Description
Gobbet Exercise prompts can be found in the Course Reader pp. 31 – 44. For this assignment you are required to write on TWO topics and only ONE topic can be chosen from a particular week. In short, a complete Gobbet Exercise should look something like this:
Primary Source 2 (Course Reader: Week 3 – option B) 500-800 words
To help spur the little grey cells further, here are a few example questions to keep in mind during your primary source analysis:
- What is the source being analyzed? Is it a text, an image, a video?
- What sort of material is it (journal entry, poem, song lyrics, painting, inscription, political pamphlet, documentary etc.)?
- Who created it?
- Why was it created?
- Where and when was the source created?
- What was happening concurrently in the larger historical picture (e.g. war, famine, the rise of Cthulhu) when the source was created?
- How reliable was the creator’s knowledge of the events (s)he describes?
- Is the creator biased? If so, which way? How is this shown?
- Is the creator trying to persuade the reader/viewer/listener of a particular point?
- Can anything be said about the creator’s attitude or point of view from the source?
- Does the creator’s attitude reflect or conflict with general attitudes at the time?
For more tips on how to write Gobbets please refer to the Course Reader (p. 30). Under “Student Resources”, in the Modules folder, you will find a document titled Gobbets Made Easy and two gobbet examples. If you have any questions, please ask!
