How to Approach Either Option
Two paths. One destination. Whether you’re writing a 6–7 page analysis of a work of art or creating your own piece with a 2–3 page reflection, the core requirement is the same: connect humanities to real life in a way your instructor can evaluate critically. Here’s how to approach both options without wasting time on the wrong one.
Most students stall on this assignment not because the topic is too hard, but because they spend too long deciding which option to take. Then they pick a topic that sounds interesting but doesn’t connect cleanly to course content. Then they realize mid-draft that they’ve been describing art instead of analyzing it. All three of those problems are avoidable — but only if you understand what the assignment is actually asking before you write a single sentence.
What This Guide Covers
Which Option Should You Pick?
Be honest with yourself here. The project option is not automatically easier. You still have to write 2–3 pages of critical, well-cited reflection — but you also have to create an actual piece of artwork and be willing to analyze it rigorously. If you’ve never done that kind of self-critical writing before, it can be harder than writing a straightforward 6–7 page paper.
Pick the 6–7 Page Paper If…
- You write comfortably at length and already have something to say about a specific work of art or humanities theme
- You want a single, unified task — choose art, research it, write
- You’re stronger with academic analysis than with making things
- You already have a work in mind that you can connect to your life and course content
- You want more room to develop your argument — 6 pages gives you space to build
Pick the Project + Paper If…
- You paint, draw, play music, write poetry, make videos, or create in any medium
- You’re comfortable being self-critical in writing — the paper asks you to critique your own work
- You want to demonstrate understanding of course themes through creation, not just analysis
- You have a clear idea of what you’d make and how it connects to the humanities
- You can write concisely — 2–3 pages is short, so every sentence needs to count
A lot of students choose the project because they think it means less writing. It doesn’t — it means different writing. A 2–3 page critical reflection on your own creative work, with properly cited sources, connected to specific course themes, is a disciplined piece of academic writing. Students who treat it as a casual “here’s what I made” paragraph get marked down significantly. The word “critical” in the instructions is doing real work.
The 6–7 Page Paper — What It Actually Requires
The paper-only route is clean in its logic. You choose a work of art. You analyze what the artist is communicating about human life. You tie that to course themes. You connect it to your own life. You need at least two sources — one from outside the course and one from within it.
You Are Not Writing a Summary — You Are Making an Argument
A summary tells the reader what happens in a painting, a poem, or a piece of music. An analysis argues what it means and why it matters. The difference is everything. If your paper is describing the artwork, you’re summarizing. If your paper is making a claim about what the artist is trying to say about the human condition and backing that claim with evidence from the artwork and your sources, you’re analyzing. Your instructor can tell the difference in the first paragraph.
A useful framing question: What would be lost if this artwork didn’t exist? What does it say about how people live, suffer, love, struggle, or find meaning that couldn’t be said as effectively another way? That’s the question driving a strong humanities analysis. Build your thesis around your answer to that question, then use the rest of the paper to prove it using the artwork itself, course concepts, outside scholarship, and your personal perspective.Six to seven pages sounds like a lot until you break it down. A strong introduction with your thesis takes about half a page. Background context on the artwork and its creator takes another page. Two or three body sections — each developing one analytical point connected to the artwork — take roughly three to four pages. Your personal connection section takes about a page. Your conclusion wraps the argument in under a page. That’s your structure. Work backwards from it.
The Project + Paper — What It Actually Requires
Two deliverables. The artwork itself and the 2–3 page paper. Both get evaluated. Don’t assume the artwork alone can carry the grade — the paper is where you demonstrate academic understanding.
Showcase, Identify, Apply — Three Distinct Tasks in 2–3 Pages
The instructions use three specific verbs: showcase how the humanities applies to your everyday life, identify key themes and characteristics from the course, and apply them to your artwork. That structure is your outline. Paragraph one: what you made and how it connects to your life (showcase). Paragraph two: which specific course themes or concepts appear in your work and how (identify). Paragraph three onward: explain how those themes are applied — not just mentioned, but demonstrated — in the actual decisions you made in creating the artwork (apply).
Being “critical of yourself” — what that actually means: The instructions say to be critical of yourself. That doesn’t mean say bad things about your work. It means examine your own choices rigorously. Why did you choose that medium? Why those colors, that structure, that narrative arc? What does your choice to depict X instead of Y say about your understanding of a course theme? Students who write “I made a painting about loneliness and it represents the human condition” are not being critical. Students who write “I chose watercolor because its tendency to bleed and resist control mirrors the course theme of fate versus free will that we examined in Sophocles” are being critical. That level of specificity is what the paper needs.Valid Art Mediums for the Project
- Visual art: painting, drawing, collage, photography, digital art, sculpture
- Written art: an original poem, short story, personal essay as art, dramatic monologue
- Performance-based: a recorded piece of music, a short theatrical scene, a dance filmed and submitted
- Mixed media: a zine, an illustrated journal, a photo essay with text
- Architecture/design: a detailed architectural concept, floor plan with written rationale connected to humanities themes
When in doubt, ask your instructor whether your chosen medium qualifies before investing significant time in it.
What “Connecting to Course Content” Looks Like
If your course covered Greek tragedy, your artwork might explore the theme of inevitable downfall. If your course covered Renaissance painting, your artwork might engage with the use of light and shadow as metaphor for knowledge and ignorance. If your course covered Romantic poetry, your artwork might respond to the theme of nature as emotional mirror. The connection doesn’t need to be a direct imitation of a course example — it needs to engage with a theme, concept, or question that your course actually addressed. That’s what makes the paper credible.
Choosing a Topic That Actually Works
For the paper option: you need a work of art you have a genuine response to. Not the most famous one. Not the one that looks most impressive on a paper title. The one you actually have something to say about.
Three Questions Before You Commit to a Work of Art
Ask yourself three things before you settle on a topic. One: can you make an argument about what this work says about human life — not just describe it? Two: does it connect to at least one theme your course actually addressed? Three: can you draw a genuine personal connection to it — not a forced one? If the answer to all three is yes, that’s your topic. If you’re unsure about any of them, keep looking.
Some genuinely workable combinations:Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits + the theme of identity, suffering, and the personal as political + your own experience navigating identity. Strong because Kahlo’s work is analytically rich, connects to philosophy and feminist thought, and invites personal reflection.
Langston Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance poetry + the theme of marginalized voices and the politics of cultural expression + your experience with community and belonging. Strong because Hughes is historically grounded, philosophically loaded, and his work invites personal response without being vague.
The Parthenon or another architectural work + the theme of political power expressed through built space + your own relationship to spaces that feel designed to impress or intimidate. Architecture is an underused angle in humanities papers and instructors notice when a student takes a less obvious path with genuine analytical depth.
A specific piece of jazz or classical music + the theme of improvisation versus structure as a metaphor for freedom and constraint in human experience + your own relationship to rules and creativity. Music is harder to write about but very rewarding when done well.
| Humanities Theme | Works of Art That Fit Well | Personal Connection Angle | Likely Course Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity & Self | Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar | How you construct and perform identity in different contexts | Philosophy, literature, psychology of art |
| Power & Authority | Greek tragedy (Sophocles); Roman architecture; Beethoven’s Eroica | Your relationship with authority — family, institution, state | History, political philosophy, drama |
| Suffering & Meaning | Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; Picasso’s Guernica; Job (religious literature) | How you have found or struggled to find meaning in difficulty | Religious thought, philosophy, literature |
| Beauty & Aesthetics | Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn; Japanese wabi-sabi; Baroque music | What you find beautiful and why — how that changes over time | Philosophy, poetry, music, art history |
| Freedom & Constraint | Jazz improvisation; Existentialist literature (Camus, Sartre); Gothic architecture | Where in your life you feel free or constrained — and why | Philosophy, music, religious thought, literature |
| Community & Belonging | Harlem Renaissance poetry; African oral tradition; Communal muralism (Diego Rivera) | Your experience of belonging and exclusion in different groups | History, literature, cultural studies, poetry |
Analyzing Art vs. Describing It — The Difference That Determines Your Grade
This is the single most common failure point in humanities papers. Students describe what they see. Instructors grade what you argue.
Description — Not Analysis
“Picasso’s Guernica shows a chaotic scene with distorted figures, a bull, a horse, and a screaming woman holding a dead baby. The painting is done in grey, black, and white. It was painted in 1937 in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.”
Analysis — This Is What You’re Being Graded On
“Picasso’s deliberate rejection of color in Guernica functions not just as aesthetic choice but as philosophical argument — the absence of color strips war of the heroic narrative that propaganda traditionally relies on. The fragmented bodies resist the viewer’s desire for narrative coherence, forcing an experience of chaos rather than a story about it.”
Surface-Level Theme Mention
“This painting relates to the humanities theme of suffering because the figures in it are suffering. Suffering is a universal human experience. People in all cultures experience suffering in different ways.”
Genuine Theme Connection
“The painting engages the same question that runs through Greek tragedy — whether suffering has meaning or whether it is simply arbitrary. Where Sophocles gives Oedipus a fate that is terrible but legible, Picasso gives the Basque civilians nothing but a scream. The theological comfort of meaning is absent. That absence is the argument.”
After writing a paragraph, ask: could someone who has never seen this artwork understand my argument? If yes — if your point stands on its own as an interpretive claim about human experience — that’s analysis. If the paragraph only makes sense as a caption for the image, it’s description. Strong humanities analysis uses the artwork as evidence for an argument about people, not as the subject of a report.
Connecting to Course Themes — What “From Our Course” Actually Means
Both options require at least one source from your course. That source is your bridge between your personal interpretation and the academic framework of the class. Use it strategically, not decoratively.
It Should Do Analytical Work — Not Just Appear in a Citation
A weak use of a course source looks like this: you write three pages of analysis, then drop in a course reading citation at the end of a paragraph as if checking a box. A strong use looks like this: a concept from the course reading — say, a philosopher’s definition of beauty, or a critic’s framework for reading literature — becomes the lens through which your entire analysis is organized. The source is doing analytical work, not decoration. Your instructor assigned those readings for a reason. Show that you absorbed them.
Connecting a course concept to your chosen artwork: If your course covered Aristotle’s concept of catharsis in drama, and you’re analyzing a piece of theatre or music, you can use catharsis as an interpretive framework — does this work produce catharsis? How? For whom? Does it fail to? Why does that failure matter? If your course covered the sublime in Romanticism, and you’re analyzing a landscape painting or Romantic poem, you can use the course’s definition of the sublime to drive your analysis of the specific work you’ve chosen. Name the concept, cite the course source, then apply it specifically to your chosen artwork.The one-outside-source requirement: The outside source should add something the course reading doesn’t. A scholarly article on your specific artist, a critical biography, a peer-reviewed discussion of the historical context — something that brings external evidence to support your argument. Don’t use Wikipedia. Use your library’s databases.
Bringing in Your Personal Life — Without Making It a Diary Entry
Both options ask you to connect the humanities to everyday life and to draw connections with your personal experience. A lot of students either avoid this entirely (the paper reads as cold and impersonal) or go too far (the paper reads as a therapy journal). Neither works.
Concrete But Analytically Purposeful
The personal connection should illuminate the argument, not replace it. A single specific, concrete personal experience that genuinely connects to the theme you’re analyzing is worth more than three vague references to “my life” or “my culture.” The specificity makes it credible. The analytical framing makes it academic.
What this looks like in practice: If you’re analyzing a poem about grief and you want to bring in personal experience, don’t write “This poem reminded me of when I lost someone close to me, which was very hard.” Write something like: “The poem’s refusal to resolve — it ends mid-sentence, with the speaker still speaking into absence — matched an experience I had after losing a family member, where the hardest part was not the acute grief but the conversation I kept starting in my head and not finishing. Hughes doesn’t give his speaker closure. Neither does loss.”Notice the difference. The second example uses the personal experience to make an analytical point about the artwork. The artwork and the life experience illuminate each other. That’s the relationship the assignment wants.
MLA Formatting — Exactly What You Need
The formatting requirements are not suggestions. “Standard MLA formatting” has a specific meaning and your instructor knows what it looks like. A paper submitted in the wrong format loses marks before the content is even read.
Font & Size: 12-point Times New Roman throughout — including the Works Cited page. No other fonts.
Spacing: Double-spaced throughout — including between entries on the Works Cited page. No extra spacing between paragraphs.
Margins: 1 inch on all four sides.
Header (top left, first page only): Your full name / Instructor’s name / Course name and number / Date (day Month year format — e.g., 27 May 2026)
Title: Centered, on the line after the header. Not bolded, not underlined, not in quotation marks. Standard title case.
Page numbers: Top right corner, last name followed by page number (e.g., “Smith 3”). No “Page” or “p.” — just name and number.
In-text citations: (Author Page) format — e.g., (Hughes 14) or (Berger 27). No comma between author and page number.
Works Cited page: New page at the end. Centered heading “Works Cited.” Entries in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Hanging indent format (first line flush left, subsequent lines indented 0.5 inches). All entries double-spaced.
The official source for MLA formatting rules is the MLA Style Center at style.mla.org. It covers formatting for student papers including headers, margins, in-text citation formats, and Works Cited entry formats for different source types. Use it to double-check your Works Cited entries — the format for a book, a journal article, a website, and an artwork are all different.
Finding and Using the Required Sources
Two sources minimum. One from outside the course. One from within the course. That’s the floor — not the ceiling. Using three or four relevant sources makes your argument stronger and shows intellectual engagement with the topic.
Identify Your Course Source First
Go back through your course readings, syllabus, or textbook and find the reading that most directly addresses the theme you’re writing about. It doesn’t have to be about your specific artwork — it needs to address the theme, concept, or period relevant to your argument. Highlight the specific passage you’ll cite. Know what claim you’re using it to support before you start drafting.
Find Your Outside Source Through Your Library Database
Use your institution’s library database (JSTOR, Project MUSE, EBSCOhost) rather than a general Google search. Search for your artist’s name + “analysis” or “interpretation,” or search for the humanities theme + “essay” or “criticism.” A peer-reviewed journal article or a chapter from a scholarly book in your library is far stronger than a website or a general encyclopedia entry. If you’re stuck, your library’s reference desk can point you toward the right database for humanities research.
Cite the Artwork Itself If You’re Quoting or Describing It
If you quote directly from a poem, novel, or play, cite it in text and list it in Works Cited. If you reference a painting, sculpture, or piece of music in your paper, it should appear in the Works Cited list too — MLA has specific formats for visual artworks and musical compositions. Check the MLA Style Center for the correct format for your specific type of artwork.
Integrate Sources — Don’t Just Drop Quotes
Every quote or paraphrase needs context before it and analysis after it. The pattern is: introduce the source, give the quote or paraphrase, then explain what it contributes to your argument. A quote dropped into a paragraph with no explanation is a missed opportunity. Your instructor wants to see that you understand the source and can use it as evidence, not just that you found it.
Mistakes That Cost Grades
Choosing a Work of Art With Nothing to Say About It
Picking the Mona Lisa because it’s famous, or picking a song because you like it, without having an actual argument ready — produces a paper that describes and summarizes but never analyzes. Famous works are fine. Having a real argument about them is the requirement.
Pick Something You Have a Strong Reaction To
Strong reactions — positive or negative — produce strong arguments. If a work makes you uncomfortable, intrigues you, moves you, or challenges something you believe, that reaction is the seed of your thesis. Work out why you have that reaction and you’re halfway to an argument.
Writing the Project Paper as a Description of the Artwork
“I painted a tree because trees represent life and growth. The tree is green and brown. I used watercolors. I think this connects to the humanities because nature is a common theme in art.” That’s a description, not a critical reflection. It will not earn strong marks.
Explain Specific Choices in Terms of Course Concepts
Every significant creative choice — medium, color, subject, structure, scale — should be explained in terms of what course theme or concept it embodies. Not “I chose blue because blue is calm” but “I chose blue as the dominant color because the course reading on Romanticism described the sublime as a state of overwhelming awe that simultaneously calms and terrifies — blue carries both.”
Submitting Without Checking MLA Format
Wrong font. Wrong spacing. No last name in the header. Works Cited with no hanging indent. Missing in-text citations. These are mechanical errors that signal to your instructor that the paper was rushed. They cost real marks and take five minutes to fix.
Run Through the MLA Checklist Before Submitting
After writing, go through the format checklist item by item. Font. Size. Spacing. Margins. Header. Title. Page numbers. In-text citations. Works Cited format and alphabetical order. Each one is either right or wrong — there’s no partial credit for close.
Writing the Personal Connection as a Memoir Passage
Three paragraphs about your personal experience with very little connection to the artwork or to course themes is not what the assignment asks for. The personal connection should be purposeful — it exists to illuminate your analysis of the humanities work, not to replace it.
Use Personal Experience as Evidence, Not as Subject Matter
Your life experience is evidence for the claim that this artwork speaks to something real in human experience. Keep the artwork at the center. Your experience demonstrates that the theme is genuine — but the paper is about the artwork and the humanities, not about you.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Essay Writing Service Get StartedBefore You Submit Your Topic Choice
Both options require you to submit your choice and potential topic first. That submission matters more than students typically realize. A vague or weak topic choice signals to your instructor that you haven’t done the thinking yet — and it puts you at risk of getting halfway through a paper and realizing the topic doesn’t hold together.
Before you submit your topic, you should be able to answer two questions clearly. For the paper option: what is the specific argument I’m making about this work of art and what course theme does it connect to? For the project option: what am I making, why does that specific creative choice connect to a specific course theme, and what critical claim can I make about my own work? If you can answer those questions in two sentences, your topic is ready. If you’re still vague, think it through before you lock it in.
The assignment gives you genuine freedom. Philosophy, religious thought, drama, architecture, music, poetry — you can go almost anywhere. That freedom is an advantage if you use it to choose something you’re genuinely engaged with. It’s a trap if you use it to avoid committing to a clear argument. Pick something. Make a claim about it. Prove it.