Writing Wednesday: Splitting and Drawing

This week has been pretty slow. I had this plan to write a very ambitious paper that would weave together various Roman period features and finds from the area E.F2 at Polis. As the article took shape — complete with catalogues, stratigraphic descriptions, and comparanda for the various features — it crept toward 25,000 words. Having just completed a “minigraph” that was supposed to be around 30,000 words (and somehow became longer), I knew where this was heading and we decided cut the growing article in half. One part of the article would focus on the features (levigation pool, kiln, and some of the later walls), stratigraphy, and a small number of finds. The other would be a proper article focused on the Roman pottery from Polis. This gave us the freedom to delve a bit more deeply into our Roman pottery assemblage which we hope will be to the benefit both to folks thinking about how imported (especially Eastern Sigillata A) and regional (especially Cypriot Sigillata and regional…