Pick a short passage in the reading for the course so far, and give a brief account of its content. The passage might be anything from a single sentence to a few sentences (e.g., a short paragraph or part of a longer one). Your account should be just a few paragraphs in length (c. 200-400 words), so I’m certainly not expecting the passage to be very long.

You should not think of yourself as summarizing the passage; instead you should describe it. That is, instead of speaking for the author by presenting what is said in a shortened form, you should speak for yourself about the passage. A complete description of a passage would be many times longer than the passage itself, so your account will be too short to say everything that might be said about even a very brief passage, and you will need to make choices about what to say. In doing that, you should focus on the questions “What does this mean?” and “What are the author’s reasons for saying this?”

You should give a full reference for the passage, and you can expect me not to accept your paper if you don’t. These references should always include (i) the title of the work the passage is from and the author of that work, but you should also provide (ii) enough information for someone to locate that passage on the page of a book. If the passage comes from one of the handouts, you can do the latter using information on the handout (e.g., the marginal “Stephanus numbers” for Plato, or the book and chapter numbers for Aristotle—as well as giving the translator in each case). If it’s from the Rosenthal anthology, you can cite that anthology by its title, the editor (i.e., Rosenthal), and the publisher, and give a page reference to note the location of passage in the anthology.

Again, I’ll give you feedback on these, but I won’t grade them: you will get full credit simply for making a serious effort. While I’d be happy to accept your assignment on paper, it is more convenient for me to receive work electronically; and, since I haven’t set up the course Canvas site for assignments, that means using e-mail—my address is helmang@wabash.edu. A short assignment like this could itself be the content of an e-mail message, but I’m also happy to get e-mail attachments.