eminent art historian/teachers in writing his new book. Had he collaborated with one of these scholars, together they most likely would have produced a longer and even more useful textbook than the very good A Short Guide to Writing About Art.