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Penning The Past: Advice on Writing in the Historical Disciplines

Alyssa E. Lodewick
Department of History

Table of Contents

  • Where Everything Begins: Determining the Nature of the Assignment
    • Historical Narratives
    • Analytic Essays
    • The Importance of Mixing Narrative and Analysis
      • Provide Your Reader with a Narrative Context
      • For Whom Should One Write? Assessing the Audience
      • Include Analysis in Everything You Write
  • Developing a Topic and Determining the Topic's Parameters
    • Research Papers
      • Figure Out Which Topics Interest You
      • Determine Whether Your Topic Is Viable
    • Analytic Essays
      • Make Sure That You Comprehend the Topic's Language
      • Make Sure that You Understand All of the Question's Demands
  • Working With Sources
    • Thoroughly Examine All of Your Primary and Secondary Sources
    • Definitions: Different Types of Historical Sources
    • Guard Against Misusing and Misinterpreting Sources
    • Use a Wide Variety of Sources in Correlation with One Another
    • Use Sources as Springboards for Your Own Analysis
    • Use Sources as Support or Evidence for Your Own Argument
    • Use Direct Quotes, but Ensure that Your Own Ideas and Voice Dominate the Paper
    • Avoid Plagiarism by Citing Your References to Other Sources
    • A Quick Test to Help Avoid Plagiarism
  • Creating an Argument and Using It to Organize Your Paragraphs
    • Write in Past Tense, Not Present Tense
    • An Argument Is Not A Statement of Fact, But A Debatable Statement That You Must Prove
    • Guard Against Misusing and Misinterpreting Sources
    • Place Your Argument Early in the Paper, and Make it as Succinct as Possible
    • Make the Paper Manageable; Don't Try to Tackle Too Many Ideas
    • Do A Thorough Job Analyzing and Explaining Each Idea Contained in the Essay
    • Be Sure that Each Paragraph is Connected to Your Argument
  • Conclusion
  • Resource Works

Where Everything Begins: Determining the Nature of the Assignment

So you are faced with the task of writing a paper for one of your history classes. The first thing one must do in this situation is evaluate the assignment. After you have drilled into your head the basic logistics of the paper-such as its due date, its required length, etc. - you must figure out what exactly the professor wants from you. You need to ask yourself the following fundamental question: What sort of history paper does the professor desire me to write?

Generally, history assignments fall into two different categories-historical narratives, and analytical essays. This dual-classification system is not quite as simple as it seems, though. History professors seldom want their students to write analytical essays that don't include any sort of historical narrative or contextualization. Occasions upon which professors encourage their students to write purely narrative papers with no analysis involved are even more rare; in fact, most professors are highly dissatisfied with papers that merely "tell a story" but don't in any way try to evaluate the story they have told. If you want to avoid writing narrative- or analysis-in-a-void, please take the time to read the following section entitled "The Importance of Mixing Analysis and Narrative."

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Historical Narratives

Much as their name implies, narrative essays call upon you to narrate and analyze some particular historical happening. In many of your courses, narrative assignments will take the form of research papers in which you undertake a detailed examination of a historical event/idea/person/era. In order to complete this intellectual exercise, you will need to read a variety of primary and secondary sources written about your particular topic. (See the following section entitled "Working with Sources" if you are unclear as to what constitute "primary" and "secondary" sources.) After selecting the most important/pertinent information regarding your paper topic from these sources, you will tell the story of the topic you have researched. Finally, and most importantly, you will formulate some sort of explanation for, or analysis of, the events you have described and include this interpretation in your paper.

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Analytic Essays

Analytic essays ask you to look at particular historical events, phenomena or sources and think about/evaluate them in a critical manner. For example, after assigning a variety of different primary and secondary source materials on the topic, your professor might demand that you determine the most important motivating factors behind President Woodrow Wilson's decision to declare war on Germany in 1917. Or perhaps your professor will call upon you to look at a particular historical document and try to place it into historical context. For instance, she may have you read The Communist Manifesto and then ask you to write on why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels felt that 1848 was an ideal year to begin circulating their revolutionary ideas. Finally, historiographically-oriented analytic essays might ask you to critically evaluate a historical source document in isolation, by itself.[1] If, for example, you are studying the history of Asia, you might read the writings of Francis Xavier, a Catholic missionary who travelled throughout India, Japan, and China between 1542 and 1552. Your professor may ask you to evaluate the reliability and preciseness of Xavier's depictions of life in those countries, given his non-Asian cultural heritage. You might then have to argue whether the source, with its inherent cultural biases, is of any use to historians hoping to piece together accurate pictures of life in 16th century Asia.

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The Importance of Mixing Analysis and Narrative

As a general rule, you should avoid writing all-analysis-with-no-narrative or, conversely, all-narrative-with-no-analysis. Take care, though, when applying this particular piece of guidance, for while it serves as a valid piece of advice, you will most likely encounter exceptions to it; at some point during your study of history, one of your professors will almost certainly ask you to write an analytic essay of no more than one or two pages in length. Given such length constraints, you should probably refrain from including a lot of narrative context, and instead fill all available space with your own ideas. If you have questions about whether or not to add narrative to your analytic essay, don't be afraid to ask your professor or TA for some help in figuring out what you should include in your writing.

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Provide your reader with a narrative context

Although it is important to know how to tackle a paper of one or two pages, many analytic papers assigned in college history courses are designed to be longer. In these cases, you possess room enough to include background material or narrative that familiarizes the reader with the sources and/or historic events that you plan to analyze/critique/interpret.

For Whom Should One Write?: Assessing the Audience

Whenever you set out to write a paper, you need to think about the audience of your work. Who will be reading your words? An expert on the topic about which you are writing? Someone who has never before read a history text? Anticipating the type of people in your audience is necessary because the act of doing so helps you figure out how to structure your argument and your paper. For most of the history papers you write at Brown, you can probably assume that you are writing for an educated person who possesses a general knowledge of history. However, unless your professor tells you otherwise-or unless your assignment is extremely short in length and thus leaves no room for narrative or context-you should not assume that the person reading your paper is an expert on your topic. Thus, you cannot simply mention names, dates, events, etc. without also including at least a brief description of their significance. (An exception to this rule might occur when you mention a historical actor/date/event that is so famous and well known amongst the general population that no description is necessary; anyone who has completed the most elementary levels of schooling will recognize the person or event about whom/which you write.)

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As a responsible writer, you must make sure that your paper contains basic narrative information about the context of different sources and events. For example, if you plan to discuss a particular source document in your essay, introduce that source to the reader by telling the reader who created it. Include information about when the source was composed, and provide your reader with some knowledge about motivations for producing the source: to which historic ideas or events did the author of the source respond? Similarly, if you plan to examine a historic event in your paper, you must explicitly identify your topic at the beginning of the paper, inform the reader as to when the event took place, and name the actors who played roles in the event. In short, provide your reader with background information on the subjects of your intellectual scrutiny before you launch into the analysis of those subjects.

Providing your readers with a contextual framework for the sources/events you plan to analyze serves several purposes. Most importantly, it shows your professors and teaching assistants that you understand the historical circumstances in which source documents were created and/or events took place. Comprehending the history behind events or sources lends extra depth to your analysis of those events/sources, and highlighting your knowledge about the historical context of your paper's subjects lends credibility to your interpretation of them. By providing the reader with background information, you prove that you have gone beyond scrutinizing events/sources as isolated entities that exist somewhere outside of time; you exhibit your own knowledge of how the examined source documents/events fit into the overarching backdrop of history. Although including historical context for analytical papers might seem tedious, providing it is well worth the effort. In my experience, readers are more likely to accept an author's arguments and interpretations if they believe that the author has thought about his or her topic in a complex, multi-faceted way.

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Include analysis in everything you write

Thus far in this section, I have written only about analytic papers. I have tried to convince you of the importance of including narrative historical context in your analytical assignments. But what about narrative research papers? Do you need to have analysis in them? The answer to this question is a resounding "yes, most definitely." In fact, I will go so far as to assert that including analysis in your narrative papers is even more important than including narrative in your analytic assignments. In some analytic assignments, you might be able to slide by without including narrative context. But I will almost guarantee that if you turn in an analysis-free narrative or research paper, you will fare poorly.

As historians, our job is not to merely tell the story of some past event or person, (although telling stories is definitely one facet of our profession); after all, any child in primary school can tell a simple story or write an account of some long-ago happening. Ask the child to interpretthe story that s/he has just told, however, and the child might very well find it difficult. The challenge of interpretation also sometimes proves trying for adults. Nevertheless, it is our duty as historians and scholars to take up that gauntlet. We must not only describe past events; we must try to make sense of them. We must not only chronicle people's actions; we must try to discover the causes behind them. Sometimes we fail at our task. We come to events that we cannot explain, and we encounter actions whose motivating factors we cannot penetrate. Yet simply by grappling with questions of interpretation, we deepen the way we look at history, and add another layer of complexity to our own thought processes-whether or not we succeed in making total sense of the past in the end.

Don't be afraid to analyze the stories that you tell in your research papers. As you write and/or research-and this advice is applicable to all types of history papers-frequently ask yourself the two most important analytic questions: why and how. Why did the subject you are writing about happen when it did? Why did events unfold and take shape in the way that they did? How did environmental factors and contemporary events interact with each other to help bring about the historical event you are dissecting? In your search for answers, you might come up with an explanation for events with which your professor and/or teaching assistant doesn't agree. But try not to let thoughts of being "wrong" frighten you too much, or you might become intellectually paralyzed. Most professors that I know care very little for whether or not you arrive at some predetermined, "correct" historical interpretation. In fact, over the course of the twentieth century, most scholars have forsaken the notion that there even exists one "correct," objective version of historical "truth" that students can comprehend through diligent study. Thus, while most modern professors care greatly about whether or not their students possess enough intellectual fortitude to tackle the task of analyzing history, they do not expect their students to successfully come up with universally "correct" answers to whatever analytical questions have been raised.

In my experiences teaching and writing history, I have found that even when they end up disagreeing with students' interpretations of historical events or sources, most professors recognize and appreciate the efforts of writers who: a.) research their paper topics thoroughly, b.) successfully take up the challenge to think about their topics in complex, multi-faceted ways, and, c.) describe their narratives and analyses clearly, concisely, and completely. So analyze without fear. And most importantly, don't turn in a paper that simply states one fact after another and completely lacks your own interpretation of those facts. Such papers are boring, and writers hoping to keep their readers' attention and interest should avoid being tedious.

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Developing a Topic and Determining the Topic's Parameters

Research Papers

On the collegiate level, most professors grant a great deal of leeway in terms of what students are allowed to write about, especially when assigning research papers. Professors rarely assign their classes specific topics to research; instead, they leave it up to individual students to pick their own paper topics. Professors do this because they want students to write about topics that they (the students) find personally interesting; generally, students who write about topics that intrigue them turn in much higher-quality papers than students who are forced to write about particular topics that don't evoke their curiosity.

Figure out which topics interest you

At first, the task of choosing one particular research topic from an infinite pool of possible paper subjects might seem a bit intimidating, especially if you have not written many history research papers before. So just how should one go about picking an appropriate topic? First, take some time and really think about the course itself, trying to determine which aspects of it you have found particularly intriguing. Look back through old lecture notes and readings, and then try to remember all of the discussion sections you have attended. Think about the following questions:

  • What has your professor said in class that has captured your interest? Have you found yourself wishing that you knew more about a specific event or person or idea s/he mentioned?
  • In discussion section, did your TA or another classmate put forth an interpretation of history that provoked a strong reaction within you? What was the topic of conversation that so affected you? Has a particular comment forcefully challenged your own view of history?
  • Have any of the course readings raised new questions in your mind that you have wondered about long after you put the article/book down? If you are reading a general textbook in the course, which sections' content have you read and liked, and which have you wanted to skip over?

Engage in a bit of self-reflection when seeking the answers to the above questions. The process of doing so will allow you to determine which historical topics are intellectually attractive to you and which particular topics spark your natural sense of curiosity. Next, pick one of the interesting subjects and try to imagine how you might transform it into the topic of a history paper. What questions related to that subject might you seek to answer through research? What are your initial, gut-level ideas about a particular subject, and can you translate those ideas into some sort of argument?

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Determine whether your topic is viable

Once you find a topic that interests you, you need to determine whether it is a viable subject for a research project. In most college history courses, your professor will demand that you use primary and secondary sources to back up whatever argument you choose to make in your paper; without textual support, even the most brilliant argument is compromised. One serious problem that you face as a researcher is the prospect of intellectually devoting yourself to a particular topic, only to discover when you begin the actual research that there are not enough available sources to serve as a foundation for your paper. Unfortunately, if there are not enough sources to substantiate your argument's claims, you will find writing the paper-not to mention getting a good grade on it-a very frustrating process. Thus, before dedicating yourself to a paper topic, make sure that there are enough primary and secondary sources in existence-and also, of course, accessible to you-to make your research efforts worthwhile. Do some leg-work in the library before you become too attached to one particular paper topic, making sure that when it finally comes time to write the paper, you will be able to include support for your argument from an array of sources. I recommend the following steps:

  • Do an electronic search in the library's on-line catalog in order to see what sorts of books and articles (if any) have already been written concerning your topic. Does it seem as though any of these secondary sources will prove useful as you try to learn about the background and context of your research topic?
  • If your professor has asked you to use primary sources, after completing the on-line catalog search, identify some of the books and articles that seem especially relevant to your potential project. Find those books/articles on the library shelves and look through them. Pay close attention to the bibliographies and footnotes. What primary sources were used by the author(s)? Will it be possible for you to access some of the same primary sources? Are the original primary sources located locally? If not, do any of the local libraries possess copies or published versions of the sources? Keep in mind that the Rock and other Brown-affiliated specialty libraries (the Hay Library, the John Carter Brown Library, etc.) are not the only libraries in Providence. The Providence Public Library and the Providence Athenaeum are also institutions that might prove helpful as you conduct your research.
  • Have any of the course readings raised new questions in your mind that you have wondered about long after you put the article/book down? If you are reading a general textbook in the course, which sections' content have you read and liked, and which have you wanted to skip over?

If you complete the preceding steps and discover that you will indeed have access to enough primary and secondary sources to make your research worthwhile, congratulations! You have chosen a paper topic that is both interesting to you and feasible. Once you are over the hump of choosing a viable topic that intrigues you, you will hopefully find the process of researching and writing about it intellectually rewarding.

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Analytic Essays

Because the topics of analytic essays are usually assigned, and the professor explicitly states what s/he wants you to write about, the process of choosing a subject for this type of essay is usually a non-issue. In this situation, you are faced with a different challenge: determining how to deal with the given question or topic.

Make sure that you comprehend the topic's language

First, you need to make sure that you understand the question or topic. Pretend that you are taking a course in American history, and that your professor has handed out a paper with the following topic for an analytical essay:

Some scholars claim that the American Civil War was caused by a desire among Northern millenialists to eradicate the "sinful evil" of slavery so that Armageddon could occur. Other intellectuals believe that the War Between the States was caused not by slavery, but by tension over states' sovereignty and the right to self-governance. Evaluate these explanations for the Civil War, exploring the strengths and the weaknesses of each. In your mind, which one provides a more believable explanation for the clash? Since neither provides a complete account of why the conflict began, offer your own explanation of the causes behind the struggle.

As is probably obvious, this "question" is made up of several different parts, and each subsection calls upon you to do some critical thinking. Even before you break the question down into its constituent parts, make sure that you know the meaning of key phrases in the question. Start off by evaluating the essay topic on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Does it contain specialized terms that you don't fully understand, even though people may have used the terms repeatedly during lecture or discussion section? Are there words whose definitions are fuzzy in your mind? If so, ask your TA or professor or a classmate for some guidance. For the above essay topic, you would certainly need to understand the term "millenialists." You would also need to comprehend the complexities behind the phrase "states' sovereignty and the right to self-governance." There is just no way that you sufficiently can answer the question if you lack knowledge of those fundamental concepts.

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Make sure that you understand all of the question's demands

After looking at the question's terminology and language on the sentence level, evaluate its different components or subsections. What is the question truly asking of you? Is it made up of several parts or statements? If so, break the question down and make sure that you understand each subsection in isolation. In the Civil War example given above, you are dealing with two different foundation ideas: (1) the idea that the Civil War was caused by millenialist concerns over slavery, and (2) the idea that the War Between the States was caused by tension over states' sovereignty and right to self-rule. In your essay, you need to do three things:

  • examine each foundation idea in isolation and address its strengths and weaknesses
  • juxtapose the foundation ideas and, after looking at them in relation to each other, explain which one has more merit
  • include your own interpretation of the motivations behind the Civil War

If you fail to address any one of these three requirements, you have not successfully explored the essay topic, regardless of how fully and completely you responded to the other two requirements. Only after coming to terms with the essay question or topic and what it demands of you should you try and figure out how you want to actually answer the question or address the topic.

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Working with Sources

Let's recall where we are in the writing process. If you are working on a narrative/research paper, you have decided upon a topic that interests you and can be successfully researched given the resources available to you. If you are working on an analytical piece, you comprehend the parameters of the essay question or topic; you have identified all of the issues that essay requires you to address.

Thoroughly examine all of your primary and secondary sources

In both narrative and analytic writing, the next step you take is the same: you undertake a complete examination of the source materials you plan to utilize or discuss in your paper. Usually the list of source materials will include both primary sources and secondary sources, so it is important to understand the difference between the two.

Definitions: Different Types of Historical Sources[2]

Primary sources are the materials that you are directly writing about, the 'raw materials' of your research. In fields that study writers or documents, the texts you write about are primary sources. In fields such as English or history, you usually cannot write a research paper without using primary sources. [In the discipline of history, the primary sources that you will use might, depending upon your topic, include: personal journals/diaries; letters; newspapers and magazines published around the time of whatever particular event-or during whatever general chronological era-you are scrutinizing; novels; the personal and/or professional writings of historical figures; films and movies; pieces of music; pieces of art; folk stories; oral histories, etc.]

Secondary Sources are books and articles in which other researchers report the results of their research based upon primary data or sources. [In the province of history, these are usually books that scholars have written to disseminate any findings gleaned during their own historical investigations. In the context of your own research, think of "secondary sources" as the body of books/articles that other researchers have already written about your particular research topic.] You quote or cite them to support your own research. If a researcher quoted your paper to support his argument, your paper would be his secondary source. If, on the other hand, he were writing your biography, your paper would be a primary source.

Tertiary Sources are books and articles based on secondary sources, on the research of others. Tertiary sources synthesize and explain research in a field for a popular audience or simply restate what others have said. Tertiary sources can be helpful in the early stages of your research, but they make weak support for your argument because they often oversimplify and overgeneralize, are seldom up to date, and are usually distrusted by experts. [In history, tertiary texts often take the form of review or synthetic essays that discuss a number of different secondary sources in relation to one another. In general, I advise against utilizing tertiary sources as evidence in your own research projects, for all the reasons given above.]

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Studying a variety of primary and secondary source materials will enable you to fulfill several goals. They will help you:

  • understand the basic facts about the topic you are covering
  • use those facts to build a chronological framework for your topic
  • place the topic of your paper into broader historical context
  • review what other scholars have written about your topic
  • look at your topic from a wide range of vantage points (assuming that your sources were not all written by the same author)
  • build your own argument/thesis
  • support assertions that you make in your argument/thesis with historical evidence and examples taken from your sources

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Guard against misusing and misinterpreting sources

As is obvious, source materials are crucial to any historical investigation. Because source materials are the building blocks for history essays and papers, and because you will use them to bolster the arguments you put forth in your writing, you must take great care when using different sources. If you misuse a source-for example, by purposely using a quote out of context in order to make it "fit" with your own argument (a calculated misuse and an intellectual misdemeanor), or by attributing intentions to a source's author that the author never possessed (a misuse often stemming from misunderstanding or a lack of knowledge)-you risk damaging your own argument's credibility. It matters not whether you misuse a source intentionally or accidentally; in either case, the misuse is usually detectable, especially to professors, who have read large amounts of good (not to mention bad!) history in their careers.

So how can you guard against such mistakes? In short, examine each source carefully so that you do not misinterpret what the source is saying. Recognize the limitations of each source that you use. Take care to complete these tasks with a questioning attitude and a critical eye. In your mind, ask all sorts of questions about each of your sources, such as: Why was each source produced when it was? (This is especially important to ask when dealing with primary sources.) Who created each source, and for what reason? How does the source inadvertently (or, in some cases, purposefully) show the biases of its author? How accurate is the story each source tells, and how completely can a modern reader trust the claims that are put forth in it? Put baldly, each source with which you deal-whether primary or secondary-was written by an author who possessed/possesses biases, prejudices, and personal agendas. You need to be aware of these factors or you cannot fully understand each source in all of its complexity.

Modern historians usually find the task of ascertaining the true subconscious motivations and ideologies that influenced the formulation, revision, and publication of written source documents nearly impossible. In many cases, all of the people intimately involved in producing and issuing a certain source are long dead. Obviously, we cannot ask their ghosts to explicate the rational and logic that lay behind decisions in the writing and editing processes. Even if we could communicate with dead authors and editors, we could not trust them to relate or acknowledge their true motives; we would still be unable to "get inside their heads" and analyze the effects of subconscious or masked personal and social goals upon the narrative's veracity.

Thus, as historians, we come upon moments of despair. Can we really trust any source? If we cannot be sure that the authors of our sources did not modify the events/thoughts that they depicted in order to further personal goals, can we really believe anything that the authors wrote? I would argue yes, under certain conditions that we ourselves create.

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Use a wide variety of sources in correlation with each other

First, no matter what sort of history we write, we must be sure to use a broad variety of sources, both primary and secondary. Including many sorts of historical sources in our research helps us contextualize not only the historical events we choose to analyze, but also the sources themselves. Just as importantly, we must use source documents in correlation with one another. We must take one source and verify its contents through thorough research in other sources. Only when we analyze a specific historical document in relation to a plurality of various other sources can we better discern the "truths" contained in our original source. As long as we do not accept our sources at face value, and instead use them in conjunction with data gathered from a myriad of sources, source documents written long ago by people whose heads we cannot enter can prove meaningful, valid, and useful.

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Use sources as springboards for your own analysis

Now that I have established the necessity of using a wide variety of sources in conjunction with each other, I want to say a few concrete words about how to actually use those sources. At this point, you know that you will utilize primary and secondary documents for a variety of reasons while writing your paper. In some cases-especially in historiographically-oriented analytical essays-you might discuss a certain source document in order to raise questions or criticisms about a.) the source itself, or b.) ideas contained within it. You would then proceed to address these questions and issues in your paper. For example, if you were responding to an essay topic about the origins of the Progressive movement in America, you might write the following sentences:

In The Search for Order, historian Robert Wiebe argued that due to the industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and economic depression that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, "Americans in a basic sense no longer knew who or where they were."[3] He claimed that the Progressive movement arose in reaction to this sense of disorientation and that it was characterized by middle-class efforts to re-construct a stable, well-ordered society. However, several problems arise in Weibe's assertions that scholars need to address. . . . [Getting back to your own analysis, you would then go on to list and discuss some of those problems.]

I call the above technique of using a source the "springboard" method because when you use it, you touch upon a point raised by a source and then use that point as a springboard, or jumping-off point, to launch into your own analysis or critical evaluation.

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Use sources as support or evidence for your own argument

You can manage source documents so that they operate as a springboard quite effectively. However, I imagine that the most crucial and frequent role that historical source documents will play in your writing is that of support or evidence for your own assertions or arguments. Note that the key word here is "support." The sources should not dominate the paper, but should instead serve as supportive voices that merely back up what you yourself have said. At the college level, a successful history essay or paper constitutes more than a simple regurgitation of what other authors have written. Thus, do not simply string together a bunch of quotations from other authors and expect those authors to speak for you. Your own ideas and your style of writing should be dominant in the paper, because you want the reader of the paper to walk away with your voice-and not that of some other author-echoing in his/her head.

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Use direct quotes, but ensure that your own ideas and voice dominate the paper

In order to avoid granting too much power and devoting too much space to other authors, use direct quotes from your sources sparingly. When discussing ideas or information found in written sources, try to paraphrase whenever possible. You might use a direct quote if:

  • it is important to show the reader the source's exact language or wording in order to make your own analytical point
  • there is no way that your own wording can capture an idea as succinctly, efficiently, memorably, or perfectly as the source document did

In general, try to keep the quotes as short as possible. Only quote the sentences and/or phrases in the source document that are immediately relevant to the idea at hand. If you have many sources that say the same thing, only quote the one that says it best; in an informational footnote at the bottom of the page, you can always add something like the following:

12[The last name of the author you've quoted] is not the only scholar who has discussed [whatever topic is at hand]. [Dr. So-and-so] and [Scholar X] have also advanced similar ideas in their works, [Dr. So-and-so's Book Title] and [Scholar X's Book Title].

Of course, you can entirely avoid the trouble of adding an informational footnote by including a brief mention of the other authors who have covered the same ground somewhere in the paragraph itself; a logical place would be directly before or after the quote itself.

Unlike you, your reader hasn't seen the source in its entirety. S/he also isn't omniscient, and is not inside your head; therefore, the logical connection between a particular quote and your argument is not automatically clear to the reader, no matter how clear and rational the link seems to you. In short, when working with quotes, you must ensure that a reader understands the purpose of each quote that you include in your paper. You need to elucidate how each quote is relevant to your topic, and you need to clarify why/how you are utilizing each quote.

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Avoid plagiarism by citing your references to other sources

If you are only going to remember one thing about writing history, remember this: give credit to other authors when it is due. Plagiarism, or the act of using the ideas or words of another person without granting that person recognition, is not only dishonest-because you are, in essence, claiming those words or ideas as your own-it is also an intellectual crime that has been prosecuted in courts of law. So just to be on the safe side, cite, cite, cite. If you have questions about exactly how to cite a source, take a look at a few of the reference works I have included at the end of this booklet. Most history professors will allow you to use either footnotes (wherein reference information is placed at the bottom of the pages on which citations occur) or endnotes (wherein all reference information is collected at the end of the paper) when you are citing sources. Although many instructors will accept a wide variety of footnote styles, the citation method outlined in Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations[4] is one of the most popular within historical circles. In any case, figuring out how to cite sources should not take too long, and the practice will soon become second nature.

Student writers with whom I work frequently voice the complaint that determining what constitutes plagiarism can be confusing. Most people find it fairly obvious that copying another author's words into one's own work without crediting that other author constitutes plagiarism. In addition, you "plagiarize even when you do credit the author but use his exact words without so indicating with quotation marks or block quotations. You also plagiarize when you use words so close to those in your source, that if you placed your work next to the source, you would see that you could not have written what you did without the source at your elbow."[5] Finally, the act of taking another person's idea, putting it into one's own words, and then including it in one's paper-without acknowledging that the idea came from some other source-is plagiarizing.

Some students try to avoid plagiarizing by shunning the use of direct quotes. Instead of copying another author's words exactly, the students attempt to paraphrase-or put into their own words-passages from primary and secondary texts. This is not a bad idea, but in order for paraphrasing to work, two things must be remembered.

  • The act of paraphrasing does not give you permission to copy almost an entire passage, simply changing a few words here or there. If you are only changing an occasional word or phrase, or if you are keeping most of the important phrases from the original text in your own version, you are not paraphrasing, and you would be better off directly quoting the source. As Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams remind us in The Craft of Research, "close paraphrase may count as plagiarism, even if you cite the source."[6]
  • Even when you do paraphrase correctly, and completely re-word the statement of an idea so that it reflects your own phrasing and not that of the original author, you need to cite the material that you have paraphrased because it contains ideas that originated in the mind of somebody else. You might not be directly quoting another author, but you are still discussing another scholar's thoughts.

A Quick Test to Help Avoid Plagiarism[7]

" . . .Be conscious of where your eyes are as you put words on paper or on a screen. If your eyes are on your source at the same moment your fingers are flying across the keyboard, you risk doing something that weeks, even months, even years later could result in your public humiliation. Whenever you use a source extensively, compare your page with the original. If you think someone could run her finger along your sentences and find synonyms or synonymous phrases for words in the original in roughly the same order, try again. You are least likely to plagiarize inadvertently if, as you write, you keep your eyes not on your source but on the screen or on your own page, and you report what your source has to say after those words have been filtered through your own understanding of them."

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Due to the serious nature of plagiarism, you may well wonder whether there are ever instances in which you can incorporate ideas or language that did not originate in your own mind into your writing without including citations. I will respond by saying that there is never justification for not citing-and enclosing in quotation marks-specific language lifted directly from other documents. Technically, scholars are often excused from citing "commonly-known" ideas or facts; however, the question of what constitutes "commonly-known" is very murky. To be on the safe side, I encourage you to go ahead and use a citation if you have any doubts about whether an idea/fact you want to discuss is "commonly-known." In my mind, it is better to cite too often, and err on the side of being overly cautious, than to cite too infrequently and risk being brought up on charges of plagiarism. I also strongly advise you to talk to your TA or your professor if you have specific questions about whether or not something needs to be cited.

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Creating an Argument and Using it to Organize Your Paragraphs

We have finally reached the "writing" stage of constructing a history paper. If your professor did not assign a paper topic to you, you have formulated a topic of your own. Through research in a variety of primary and secondary sources, you have developed a general sense of where you anticipate your paper will go. In the back of your mind, you have a feel for the points that you want to cover. The next step is to come up with an argument, or thesis, that sums up the paper's main ideas and tells the reader what you will attempt to prove in the paper.

Write in Past Tense, Not Present Tense

Before I launch into a discussion of creating an argument, I should remind you to use the past tense when you write history papers. When constructing essays in other humanistic disciplines, you are allowed-even expected-to use the present tense. In the historical realm, present tense is used much more infrequently. As Mary Lynn Rampola explains on page 38 of A Pocket Guide to Writing in History[8],

The events that historians write about took place in the past; therefore, historians conventionally use the past tense . . . The use of the present may be a very effective device [in other fields], but it is awkward in a history paper. First, readers might become confused about whether the events under discussion happened in the past or present, especially if the paper includes modern assessments of the issue. Second, the use of the present makes it very easy for the writer to fall prey to anachronism. Perhaps more important, writing in the present sounds artificial; in normal conversation, we talk about events that happened in the past in the past tense. The same approach is also best for writing.

Regardless, there are important times in history when you should use the present tense. For example, when you discuss the contents of a source document itself, use the present tense, since that source document is still "alive" and speaking to you as a modern reader. Thus, even though you should use the past tense when writing "the framers of the American Constitution intended to balance individual liberties with community responsibility," you should use the present tense when claiming that "the Constitution guarantees certain individual rights." In the first phrase, you use the past tense because the framers of the Constitution completed the action of "intending" long ago. You use the present tense in the second phrase because the Constitution is still in existence and acting to "guarantee" individual rights even as you pen your history paper. Now, with the question of which tense to use out of the way, let's move on to a discussion of how to formulate an argument.

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An Argument Is Not A Statement of Fact, But A Debatable Statement That You Must Prove

Much as the term "argument" implies, you cannot simply state an incontestable fact and use it as your argument. For example, the sentence "When Europeans arrived in the 'New World,' they brought with them diseases that decimated entire groups of Native Americans" would not serve as an acceptable argument because it is undeniably true. You could, however, use this statement as an argument if you amended it slightly and declared that "When Europeans arrived in the 'New World,' they brought with them diseases that proved to be the main factors in the downfall of Native American civilizations." Unlike the first statement, which really didn't assert anything questionable but merely stated a fact, this second statement makes a claim that is open to debate; scholars other than yourself might argue that drought, rather than disease, was the main killer of Native Americans throughout the 1500s. Similarly, you could not use as your argument a statement like "In The Decameron, Giovanni Boccacio described life in the city of Florence during the 1300s, when the plague swept through Europe." Once again, this is a statement of fact and contains no assertions that need to be defended or proved. If you transformed the statement into "Boccaccio's treatments of love and the Black Death in The Decameron prove that his interpretation of Florentine society was subjective and thus is historically questionable," you would have a usable argument around which to frame your paper.

When attempting to determine whether your thesis statement is really an argument (which it should be!), ask yourself whether someone could contest what you are claiming. If so, then you have formulated a genuine argument. Once you have stated that argument at the paper's beginning, you will spend the rest of the paper: a.) supporting your argument and, b.) rebutting possible attacks against your argument. Play devil's advocate. Imagine that you are your own worst enemy-someone who is trying to disprove the argument that you have put forth. What flaws in your argument will your opponents point out? Where are the lapses in your thesis? Once you have determined the weaknesses in your own argument, you can work on eradicating them.

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Place Your Argument Early in the Paper, and Make it as Succinct as Possible

Many secondary school teachers tell students that an argument/thesis should only be one sentence, and that it must appear as the last sentence in the first paragraph of the paper. At the college level, papers become more complex, and you cannot always fit your whole argument into one sentence, especially if your paper is a lengthy one that explores several different points. In addition, since papers at the university level can be quite extensive (twenty pages or longer in some instances), it is not always necessary to place the argument at the end of the first paragraph. Depending upon how much flexibility you have in terms of paper length, and also upon how complicated your paper topic is, you might need to use the first paragraph to give a general introduction that outlines the context of the topic at hand. You would then summarize the actual argument in one of the succeeding paragraphs. No matter how long the paper is, however, I recommend trying to present your thesis to the reader as early in the paper as possible. The less time the reader has to spend wondering where the paper will take him or her, the better.

Flexibility is very important when planning a history paper; you will not always find it possible to place your thesis in one sentence at the end of the first paragraph of your essay. But I still encourage you to keep the advice of your secondary school teacher in mind when you start to construct your argument. Pretend that you do have to place the argument at the end of your first paragraph, and pretend that it is only limited to one sentence. This is a good idea for two main reasons. First, believing that an argument should only be one sentence long encourages you to think long and hard about what you really want to get across in your paper. In the course of paring down all of your ideas so that they fit into a single thesis sentence, you will eradicate unneeded, obstructive thoughts that are floating around in the back of your mind; organizing the paper will become much easier. Second, trying to construct a paper in which the argument appears at the very end of the first paragraph will help you create a well-thought-out framework upon which to "hang" the rest of the paper.

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Make the Paper Manageable; Don't Try to Tackle Too Many Ideas

Since the argument is one of the most important elements of you paper, you need to spend some time developing it. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I can give you is this: don't try to tackle too many ideas in one essay! You will only end up frustrated. Simple identification of your argument can be a troublesome task if you have a myriad of thoughts in your head and are unsure as to which ones should be stressed in the paper. To gain some clarity, try the following exercise. Keeping in mind all of the ideas that you want the paper to cover, pretend that when your reader walks away from your paper, most of the writing will fade from her mind. She will, however, remember one major point. What do you want this point to be? This point-the one that you want your reader to recall, even if she forgets everything else she has read-is your argument or thesis.

What if you have two or three major ideas that you want your reader to remember? First, I would encourage you to examine those ideas to see if you can place them in some sort of hierarchical order. Is one idea slightly more important than the others are? Does one of the ideas serve as a bridge or connector between the others? If not, can you think of a "higher," overarching idea that links all of the ideas? If you can answer any of these questions affirmatively, you have identified your main idea, and it should be the focus of your thesis statement. The other ideas in your mind are important, but they are ideas that merely support, advance, or are connected to the main idea; they do not need to be the focus of your argument.

You will indubitably run into situations where you have two or three main ideas and all of them are equally important. (If you have more than three main concepts you are trying to advance in your paper, you are trying to do too much, unless you are writing a book or an honors thesis.) This means that your thesis is comprised of several sub-components; due to this complexity, statement of the thesis might necessarily take more than one sentence. A brief examination of Christine Stansell's City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860[9] highlights a two-pronged thesis. On page xiv, Stansell ends the Introduction to her work by concluding that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, New York City was

a place set off from the rest of the country in many ways. In its cosmopolitanism, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its breadth of human enterprise, it resembled London and Paris . . . But if unique, New York was far from irrelevant to the rest of America: It was a historical stage writ large for encounters that reverberated across the rest of the nation. It was the home of a radical working class and the site of intense class conflicts before the Civil War; it was also at the forefront of middle-class commercial and domestic culture. . . . Already by the 1840s an arbiter of gender fashions and expectations, New York was a testing ground for much that was new between the sexes. For poor women in this city, a new configuration of suffering and possibility was just beginning to move into place. [italics mine-AL]

Through this paragraph, a reader senses that Stansell will touch upon many topics in her book, including New York's "cosmopolitan" nature, its class struggles, and its "commercial and domestic culture." The reader can also tell, however, that these sub-topics are not Stansell's main concern, and so her argument does not revolve around them. Instead, Stansell's argument focuses upon the following two points: 1.) by the 1840s, New York was a "testing ground" for changing conceptions of gender and gender relations, and, 2.) New York's shifting gender landscape brought with it new options for poor women in the city, along with new suffering.

In Christine Stansell's work, we see a situation where an author obviously has many ideas and topics that she wants to discuss in her work. Fortunately for the reader, she has skillfully distinguished the major points that she actually wants to prove and placed them in two sentences that, when combined, make up her argument. As mentioned earlier, implicit in the word "argument" is the idea that a writer is taking a stand that other scholars can argue against. In Stansell's mind, there is no question about whether New York was sophisticated or a place of socioeconomic turmoil. Thus, the topics of New York's sophistication and its social, economic, and cultural complexity do not serve as a debatable foundation for an argument; instead, Stansell uses a discussion of those topics as background and context for an exploration of her thesis.

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Do A Thorough Job Analyzing and Explaining Each Idea Contained in the Essay

Once you have formulated a strong argument, you can work on developing the rest of your essay. I am afraid that I will not be able to offer you much concrete guidance on what the rest of your paper should look like, since the shape of your paper will depend in large part upon your particular argument. Does your argument call upon you to compare and contrast two different historical sources? Does it demand that you explain the causes of a certain historical phenomenon? Have you promised to explore the effects of an historical happening? Different types of arguments require papers that are structured differently. Therefore, I suggest that you visit your TA or professor and attain some advice if you are having trouble organizing your piece.

Despite the large number of possible paper structures, I can confidently render the following piece of advice: discuss each idea in your paper fully and completely. In the course of determining your essay's argument, you should have spent some time paring down the number of ideas that you plan to address in the paper. Limit yourself to exploring those ideas and sub-topics that can be analyzed in a complex, multi-faceted manner given the assignment's page and time constraints. As I have repeatedly hinted, you are better off writing about fewer ideas in great detail and with increased insight and depth than presenting the reader with a broad collection of undeveloped, unconnected thoughts.

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Be Sure that Each Paragraph is Connected to Your Argument

Throughout the writing process, you should remain conscious of how each paragraph connects with your argument. In history papers, paragraphs can play a variety of functions. They can:

  • present new evidence to support your argument
  • provide the reader with the background or context necessary to fully understand your argument
  • anticipate and address counter-arguments that might be launched at your argument
  • elucidate or define how you are using a particular term in your argument
  • explore the relationship between different parts of your argument, if your thesis is composed of various sub-ideas

There are few things more distracting to a reader than unnecessary paragraphs that don't seem to serve any purpose in the paper. Such paragraphs disrupt the flow of the essay and shatter the reader's concentration.

So how do you avoid including useless paragraphs of clutter? At the end of each paragraph composed, ask yourself how the paragraph clarifies or furthers your argument; if you have a difficult time figuring out a paragraph's purpose, your reader will as well. You also must ascertain that you have made perfectly explicit the paragraph's relation to your argument. Of course, since you have written the paper, you know why you have included each particular paragraph; the whole paper seems quite logical to you. But will your rationale for including different paragraphs also be evident to a reader who hasn't been inside of your head throughout the writing process? Finally, when you finish the first draft of your paper, re-read your work. As you work through each paragraph, ask yourself what would happen if you took the paragraph out of the paper. Would your argument still be as clear and strong? If you can remove a paragraph without in any way harming your ability to prove your thesis, that paragraph might not be necessary. You may be able to remove it and fill its space with significant material that is more relevant to your argument, and thus more important to your paper.

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Conclusion

The process of writing a history paper can be daunting if you are a relative newcomer to the study of this academic discipline. However, you must realize that at its core, the goal of writing history is not much different than the goal writing in any other scholarly realm; in every instance where you put pen to paper, you try to convince your reader that your words and ideas merit attention and serious consideration. After reading this booklet, I hope that you can more easily meet that goal using the ideas and tools that I have offered. Above all else, remember that writing is not an easy task for anyone and that even the "experts" continually revise their pieces in order to craft better-finished products. Only through continued, persistent practice can we improve our writing skills; if you keep plugging away at the art of penning history, I guarantee that you will become a far better writer than you ever thought you could be. From one historian to another, good luck.

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Resource Works

General Advice on the Crafts of Writing and Researching

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Kane, Thomas S. The New Oxford Guide to Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Special Advice on Writing History in Particular

Bailyn, Bernard. On the Teaching and Writing of History: Responses to a Series of Questions. Hanover, NH: Montgomery Endowment, Dartmouth College, 1994.
Bloch, Marc. The Historian's Craft. Translated by Peter Putnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1953.
Burke, Peter, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Handlin, Oscar. Truth in History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979.
Lottinville, Savoie. The Rhetoric of History. Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Rampolla, Mary Lynn. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Winks, Robin W., ed. The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence. New York: Harper and Row, 1969

Grammar and Style Manuals

Burchfield, R.W., ed. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
The Chicago Manual of Style. 14th ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Hairston, Maxine, and John J. Ruszkiewicz. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. 3rd ed. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1993.
Hale, Constance, ed. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. San Francisco: HardWired, 1996.
Harvey, Gordon. Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.
The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage New York: The Stonesong Press, 1987.
Sabin, William A. The Gregg Reference Manual. 8th ed. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. 5th ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

General Reference Works

Harris, Sherwood, ed. The New York Public Library Book of How and Where to Look It Up. New York: The Stonesong Press, 1991.
The New York Public Library Desk Reference. 2nd ed. New York: The Stonesong Press, Inc., 1993.
Rubin, Louis Jr., ed. A Writer's Companion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

World Wide Web Sites

Brown University Writing Center

[1]"Historiography" has two different, but related, meanings. First, the term "historiography" simply refers to the body of written source materials-journal articles, books, etc.-on a given historical topic. Thus, the term "historiography" can be used in the following manner: "Prior to the 1960s, the historiography of immigration in the United States tended to stress 'the melting pot theory'; most books written during the era emphasized how different cultural groups tried to blend in with larger American society and become 'Americanized'. During the 1960s, however, the intellectual landscape began to shift, and scholars focused more upon the ways different immigrant groups managed to maintain their cultural differences in the works that they produced." Second, the term "historiography" simply means the critical study of written historical sources and indicates an academic discipline of history in which all professional historians must engage.

[2] Except where text is located in brackets [ ], these definitions are taken directly from Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69. I took the liberty of augmenting the given definitions with the sentences set in brackets. I also highlighted the given text with bold typeface when I believed doing so helped emphasize an especially important distinction.

[3] Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 42.

[4](Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

[5]Booth, Colomb, and Williams, 167.

[6]Ibid., 169.

[7]Ibid., 170.

[8] (Boston:Bedford/St, Martin's, 1998)

[9] (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987).