humanities

Examples of humanities in the following topics:

• Introduction to Writing in the Humanities

• Writing in Different Academic Disciplines

  • Academic writing conventions vary substantially according to discipline—that is, whether one is working in the humanities, the social or natural sciences, or business.
  • Academic writing in the humanities explores questions that deal with human values.
  • The ultimate goal in writing in the humanities is to explain or understand the human experience—to use writing as a tool to reflect upon life.
  • In a humanities class, you might be asked to analyze a poem, a performance or play, a painting, a film, or even a musical work.
  • The social sciences, on the other hand, focus on human behavior and societies.

• Introduction to Writing in the Humanities

  • Academic writing in the humanities allows for some flexibility in style and voice, while still following specific conventions of format and documentation.
  • The ultimate goal in writing in the humanities is to explain or understand the human experience and human values.
  • The humanities—also called the liberal arts—include philosophy, religion, art, music, literature, history, and language.
  • Sometimes mislabeled as the "opposite" of the applied sciences or professional programs such as business, the humanities are in fact at the core of every human endeavor to pursue, discover, and pass on knowledge.
  • There is no single, all-encompassing type of writing in the humanities.

• Making Connections Across Disciplines

  • Writing across disciplines, ranging from the humanities to the sciences to business, requires nuanced treatment of the subject.
  • The topics discussed in this section are writing for the humanities, sciences, and business.
  • Writing in the humanities includes theoretical writing, creative writing, interpretive writing, and analytical writing.
  • Each of these qualifies as writing in the humanities, but each uses a significantly different style.
  • Social sciences focus on human behavior and societies.

• Gender-Neutral Language

  • According to The Handbook of English Linguistics, generic masculine pronouns (such as he) and gender-specific language serve as examples of how, historically, society has treated men as the standard for all humans.
  • The following sentence is a good illustration of avoiding sexist language by using the gender neutral "humanity" and "human" rather than the gender-specific "mankind": "Since then, humanity has entered a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of high faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected."

• Introducing and Formatting Quotations

  • Desmond Tutu counters, "Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden."
  • Silven maintained the assertion throughout his life: "It seems unlikely that this pairing [was] due to a human need for companionship."

• Making Your Own Arguments

  • Although the structure of a scientific paper differs from the model found in disciplines such as Humanities, scientific papers are still concerned with making an argument.

• Presenting the Prevailing Theories

  • In the sciences, even more so than in the humanities, the age of a theory has a major impact on how accurate that theory is considered to be.

• Quoting Relevant Passages

  • A direct quotation is a fragment of human expression that is being referred to by somebody else, in the exact words of the author or speaker.

• When to Use Chicago/Turabian Style

  • The most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style permits the use of both in-text citation systems ("Author–Date" style, which is usually used in the social sciences) or footnotes and endnotes (this is called "Notes and bibliography" style, which is usually used in the humanities).