Keyword essay--description and links to individual essays

From Keywords

Keyword essay: Your final essay for the semester will be a collaboratively written essay on your keyword, to be produced here in the Keywords Collaboratories. You are not being asked to rewrite or improve upon the entry from Keywords for American Cultural Studies, but to write an essay that has a different scope, a different archive of materials. The original entry, after all, was a keyword entry for "American Cultural Studies" as a whole; you can think of your essay as an entry in Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008. You may find that your entry (or one of the other entries in the book) is a good formal model for the essay your group produces, though the content will surely be quite different.

You will write this essay in the designated page here in the collaboratory. Each of you can generate new text, edit one another’s text, delete, add to it, and so on. I’ll give a demonstration on how to do this early in the semester.

• Your conversations in the Blackboard discussion board throughout the semester can serve as notes toward this essay, giving you an extra motivation to keep tracking your keyword continuously. The same goes for the dictionary definition you produced for the midterm; both the definitions and the usage examples may find their way into the essay.
• Like many of the entries in the volume, yours may refer to the OED definition of your keyword, though this is not required.
• Be aware that each edit you make is recorded, with your name attached, in the “history” section of the collaboratory. For that reason, especially if you are revising someone else’s part of the text, you may want to explain your revision in the “comments” or “discussion” section of your collaboratory.
• Your keyword essay will be stronger if you start working on it fairly early in the semester, building it up gradually. This is not a task you can accomplish in the day or two before its due date, which is 5pm Tuesday, April 29, the last day of class.

Keyword essay collaboratories

• "Class," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Empire," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Ethnicity," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Market," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Marriage," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Nation," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Public," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "Religion," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"
• "White," an entry in "Keywords for American Studies 2000, Fordham University, Spring 2008"