Identifying Social Science Essay Practice in Other Formats

Below, you will see a screenshot from Wikipedia, and below that, the list of references used in the article about ‘Folk culture’. Can you identify the similarities and differences between this article and the sorts of practices that you would expect to find in a social sciences essay?

image 1

References[edit]

  1. Folk dance Estonica
  2. Blank, Trevor J. (2013). The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. xiv.
  3. Rubenstein, James (2011). Thecock Cultural Landscape. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. p. 510.
  4. Kaplan, Merrill (2013). Blank, Trevor J., and Robert Glenn Howard, eds., ed. "Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present". Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. pp. 123–148. |contribution= ignored (help)

‘Folk culture’ (2016) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_culture (accessed 22 August 2016).

Click here to see the similarities

The overview (beginning Folk culture) is very similar to what you might find in a formal essay introduction. A number of concepts and an indication of the historical and current folk culture practices are introduced, giving a good idea of the focus and scope of the article. Arguably, there are also a number of claims made – such as the assertion that, today, folk culture includes ‘representation of both modern and rural constituents’. We would expect the main body of an essay to provide evidence for this, and perhaps explore a debate between experts regarding whether, for instance, it is legitimate to call modern practices ‘folk culture’.

Click here to see the differences

Of course, the layout is very different from a conventional essay. There is a list of bullet points immediately following the introduction and, had we taken a larger screenshot, you would have seen the report style of the table of contents. Most importantly, however, the Wikipedia entry expressly asks for further contributions, even a complete reworking of this entry to avoid duplication with another, similar, topic.