S17: Skills: Writing It Up

Misinformation and China

February 13, 2026

Key questions

  • How to critique an argument?
  • What are my fields? How to situate my own research?
  • How do I move forward with my project?

Final Project: Upcoming Deadlines

  • Week 6: You are now in the independent research phase.
  • Week 8-9: In-class presentation
  • Week 9: First draft and peer review
  • Week 10: Final submission

Tips

  • Slow and steady wins the race: 0.5-1 hr per day
  • Write as you read
  • Read smarter: Footnotes, bibliography, index, book review

Activities

  • Progress Check-in
  • Evidence Inventory
  • Notice, Ask, Wonder
  • Approximating Thesis
  • Finding Your Own Voice
  • 4*3 exercise: Paper Outline

Progress Check-in

  • What have you done so far?
  • What worked?
  • What challenges have you encountered?
  • What are your next steps?

Evidence Inventory

  • Make a list of key evidence or primary sources for this project
  • Describe each piece: What is it? Why is it here?
  • Reflect: What kind of a collection is this? How will it be helpful for the paper?

Notice, Ask, Wonder

  • Choose 1-2 primary sources
  • What is puzzling, interesting, or significant about this source?
  • What could this source do within the chapter – illustrate a point, challenge an idea, serve as a counterpoint, etc.
  • What does it tell you about the chapter’s topic?

Approximating Thesis: Three Steps

  • Describe a surprising, puzzling, revealing, or seemingly contradictory pattern in the evidence.
  • Write a HOW question about the pattern. Then write a follow-up question: What’s the result or next step?
  • Then answer both questions (1–2 sentences each).

Surveying My Field

  • What are my “fields”?
  • What are the main debates in the field?
  • Who are the leading voices? What are the “master narratives”?
  • How do you situate your own contribution?

Template: Finding Your Own Voice

In just one paragraph:

  • Broad topic
  • Brief review of existing work
  • However, despite excellent work on X, we don’t know about Y.
  • This gap is bad: So what?
  • I will fill this gap: How? What will you show instead?

Example: Just One Child (2008)

The small body of work published so far has focused primarily on how policy is carried out and produces its social effects. How policy gets made is a theoretically and methodologically more challenging question. Today anthropologists are keenly aware of the tight link between knowledge and power, expertise and policy. So far, however, the insights of science and technology studies (STS), the field devoted to understanding how expert knowledge is created and politically advanced, have not been applied to the anthropological study of policy. In this book I seek to empirically expand and theoretically enrich the anthropology of policy by examining the making of public policy and by rethinking the field of policy study through the intellectually productive lens of science studies.

Example: D. Magilow, Disinformation in the Illustrated Observer, 1926–1945

In spite of current concerns about media disinformation, and in light of the frequency and oversimplification with which popular discussions of the topic invokes Nazi Germany, there surprisingly exists no German- or English-language account of the Illustrated Observer. My project offers a much-needed corrective. This case study of the Illustrated Observer shows that while the similarities between media disinformation in interwar Germany and the United States and Russia in the 2020s are striking, so too are the differences and historical contingencies, which frustrate attempts to establish easy parallels.

Grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities

Now Your Turn

  • Write down your “hero narrative”
  • Exchange draft with your neighbor:
    • How valid is your contribution?
    • What do you want to know more?
    • Any improvements?
  • Share your revised draft with class

The 4*3 exercise

  • Structure of the chapter is part of the argument: it directs the readers’ attention.
  • Fill grid with possible structures for your chapter: Four sets of three sections each
  • What is your intention behind each structure? How does your paper structure support its thesis?
Structure 1 Structure 2 Structure 3 Structure 4
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3