Overview
The Keyword Entry Paper:
The keyword genre of academic writing expects that the author provides an account of a term, its political and cultural usage, and their critical understanding of it. This is not the same as giving a definition of a term or a description of its meaning. A definition tries to fix the meaning of a term, and a description summarizes a term’s features. The Keyword Entry paper you will conduct expects you to articulate uses, contexts, and understandings of the Keywords so that your reader can appreciate the richness of the Keyword and why it is important to our ways of thinking about politics.
Raymond Williams describes his own Keywords book project, the model for this assignment, by stating that a keyword
… is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject. It is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. (Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New edition; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, xxvi-xxvii)