English 461: Professional Writing

Encyclopedia Article Assignment

Dr. Tina L. Hanlon
Ferrum College
thanlon@ferrum.edu

English 461 Home Page
English 461 Schedule

Guidelines for Writing Encyclopedia Articles

Links to sample biographies: Index at this link

from Dr. Whited's past class: http://www.ferrum.edu/lwhited/eng461/bios.htm

Jodie Foster by Dr. Grimes, edited by Mr. Horn.     Samples by Mr. Horn.

Samples by Dr. Hanlon. Use my samples for content and bibliography and giving a blurb on the writer, but your format does not have to be like mine.

Required parts of encyclopedia articles:

• biography no more than 500 words
• picture of your person
• word count at end of biography
• bibliography with two or more of your best sources (in MLA or APA format)
• your name at end, with or without e-mail link
• short autobiographical statement on you (as in my examples)
• link to English 461 biographies page: http://www.ferrum.edu/thanlon/profwrit/biosprofwrit.htm

Topics for encyclopedia articles:

You can choose any fairly famous person you want, someone related to your major or an interest of yours. But if you are interested in writing something that I might select to stay on my professional web pages (which you could then put on your resume), here are some suggestions.

• Any author or illustrator of a book about dragons, one on my web pages or one I don't have listed there yet: http://www.ferrum.edu/thanlon/dragons
• Anyone connected with southern Appalachia who might go in the web site AppLit, especially someone related to literature or folklore. Look at the Authors index and Author Links pages for ideas (but don't do Marilou Awiakta, Anna Smucker, Marc Harshman, Richard Chase, George Ella Lyon, or Rex Stephenson). You could do Becky Mushko, who teaches composition at Ferrum and has been written about in some newspaper articles, has won writing contests, etc. You could do poet Frank X Walker, who will speak at Ferrum in March, or poet Patricia Johnson, who is a Ferrum graduate. If you don't do an author, illustrator or storyteller, you might do a folk musician or someone depicted in a film set in Appalachia, or some historical person who has been written about in Appalachian literature, such as Frankie Silver or the nurse Mary Breckenridge or a famous Cherokee person such as Sequoyah or John Ross (Chief during the Trail of Tears). You could do folklore collector James Taylor Adams from Wise County because, although he's long dead, he's not in reference books much and we have his archives here. The very famous storyteller Ray Hicks just died last year and he would be a good choice.
• Anyone involved with environmental issues and literature (especially Appalachian or children's lit.). See this page and pages linked to it: http://www.ferrum.edu/thanlon/ecology/ecopicbks.htm.

Format Guidelines for Creating a Web Page from a Word File:

• Save the Word file as html (also called Save as web page). When you save as a web page, give the file a clear, logical name, not too long, ending in .htm or .html. It's best to do this soon after you start creating the page. You can still move the file around, send it as an attachment, etc., the same way you handle word processing files (it's still a Word file; it's not on the Internet yet).
• Remember as you go along that some types of formatting that are possible in Word will not show up on a web page. The help menus explain some of this if you need to figure out the differences.
• Don't use curly quotation marks or they will have to be changed for the Internet. Use only straight apostrophes and quotation marks. (In the Format menu, under Autoformat and then Autocorrect, you can tell Word to use straight marks. If you already have curly quotation marks in your document, you can then use Find and Replace to change them all, or just delete and retype them.)
• If you need to use other special characters, such as diacritical marks, you'll have to experiment with those or check the help menus to see if they will show up on the Internet.
• If you use fonts that are not standard web fonts, such as Times New Roman (on this page), Arial, or Geneva, there is good chance they won't show up in browsers when viewed on the Internet (same thing with background colors and textures, etc).
• Within cells you can center or justify text and objects as in a paragraph outside tables.
• Use Hyperlink in the Insert menu to add a link anywhere on your page to anything on the Internet (see above for required link). If you want a link on your name to your e-mail address, you will find how to do a mail to: link in Hyperlink also.

Tables and Graphics

• Margins won't exist unless you put all your text and graphics into a table. So insert at least one table and place the parts of your document in its cells. If you want, look in the table menu for ways to change the number of rows, columns or cells in tables, change margins inside table, etc.
• My samples show what a table looks like with a simple black line as the border. If you want no border or want to change the borders of all or part of a table, put the cursor in the table, select Borders in the Format menu, and then make your choices. Notice that there is a bar in there indicating what your change will apply to—a whole table, one cell, etc.
• Remember that when you want to change the features of a table, cell, row or column, you need to have clicked the cursor inside it first.
• In the Table properties menu, you can center your whole table on the page and alter its size. Mine is set to take up 85% of the screen, centered, when you view it on the Internet, and since mine has a border showing, you can see how this works.
• To get a picture from the Internet, click (right click on PCs) on the picture you want to download, and save it to your own disk. You can name it whatever you want like any other file. Then insert that file in your Word/web page. If there are strict prohibitions on a web page against copying a copyrighted image, don't use that one.
• If you try to insert graphics that are huge (not just on the page, but in the amount of memory, no. of Ks they take up), that can create problems and you may have difficulty e-mailing them to me. It's easy to make a picture smaller or larger by clicking on the image to select it (you'll see a border that just shows the outer dimensions of the image itself, which may include some white space) and then using the cursor to pull diagonally at the corners when the picture is selected. Once I resized mine in my web page, their electronic size was reduced a lot (e.g., from 140K to 12 K).
• When you save the file as a web page, any graphics you have inserted into it will automatically save in a folder with the same name in it as your file. (This could include background graphics, images for bullets, clip art, etc., but I'm not recommending that you use such things now.)

• Be sure that both your page and your graphic files have clear, logical file names (not too long, with no spaces between words). The page name must end in .htm or .html. To alter the name that will show up at the top of a browser for your page, go to Properties in the File menu in Word.

Preview and Send

• In the file menu, use Preview as web page to make your page open up in your web browser. This does not mean it's on the Internet, but it shows you what it will look like on the Internet. This will be very useful since you cannot upload your file yourself onto the Internet if you don't have a web site yourself. It's important to preview your page and make sure you have placed the picture in it where you want it, etc.
• When I experimented with adding background patterns and shaded table borders, they looked great in the preview but did not always show up the same when they were actually on the Internet. If you want to see how your page will look on the Internet before the assignment is due, send it to me at least 24 hours before the due date.
• If you have not e-mailed me your text and graphic files by 7 p.m. Wednesday, bring them to class on Thursday on a disk. We may be able to go to the lab to upload them during this class. If you have sent them earlier but want to make changes, bring yours on a disk also. Don't forget that Word will put the graphic files in a subfolder with the same name as your file, and they need to go on the Internet this way, so I need both the page file and the picture file.

Thursday, February 12

Discussion of research in library with Mr. Loveland

Tuesday, February 17

MEET IN LIBRARY COMPUTER LAB for computer workshop (creating web page, using graphics in Word).

Bring your thoughts or notes on two biographical sources you have found so far for your encyclopedia article. Be prepared to discuss how these two sources compare. See guidelines above on this assignment.

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 3-4 p.m. in Britt 106

Meeting with Mr. Jeff Horn, professional writer for encyclopedias and other reference works. Read the writing sample you receive by e-mail in preparation for the class with Mr. Horn, and be ready to talk about the topic of your own encyclopedia article by then.

Postponed until next Tuesday: Mr. Horn said to "provide the students with copies of the World Almanac capsule bios of presidential candidates that I worked on for 2004. An assignment might be to suggest three (or five) additional categories of information the Almanac MIGHT have included for each candidate, and where we might have tried to find such information. The subject should be timely—we'll still be in primary season." So this is what you should do: read these bios in the attachment and and be prepared to talk about other categories of information he could have included, and ask him questions, of course, about this type of writing for reference books.

Thursday, February 19

No class today. If you miss either of this week's classes, be sure you have made arrangements to make up that work.

Tuesday, February 24

Bring draft of your biography, printed out, to class.

Thursday, February 26

Web pages with encyclopedia article due (see instructions above)

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