how to write a history assignment

How to Write a History Essay

How to write a history essay.

Written by Kalyn McCall

Writing a historical paper can seem daunting. How can you possibly capture everything about a historical moment? 

I’ve got good news: you can’t. 

No piece of historical work can be entirely comprehensive or encompass all aspects of a historical period, event, or figure. Instead, an effective history paper begins with a question, carefully selects evidence, and uses it to make a clear statement. 

Is it possible to know everything about the past? Nope, unless you have a time machine. Historical evidence exists in fragments and is recorded from various perspectives. It’s your job to put evidence together in a way that makes sense, and it’s okay for there to be varying perspectives among your sources. So, when will you know that you have the “right” answer? That’s probably the wrong question. Rather than looking for the “right” answer, reveal the one your evidence guided you to and explain how you got there. In other words, writing history isn’t about choosing sides, but these SIDES can assist you in arriving at a clear, well-supported perspective on your topic.

This guide is meant to help students begin the process of writing history and serve as a resource for those who want to see if they’re on the right track. History assignments vary widely—so always remember to follow your instructor’s instructions. Use this guide to go from summary to analysis, beginning with careful selection of sources to effectively present their arguments, no matter what kind of historical paper assignment you have. 

So, where should you start? Here:

Table of Contents:

Investigate

Strategize: Do you understand the assignment?

To start, once you get the assignment, make sure you know what your prompt is asking. What are the parameters? How does your teacher want you to respond? 

We have a whole guide that explains how to unpack a prompt, but common types of historical essays include:

Narrative: an explanation of events. 

Analytical: what happened, but also how and why it happened.

Comparative: compare the advantages and disadvantages of two sides or viewpoints. 

Historiographical: discuss how people study history, write it, and understand it.

Creative: using art to interpret the past. 

Before you write, study the central question posed by your assignment (or your research question). This will help you determine your answer and guide your research.

Investigate: What are your sources and where did you find them? 

Once you identify your question, begin your research and evaluate your sources. Primary and secondary sources will serve as the backbone of the essay and provide the evidence to support your analysis. Items produced in the time period being examined are primary sources (e.g., letters, diaries, reports, clothing, artifacts, newspapers, etc.). Secondary sources are created after the period in question and provide their own analysis (e.g. scholarly articles, journals, and books).

When looking for sources, don’t just jump to Wikipedia (though if you must refer to that website, scroll to the bottom of the page to look at the article’s sources—those can possibly point you in a useful direction). Instead, utilize your local and school libraries, online databases like JSTOR or Gilder Lehrman , government websites, archives, museums, and, of course, your instructors to find quality, credible sources. For some assignments, your teacher may also provide an approved list of sources for you to choose from. 

Draft: Make your case by analyzing the evidence

Complicated questions require convincing answers. Now is the time to compile your research to present a clear and concise argument. Here is an overview of how your argument can come together:

Before you write the essay, take the time to make an outline. Consider the structure of your essay. How can you organize your research so that the evidence clearly conveys an argument? Think of your main theme, the goal of the essay, and how you can present your findings. Each part should flow into the next, beginning with your main argument presented in your thesis statement.

A logical outline makes the essay easier for you to write and helps you assess its organization, logic, and cohesion. Bear in mind that while your outline will help guide your draft, it isn’t set in stone. You can (and generally should) make adjustments to its content and organization as your ideas evolve.

Introduction and Thesis

The introduction should make a bold statement that introduces your topic and compels the reader to keep going. Set the scene and tone for your paper’s topic, but don’t overgeneralize. For example, “There are many wars, and the Civil War was one of them” seems … a bit too broad. Instead, try something like, “The devastation of the Civil War shed light on America’s past while casting a shadow on its future.” To understand what this statement means, the reader must keep going. Follow the hook with an explanation, culminating in your position (i.e., your thesis). Your thesis will provide your reader with a roadmap to your paper and reveal its focus.

A general (meaning weaker) thesis might read, “The Civil War changed the course of history.” A stronger thesis would be more specific and nuanced, and might look like, “Because of emancipation, the Civil War forever changed America’s economy, attitude toward labor, and stances on citizenship.” Through a clear thesis, a reader should be able to gather where your argument is headed. As you develop your argument, be aware of possible counterarguments, so that you can acknowledge, respond to and, hopefully, refute them. For more detailed guidance on crafting a strong thesis , check out that guide. 

Analyze, Don’t Summarize

As your reader makes their way through the points of your argument, they are likely to respond with, “Where’s the proof?” As a general rule, assume your reader is willing to be convinced, but won’t simply agree with you or take your word for it. It’s your job to provide readers with the information they need to understand your argument, so for every claim you make, back it up with concrete information that substantiates your position and deepens the reader’s understanding.

Primary and secondary sources will be the basis of your evidence and analysis. They are the raw materials you will weave together to make a historical argument. As such, be sure to go beyond summarizing events, dates, and tidbits of information. Instead, what information from your research helps provide evidence to support your argument, and how does it do so? Read your sources closely, and ask yourself these questions to determine what information might be most pertinent to your argument:

Who made this source, what is their background, and how does that information shape their perspective?

When was this made, where, and why?

Who is the original or intended audience of the piece? How does that shape our understanding?

How does this source compare to others of the time? Is it representative, or an outlier?

The success of an essay depends not just on how many sources you use, but how well you use them. For more guidance on how to effectively utilize sources, check out “Writing from Sources.” 

Action list for more effective writing

Every type of writing has conventions and best practices that writers should follow. That said, there is no one way to write a history paper. Use your own voice, follow your teacher’s directions, and respond to each part of the prompt to show what you know.

As you critically engage with your sources, keep some things in mind:

Write in the past tense when discussing history. If a historical event took place in the past, write about it in the past.

Be precise. Focus on your thesis and only provide information that is needed to support or develop your argument.

Be formal. Try not to use casual language, and avoid using phrases like “I think.”  You don’t need to pull out a thesaurus for every sentence, but do go beyond everyday conversation.

Be concise. There is power in clear, direct language.

Provide citations. Give credit where credit is due and be sure to follow formal guidelines (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.) depending on what your professor requires. Whatever style you use, be consistent.

Avoid generalizations and cliches. Specificity is important. 

Avoid presentism and anachronism. Leave the past in the past instead of connecting everything to the present (unless the prompt specifically asks for that).

Mind your chronology and keep events in order.

Place things in context. Analyze evidence in the appropriate historical setting.

Use your voice. Weave in your primary and secondary sources (see link above). Instead of letting quotations make your argument, paraphrase when possible and only quote if you must.

With a plan in place and an outline to guide you, the writing process should feel more structured. Be sure to refer back to your prompt, and check in with your instructor if you are unsure if you are on the right track. 

Edit: Did you miss anything?

You will want to reread and revise your drafts multiple times to ensure your paper is logical, well organized, and polished—as a general rule, most of good writing is revising. And revising. If possible, ask your teacher or a friend to give you feedback and recommendations. This process takes time but is worth it. Once you are happy with your paper’s organization and content, you can focus on local edits by proofreading. You can also use the revision and proofreading stages of the writing process to make sure you addressed each element of the assignment. Here is a checklist that can support your editing process:

Make sure the essay responds to the prompt (especially if the prompt contains several questions). Each part of the prompt can help you assess the subject and structure of the essay.

Check the flow of the paper. Is the information presented logically? Does it follow or improve upon the outline? (Try to read your own writing from a stranger’s perspective.)

Check your dates and other specific historical details. While the essay needs to do much more than recite facts and dates, it is still important to get the evidence and historical context correct.

Review your citations. Avoid plagiarism, cite when necessary, and follow the proper citation format.

Proofread for errors in punctuation, spelling, grammar, capitalization, and the like.

If you need additional editing guidance, check out our more comprehensive guide to editing college-level papers here. 

Submit: Your paper is history

Congratulations. You are done and can submit your historical paper!

One great thing about history is that there is no “right” or “wrong” answer. Much of what your essay will be judged on is the merit of your evidence and whether or not you have presented readers with believable, well-organized proof.

So have fun diving into exploring and analyzing.

Special thanks to Kalyn McCall for writing this post and contributing to other College Writing Center resources

Kalyn McCall graduated with a B.A in History, B.A. in African and African American Studies, and M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, before pursuing her PhD in History from Harvard University. Throughout her academic pursuits, Kalyn has enjoyed working with and mentoring students in various capacities, from tutoring and academic coaching to counseling and application advising. Kalyn is particularly interested in helping first-generation and Black college students reach their potential and find their own paths. When not working, she can be found reading, playing with her dogs, or taking a nap.

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How to Write A History Essay

Writing a history essay

An essay is a piece of sustained writing in response to a question, topic or issue. Essays are commonly used for assessing and evaluating student progress in history. History essays test a range of skills including historical understanding, interpretation and analysis, planning, research and writing.

To write an effective essay, students should examine the question, understand its focus and requirements, acquire information and evidence through research, then construct a clear and well-organised response. Writing a good history essay should be rigorous and challenging, even for stronger students. As with other skills, essay writing develops and improves over time. Each essay you complete helps you become more competent and confident in exercising these skills.

Study the question

This is an obvious tip but one sadly neglected by some students. The first step to writing a good essay, whatever the subject or topic, is to give plenty of thought to the question.

An essay question will set some kind of task or challenge. It might ask you to explain the causes and/or effects of a particular event or situation. It might ask if you agree or disagree with a statement. It might ask you to describe and analyse the causes and/or effects of a particular action or event. Or it might ask you to evaluate the relative significance of a person, group or event.

You should begin by reading the essay question several times. Underline, highlight or annotate keywords or terms in the text of the question. Think about what it requires you to do. Who or what does it want you to concentrate on? Does it state or imply a particular timeframe? What problem or issue does it want you to address?

Begin with a plan

Every essay should begin with a written plan. Start constructing a plan as soon as you have received your essay question and given it some thought.

Prepare for research by brainstorming and jotting down your thoughts and ideas. What are your initial responses or thoughts about the question? What topics, events, people or issues are connected with the question? Do any additional questions or issues flow from the question? What topics or events do you need to learn more about? What historians or sources might be useful?

If you encounter a mental ‘brick wall’ or are uncertain about how to approach the question, don’t hesitate to discuss it with someone else. Consult your teacher, a capable classmate or someone you trust. Bear in mind too that once you start researching, your plan may change as you locate new information.

Start researching

After studying the question and developing an initial plan, start to gather information and evidence.

Most will start by reading an overview of the topic or issue, usually in some reliable secondary sources. This will refresh or build your existing understanding of the topic and provide a basis for further questions or investigation.

Your research should take shape from here, guided by the essay question and your own planning. Identify terms or concepts you do not know and find out what they mean. As you locate information, ask yourself if it is relevant or useful for addressing the question. Be creative with your research, looking in a variety of places.

If you have difficulty locating information, seek advice from your teacher or someone you trust.

Develop a contention

All good history essays have a clear and strong contention. A contention is the main idea or argument of your essay. It serves both as an answer to the question and the focal point of your writing.

Ideally, you should be able to express your contention as a single sentence. For example, the following contention might form the basis of an essay question on the rise of the Nazis:

Q. Why did the Nazi Party win 37 per cent of the vote in July 1932? A. The Nazi Party’s electoral success of 1932 was a result of economic suffering caused by the Great Depression, public dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic’s democratic political system and mainstream parties, and Nazi propaganda that promised a return to traditional social, political and economic values.

An essay using this contention would then go on to explain and justify these statements in greater detail. It will also support the contention with argument and evidence.

At some point in your research, you should begin thinking about a contention for your essay. Remember, you should be able to express it briefly as if addressing the essay question in a single sentence, or summing up in a debate.

Try to frame your contention so that is strong, authoritative and convincing. It should sound like the voice of someone well informed about the subject and confident about their answer.

Plan an essay structure

Once most of your research is complete and you have a strong contention, start jotting down a possible essay structure. This need not be complicated, a few lines or dot points is ample.

Every essay must have an introduction, a body of several paragraphs and a conclusion. Your paragraphs should be well organised and follow a logical sequence.

You can organise paragraphs in two ways: chronologically (covering events or topics in the order they occurred) or thematically (covering events or topics based on their relevance or significance). Every paragraph should be clearly signposted in the topic sentence.

Once you have finalised a plan for your essay, commence your draft.

Write a compelling introduction

Many consider the introduction to be the most important part of an essay. It is important for several reasons. It is the reader’s first experience of your essay. It is where you first address the question and express your contention. It is also where you lay out or ‘signpost’ the direction your essay will take.

Aim for an introduction that is clear, confident and punchy. Get straight to the point – do not waste time with a rambling or storytelling introduction.

Start by providing a little context, then address the question, articulate your contention and indicate what direction your essay will take.

Write fully formed paragraphs

Many history students fall into the trap of writing short paragraphs, sometimes containing as little as one or two sentences. A good history essay contains paragraphs that are themselves ‘mini-essays’, usually between 100-200 words each.

A paragraph should focus on one topic or issue only – but it should contain a thorough exploration of that topic or issue.

A good paragraph will begin with an effective opening sentence, sometimes called a topic sentence or signposting sentence. This sentence introduces the paragraph topic and briefly explains its significance to the question and your contention. Good paragraphs also contain thorough explanations, some analysis and evidence, and perhaps a quotation or two.

Finish with an effective conclusion

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay. A good conclusion should do two things. First, it should reiterate or restate the contention of your essay. Second, it should close off your essay, ideally with a polished ending that is not abrupt or awkward.

One effective way to do this is with a brief summary of ‘what happened next’. For example, an essay discussing Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 might close with a couple of sentences about how he consolidated and strengthened his power in 1934-35.

Your conclusion need not be as long or as developed as your body paragraphs. You should avoid introducing new information or evidence in the conclusion.

Reference and cite your sources

A history essay is only likely to succeed if it is appropriately referenced. Your essay should support its information, ideas and arguments with citations or references to reliable sources.

Referencing not only acknowledges the work of others, but it also gives authority to your writing and provides the teacher or assessor with an insight into your research. More information on referencing a piece of history writing can be found here .

Proofread, edit and seek feedback

Every essay should be proofread, edited and, if necessary, re-drafted before being submitted for assessment. Essays should ideally be completed well before their due date then put aside for a day or two before proofreading.

When proofreading, look first for spelling and grammatical errors, typographical mistakes, incorrect dates or other errors of fact.

Think then about how you can improve the clarity, tone and structure of your essay. Does your essay follow a logical structure or sequence? Is the signposting in your essay clear and effective? Are some sentences too long or ‘rambling’? Do you repeat yourself? Do paragraphs need to be expanded, fine-tuned or strengthened with more evidence?

Read your essay aloud, either to yourself or another person. Seek feedback and advice from a good writer or someone you trust (they need not have expertise in history, only in effective writing).

Some general tips on writing

• Always write in the third person . Never refer to yourself personally, using phrases like “I think…” or “It is my contention…”. Good history essays should adopt the perspective of an informed and objective third party. They should sound rational and factual – not like an individual expressing their opinion.
• Always write in the past tense . An obvious tip for a history essay is to write in the past tense. Always be careful about your use of tense. Watch out for mixed tenses when proofreading your work. One exception to the rule about past tense is when writing about the work of modern historians (for example, “Kershaw writes…” sounds better than “Kershaw wrote…” or “Kershaw has written…”).
• Avoid generalisations . Generalisation is a problem in all essays but it is particularly common in history essays. Generalisation occurs when you form general conclusions from one or more specific examples. In history, this most commonly occurs when students study the experiences of a particular group, then assume their experiences applied to a much larger group – for example, “All the peasants were outraged”, “Women rallied to oppose conscription” or “Germans supported the Nazi Party”. Both history and human society, however, are never this clear cut or simple. Always try to avoid generalisation and be on the lookout for generalised statements when proofreading.
• Write short, sharp and punchy . Good writers vary their sentence length but as a rule of thumb, most of your sentences should be short and punchy. The longer a sentence becomes, the greater the risk of it becoming long-winded or confusing. Long sentences can easily become disjointed, confused or rambling. Try not to overuse long sentences and pay close attention to sentence length when proofreading.
• Write in an active voice . In history writing, the active voice is preferable to the passive voice. In the active voice, the subject completes the action (e.g. “Hitler [the subject] initiated the Beer Hall putsch [the action] to seize control of the Bavarian government”). In the passive voice, the action is completed by the subject (“The Beer Hall putsch [the action] was initiated by Hitler [the subject] to seize control of the Bavarian government”). The active voice also helps prevent sentences from becoming long, wordy and unclear.

You may also find our page on writing for history useful.

Citation information Title : ‘Writing a history essay’ Authors : Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson Publisher : Alpha History URL : https://alphahistory.com/writing-a-history-essay/ Date published : April 13, 2020 Date updated : December 20, 2022 Date accessed : Today’s date Copyright : The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

How to Write a History Research Paper

• How do I pick a topic?
• But I can’t find any material…

Research Guide

Writing guide.

See also: How to Write a Good History Essay

1. How do I pick a topic?

Picking a topic is perhaps the most important step in writing a research paper. To do it well requires several steps of refinement. First you have to determine a general area in which you have an interest (if you aren’t interested, your readers won’t be either). You do not write a paper “about the Civil War,” however, for that is such a large and vague concept that the paper will be too shallow or you will be swamped with information. The next step is to narrow your topic. Are you interested in comparison? battles? social change? politics? causes? biography? Once you reach this stage try to formulate your research topic as a question. For example, suppose that you decide to write a paper on the use of the films of the 1930’s and what they can tell historians about the Great Depression. You might turn that into the following question: “What are the primary values expressed in films of the 1930’s?” Or you might ask a quite different question, “What is the standard of living portrayed in films of the 1930’s?” There are other questions, of course, which you could have asked, but these two clearly illustrate how different two papers on the same general subject might be. By asking yourself a question as a means of starting research on a topic you will help yourself find the answers. You also open the door to loading the evidence one way or another. It will help you decide what kinds of evidence might be pertinent to your question, and it can also twist perceptions of a topic. For example, if you ask a question about economics as motivation, you are not likely to learn much about ideals, and vice versa.

2. But I can’t find any material…

No one should pick a topic without trying to figure out how one could discover pertinent information, nor should anyone settle on a topic before getting some background information about the general area. These two checks should make sure your paper is in the realm of the possible. The trick of good research is detective work and imaginative thinking on how one can find information. First try to figure out what kinds of things you should know about a topic to answer your research question. Are there statistics? Do you need personal letters? What background information should be included? Then if you do not know how to find that particular kind of information, ASK . A reference librarian or professor is much more likely to be able to steer you to the right sources if you can ask a specific question such as “Where can I find statistics on the number of interracial marriages?” than if you say “What can you find on racial attitudes?”

Use the footnotes and bibliographies of general background books as well as reference aids to lead you to special studies. If Carleton does not have the books or sources you need, try ordering through the library minitex. Many sources are also available on-line.

As your research paper takes shape you will find that you need background on people, places, events, etc. Do not just rely on some general survey for all of your background. Check the several good dictionaries of biography for background on people, or see if there is a standard book-length biography. If you are dealing with a legal matter check into the background of the judges who make the court decision and the circumstances surrounding the original incident or law. Try looking for public opinions in newspapers of the time. In other words, each bit of information you find should open the possibility of other research paths.

Learn to use several research techniques. You cannot count on a good research paper coming from browsing on one shelf at the library. A really pertinent book may be hidden in another section of the library due to classification quirks. The Readers’ Guide (Ref. A13 .R4) is not the only source for magazine articles, nor the card catalog for books. There are whole books which are listings of other books on particular topics. There are specialized indexes of magazine articles. Modern History Journals are indexed in the Social Studies and Humanities Index (Ref. A13 .R282) before 1976 After 1976 use the Social Sciences Index (REF A13 .S62) and the Humanities Index (Ref. A13 .H85). See also Historical Abstracts (Ref. D1 .H5). Reference Librarians would love to help you learn to use these research tools. It pays to browse in the reference room at the library and poke into the guides which are on the shelves. It also pays to browse the Internet.

3. Help! How do I put this together?

A. preliminary research:.

If you do not already have a general background on your topic, get the most recent good general source on the topic and read it for general orientation. On the basis of that reading formulate as clearly focused question as you can. You should generally discuss with your professor at that point whether your question is a feasible one.

B. Building a Basic Bibliography:

Use the bibliography/notes in your first general source, MUSE, and especially Historical Abstracts on cd-rom in the Library Reading Room (the computer farthest to the left in the front row as you walk past the Reference Desk — or ask there). If there is a specialized bibliography on your topic, you will certainly want to consult that as well, but these are often a bit dated.

C. Building a Full Bibliography:

Read the recent articles or chapters that seem to focus on your topic best. This will allow you to focus your research question quite a bit. Use the sources cited and/or discussed in this reading to build a full bibliography. Use such tools as Historical Abstracts (or, depending on your topic, the abstracts from a different field) and a large, convenient computer-based national library catalog (e.g. the University of California system from the “Libs” command in your VAX account or the smaller University of Minnesota library through MUSE) to check out your sources fully. For specific article searches “Uncover” (press returns for the “open access”) or possibly (less likely for history) “First Search” through “Connect to Other Resources” in MUSE can also be useful.

D. Major Research:

Now do the bulk of your research. But do not overdo it. Do not fall into the trap of reading and reading to avoid getting started on the writing. After you have the bulk of information you might need, start writing. You can fill in the smaller gaps of your research more effectively later.

A. Outline:

Write a preliminary thesis statement, expressing what you believe your major argument(s) will be. Sketch out a broad outline that indicates the structure — main points and subpoints or your argument as it seems at this time. Do not get too detailed at this point.

B. The First Draft:

On the basis of this thesis statement and outline, start writing, even pieces, as soon as you have enough information to start. Do not wait until you have filled all the research gaps. Keep on writing. If you run into smaller research questions just mark the text with a searchable symbol. It is important that you try to get to the end point of this writing as soon as possible, even if you leave pieces still in outline form at first and then fill the gaps after you get to the end.

Critical advice for larger papers: It is often more effective not to start at the point where the beginning of your paper will be. Especially the introductory paragraph is often best left until later, when you feel ready and inspired.

C. The Second Draft:

The “second draft” is a fully re-thought and rewritten version of your paper. It is at the heart of the writing process.

First, lay your first draft aside for a day or so to gain distance from it. After that break, read it over with a critical eye as you would somebody else’s paper (well, almost!). You will probably find that your first draft is still quite descriptive, rather than argumentative. It is likely to wander; your perspective and usually even the thesis seemed to change/develop as you wrote. Don’t despair. That is perfectly normal even for experienced writers (even after 40 years and a good deal of published work!). You will be frustrated. But keep questioning your paper along the following lines: What precisely are my key questions? What parts of my evidence here are really pertinent to those questions (that is, does it help me answer them)? How or in what order can I structure my paper most effectively to answer those questions most clearly and efficiently for my reader?

At this point you must outline your paper freshly. Mark up your first draft, ask tough questions whether your argument is clear and whether the order in which you present your points is effective! You must write conceptually a new paper at this point, even if you can use paragraphs and especially quotes, factual data in the new draft.

It is critical that in your new draft your paragraphs start with topic sentences that identify the argument you will be making in the particular paragraph (sometimes this can be strings of two or three paragraphs). The individual steps in your argument must be clearly reflected in the topic sentences of your paragraphs (or a couple of them linked).

D. The Third or Final Draft:

You are now ready to check for basic rules of good writing. This is when you need to check the diction, that is, the accuracy and suitability of words. Eliminate unnecessary passive or awkward noun constructions (active-voice, verbal constructions are usually more effective); improve the flow of your transitions; avoid repetitions or split infinitives; correct apostrophes in possessives and such. Make the style clear and smooth. Check that the start of your paper is interesting for the reader. Last but not least, cut out unnecessary verbiage and wordiness. Spell-check and proof-read.

– Diethelm Prowe, 1998

How to Write a History Essay, According to a History Professor

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• History classes almost always include an essay assignment.
• Focus your paper by asking a historical question and then answering it.
• Your introduction can make or break your essay.
• When in doubt, reach out to your history professor for guidance.

In nearly every history class, you'll need to write an essay . But what if you've never written a history paper? Or what if you're a history major who struggles with essay questions?

I've written over 100 history papers between my undergraduate education and grad school — and I've graded more than 1,500 history essays, supervised over 100 capstone research papers, and sat on more than 10 graduate thesis committees.

Here's my best advice on how to write a history paper.

How to Write a History Essay in 6 Simple Steps

You have the prompt or assignment ready to go, but you're stuck thinking, "How do I start a history essay?" Before you start typing, take a few steps to make the process easier.

Whether you're writing a three-page source analysis or a 15-page research paper , understanding how to start a history essay can set you up for success.

Step 1: Understand the History Paper Format

You may be assigned one of several types of history papers. The most common are persuasive essays and research papers. History professors might also ask you to write an analytical paper focused on a particular source or an essay that reviews secondary sources.

Spend some time reading the assignment. If it's unclear what type of history paper format your professor wants, ask.

Regardless of the type of paper you're writing, it will need an argument. A strong argument can save a mediocre paper — and a weak argument can harm an otherwise solid paper.

Your paper will also need an introduction that sets up the topic and argument, body paragraphs that present your evidence, and a conclusion .

Step 2: Choose a History Paper Topic

If you're lucky, the professor will give you a list of history paper topics for your essay. If not, you'll need to come up with your own.

What's the best way to choose a topic? Start by asking your professor for recommendations. They'll have the best ideas, and doing this can save you a lot of time.

Alternatively, start with your sources. Most history papers require a solid group of primary sources. Decide which sources you want to use and craft a topic around the sources.

Finally, consider starting with a debate. Is there a pressing question your paper can address?

Before continuing, run your topic by your professor for feedback. Most students either choose a topic so broad it could be a doctoral dissertation or so narrow it won't hit the page limit. Your professor can help you craft a focused, successful topic. This step can also save you a ton of time later on.

Step 3: Write Your History Essay Outline

It's time to start writing, right? Not yet. You'll want to create a history essay outline before you jump into the first draft.

You might have learned how to outline an essay back in high school. If that format works for you, use it. I found it easier to draft outlines based on the primary source quotations I planned to incorporate in my paper. As a result, my outlines looked more like a list of quotes, organized roughly into sections.

As you work on your outline, think about your argument. You don't need your finished argument yet — that might wait until revisions. But consider your perspective on the sources and topic.

Jot down general thoughts about the topic, and formulate a central question your paper will answer. This planning step can also help to ensure you aren't leaving out key material.

Step 4: Start Your Rough Draft

It's finally time to start drafting! Some students prefer starting with the body paragraphs of their essay, while others like writing the introduction first. Find what works best for you.

Use your outline to incorporate quotes into the body paragraphs, and make sure you analyze the quotes as well.

When drafting, think of your history essay as a lawyer would a case: The introduction is your opening statement, the body paragraphs are your evidence, and the conclusion is your closing statement.

When writing a conclusion for a history essay, make sure to tie the evidence back to your central argument, or thesis statement .

Don't stress too much about finding the perfect words for your first draft — you'll have time later to polish it during revisions. Some people call this draft the "sloppy copy."

Step 5: Revise, Revise, Revise

Once you have a first draft, begin working on the second draft. Revising your paper will make it much stronger and more engaging to read.

During revisions, look for any errors or incomplete sentences. Track down missing footnotes, and pay attention to your argument and evidence. This is the time to make sure all your body paragraphs have topic sentences and that your paper meets the requirements of the assignment.

If you have time, take a day off from the paper and come back to it with fresh eyes. Then, keep revising.

Step 6: Spend Extra Time on the Introduction

No matter the length of your paper, one paragraph will determine your final grade: the introduction.

The intro sets up the scope of your paper, the central question you'll answer, your approach, and your argument.

In a short paper, the intro might only be a single paragraph. In a longer paper, it's usually several paragraphs. The introduction for my doctoral dissertation, for example, was 28 pages!

Use your introduction wisely. Make a strong statement of your argument. Then, write and rewrite your argument until it's as clear as possible.

If you're struggling, consider this approach: Figure out the central question your paper addresses and write a one-sentence answer to the question. In a typical 3-to-5-page paper, my shortcut argument was to say "X happened because of A, B, and C." Then, use body paragraphs to discuss and analyze A, B, and C.

Tips for Taking Your History Essay to the Next Level

You've gone through every step of how to write a history essay and, somehow, you still have time before the due date. How can you take your essay to the next level? Here are some tips.

• Talk to Your Professor: Each professor looks for something different in papers. Some prioritize the argument, while others want to see engagement with the sources. Ask your professor what elements they prioritize. Also, get feedback on your topic, your argument, or a draft. If your professor will read a draft, take them up on the offer.
• Write a Question — and Answer It: A strong history essay starts with a question. "Why did Rome fall?" "What caused the Protestant Reformation?" "What factors shaped the civil rights movement?" Your question can be broad, but work on narrowing it. Some examples: "What role did the Vandal invasions play in the fall of Rome?" "How did the Lollard movement influence the Reformation?" "How successful was the NAACP legal strategy?"
• Hone Your Argument: In a history paper, the argument is generally about why or how historical events (or historical changes) took place. Your argument should state your answer to a historical question. How do you know if you have a strong argument? A reasonable person should be able to disagree. Your goal is to persuade the reader that your interpretation has the strongest evidence.
• Address Counterarguments: Every argument has holes — and every history paper has counterarguments. Is there evidence that doesn't fit your argument? Address it. Your professor knows the counterarguments, so it's better to address them head-on. Take your typical five-paragraph essay and add a paragraph before the conclusion that addresses these counterarguments.
• Ask Someone to Read Your Essay: If you have time, asking a friend or peer to read your essay can help tremendously, especially when you can ask someone in the class. Ask your reader to point out anything that doesn't make sense, and get feedback on your argument. See whether they notice any counterarguments you don't address. You can later repay the favor by reading one of their papers.

Congratulations — you finished your history essay! When your professor hands back your paper, be sure to read their comments closely. Pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses in your paper. And use this experience to write an even stronger essay next time.

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How to Write a History Essay with Outline, Tips, Examples and More

Samuel Gorbold

Before we get into how to write a history essay, let's first understand what makes one good. Different people might have different ideas, but there are some basic rules that can help you do well in your studies. In this guide, we won't get into any fancy theories. Instead, we'll give you straightforward tips to help you with historical writing. So, if you're ready to sharpen your writing skills, let our history essay writing service explore how to craft an exceptional paper.

What is a History Essay?

A history essay is an academic assignment where we explore and analyze historical events from the past. We dig into historical stories, figures, and ideas to understand their importance and how they've shaped our world today. History essay writing involves researching, thinking critically, and presenting arguments based on evidence.

Moreover, history papers foster the development of writing proficiency and the ability to communicate complex ideas effectively. They also encourage students to engage with primary and secondary sources, enhancing their research skills and deepening their understanding of historical methodology. Students can benefit from utilizing essay writers services when faced with challenging assignments. These services provide expert assistance and guidance, ensuring that your history papers meet academic standards and accurately reflect your understanding of the subject matter.

History Essay Outline

The outline is there to guide you in organizing your thoughts and arguments in your essay about history. With a clear outline, you can explore and explain historical events better. Here's how to make one:

Introduction

• Hook: Start with an attention-grabbing opening sentence or anecdote related to your topic.
• Background Information: Provide context on the historical period, event, or theme you'll be discussing.
• Thesis Statement: Present your main argument or viewpoint, outlining the scope and purpose of your history essay.

Body paragraph 1: Introduction to the Historical Context

• Provide background information on the historical context of your topic.
• Highlight key events, figures, or developments leading up to the main focus of your history essay.

Body paragraphs 2-4 (or more): Main Arguments and Supporting Evidence

• Each paragraph should focus on a specific argument or aspect of your thesis.
• Present evidence from primary and secondary sources to support each argument.
• Analyze the significance of the evidence and its relevance to your history paper thesis.

Counterarguments (optional)

• Address potential counterarguments or alternative perspectives on your topic.
• Refute opposing viewpoints with evidence and logical reasoning.
• Summary of Main Points: Recap the main arguments presented in the body paragraphs.
• Restate Thesis: Reinforce your thesis statement, emphasizing its significance in light of the evidence presented.
• Reflection: Reflect on the broader implications of your arguments for understanding history.
• Closing Thought: End your history paper with a thought-provoking statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

References/bibliography

• List all sources used in your research, formatted according to the citation style required by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include both primary and secondary sources, arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.

Notes (if applicable)

• Include footnotes or endnotes to provide additional explanations, citations, or commentary on specific points within your history essay.

History Essay Format

Adhering to a specific format is crucial for clarity, coherence, and academic integrity. Here are the key components of a typical history essay format:

Font and Size

• Use a legible font such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri.
• The recommended font size is usually 12 points. However, check your instructor's guidelines, as they may specify a different size.
• Set 1-inch margins on all sides of the page.
• Double-space the entire essay, including the title, headings, body paragraphs, and references.
• Avoid extra spacing between paragraphs unless specified otherwise.
• Align text to the left margin; avoid justifying the text or using a centered alignment.

Title Page (if required):

• If your instructor requires a title page, include the essay title, your name, the course title, the instructor's name, and the date.
• Center-align this information vertically and horizontally on the page.
• Include a header on each page (excluding the title page if applicable) with your last name and the page number, flush right.
• Some instructors may require a shortened title in the header, usually in all capital letters.
• Center-align the essay title at the top of the first page (if a title page is not required).
• Use standard capitalization (capitalize the first letter of each major word).
• Avoid underlining, italicizing, or bolding the title unless necessary for emphasis.

Paragraph Indentation:

• Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inches or use the tab key.
• Do not insert extra spaces between paragraphs unless instructed otherwise.

Citations and References:

• Follow the citation style specified by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include in-text citations whenever you use information or ideas from external sources.
• Provide a bibliography or list of references at the end of your history essay, formatted according to the citation style guidelines.
• Typically, history essays range from 1000 to 2500 words, but this can vary depending on the assignment.

How to Write a History Essay?

Historical writing can be an exciting journey through time, but it requires careful planning and organization. In this section, we'll break down the process into simple steps to help you craft a compelling and well-structured history paper.

Analyze the Question

Before diving headfirst into writing, take a moment to dissect the essay question. Read it carefully, and then read it again. You want to get to the core of what it's asking. Look out for keywords that indicate what aspects of the topic you need to focus on. If you're unsure about anything, don't hesitate to ask your instructor for clarification. Remember, understanding how to start a history essay is half the battle won!

Now, let's break this step down:

• Read the question carefully and identify keywords or phrases.
• Consider what the question is asking you to do – are you being asked to analyze, compare, contrast, or evaluate?
• Pay attention to any specific instructions or requirements provided in the question.
• Take note of the time period or historical events mentioned in the question – this will give you a clue about the scope of your history essay.

Develop a Strategy

With a clear understanding of the essay question, it's time to map out your approach. Here's how to develop your historical writing strategy:

• Brainstorm ideas : Take a moment to jot down any initial thoughts or ideas that come to mind in response to the history paper question. This can help you generate a list of potential arguments, themes, or points you want to explore in your history essay.
• Create an outline : Once you have a list of ideas, organize them into a logical structure. Start with a clear introduction that introduces your topic and presents your thesis statement – the main argument or point you'll be making in your history essay. Then, outline the key points or arguments you'll be discussing in each paragraph of the body, making sure they relate back to your thesis. Finally, plan a conclusion that summarizes your main points and reinforces your history paper thesis.
• Research : Before diving into writing, gather evidence to support your arguments. Use reputable sources such as books, academic journals, and primary documents to gather historical evidence and examples. Take notes as you research, making sure to record the source of each piece of information for proper citation later on.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate potential counterarguments to your history paper thesis and think about how you'll address them in your essay. Acknowledging opposing viewpoints and refuting them strengthens your argument and demonstrates critical thinking.
• Set realistic goals : Be realistic about the scope of your history essay and the time you have available to complete it. Break down your writing process into manageable tasks, such as researching, drafting, and revising, and set deadlines for each stage to stay on track.

Start Your Research

Now that you've grasped the history essay topic and outlined your approach, it's time to dive into research. Here's how to start:

• Ask questions : What do you need to know? What are the key points to explore further? Write down your inquiries to guide your research.
• Explore diverse sources : Look beyond textbooks. Check academic journals, reliable websites, and primary sources like documents or artifacts.
• Consider perspectives : Think about different viewpoints on your topic. How have historians analyzed it? Are there controversies or differing interpretations?
• Take organized notes : Summarize key points, jot down quotes, and record your thoughts and questions. Stay organized using spreadsheets or note-taking apps.
• Evaluate sources : Consider the credibility and bias of each source. Are they peer-reviewed? Do they represent a particular viewpoint?

Establish a Viewpoint

By establishing a clear viewpoint and supporting arguments, you'll lay the foundation for your compelling historical writing:

• Review your research : Reflect on the information gathered. What patterns or themes emerge? Which perspectives resonate with you?
• Formulate a thesis statement : Based on your research, develop a clear and concise thesis that states your argument or interpretation of the topic.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate objections to your history paper thesis. Are there alternative viewpoints or evidence that you need to address?
• Craft supporting arguments : Outline the main points that support your thesis. Use evidence from your research to strengthen your arguments.
• Stay flexible : Be open to adjusting your viewpoint as you continue writing and researching. New information may challenge or refine your initial ideas.

Structure Your Essay

Now that you've delved into the depths of researching historical events and established your viewpoint, it's time to craft the skeleton of your essay: its structure. Think of your history essay outline as constructing a sturdy bridge between your ideas and your reader's understanding. How will you lead them from point A to point Z? Will you follow a chronological path through history or perhaps dissect themes that span across time periods?

And don't forget about the importance of your introduction and conclusion—are they framing your narrative effectively, enticing your audience to read your paper, and leaving them with lingering thoughts long after they've turned the final page? So, as you lay the bricks of your history essay's architecture, ask yourself: How can I best lead my audience through the maze of time and thought, leaving them enlightened and enriched on the other side?

Create an Engaging Introduction

Creating an engaging introduction is crucial for capturing your reader's interest right from the start. But how do you do it? Think about what makes your topic fascinating. Is there a surprising fact or a compelling story you can share? Maybe you could ask a thought-provoking question that gets people thinking. Consider why your topic matters—what lessons can we learn from history?

Also, remember to explain what your history essay will be about and why it's worth reading. What will grab your reader's attention and make them want to learn more? How can you make your essay relevant and intriguing right from the beginning?

Develop Coherent Paragraphs

Once you've established your introduction, the next step is to develop coherent paragraphs that effectively communicate your ideas. Each paragraph should focus on one main point or argument, supported by evidence or examples from your research. Start by introducing the main idea in a topic sentence, then provide supporting details or evidence to reinforce your point.

Make sure to use transition words and phrases to guide your reader smoothly from one idea to the next, creating a logical flow throughout your history essay. Additionally, consider the organization of your paragraphs—is there a clear progression of ideas that builds upon each other? Are your paragraphs unified around a central theme or argument?

Conclude Effectively

Concluding your history essay effectively is just as important as starting it off strong. In your conclusion, you want to wrap up your main points while leaving a lasting impression on your reader. Begin by summarizing the key points you've made throughout your history essay, reminding your reader of the main arguments and insights you've presented.

Then, consider the broader significance of your topic—what implications does it have for our understanding of history or for the world today? You might also want to reflect on any unanswered questions or areas for further exploration. Finally, end with a thought-provoking statement or a call to action that encourages your reader to continue thinking about the topic long after they've finished reading.

Reference Your Sources

Referencing your sources is essential for maintaining the integrity of your history essay and giving credit to the scholars and researchers who have contributed to your understanding of the topic. Depending on the citation style required (such as MLA, APA, or Chicago), you'll need to format your references accordingly. Start by compiling a list of all the sources you've consulted, including books, articles, websites, and any other materials used in your research.

Then, as you write your history essay, make sure to properly cite each source whenever you use information or ideas that are not your own. This includes direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. Remember to include all necessary information for each source, such as author names, publication dates, and page numbers, as required by your chosen citation style.

Review and Ask for Advice

As you near the completion of your history essay writing, it's crucial to take a step back and review your work with a critical eye. Reflect on the clarity and coherence of your arguments—are they logically organized and effectively supported by evidence? Consider the strength of your introduction and conclusion—do they effectively capture the reader's attention and leave a lasting impression? Take the time to carefully proofread your history essay for any grammatical errors or typos that may detract from your overall message.

Furthermore, seeking advice from peers, mentors, or instructors can provide valuable insights and help identify areas for improvement. Consider sharing your essay with someone whose feedback you trust and respect, and be open to constructive criticism. Ask specific questions about areas you're unsure about or where you feel your history essay may be lacking. If you need further assistance, don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help. You can even consider utilizing services that offer to write a discussion post for me , where you can engage in meaningful conversations with others about your essay topic and receive additional guidance and support.

History Essay Example

In this section, we offer an example of a history essay examining the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society. This essay demonstrates how historical analysis and critical thinking are applied in academic writing. By exploring this specific event, you can observe how historical evidence is used to build a cohesive argument and draw meaningful conclusions.

FAQs about History Essay Writing

How to write a history essay introduction, how to write a conclusion for a history essay, how to write a good history essay.

Samuel Gorbold , a seasoned professor with over 30 years of experience, guides students across disciplines such as English, psychology, political science, and many more. Together with EssayHub, he is dedicated to enhancing student understanding and success through comprehensive academic support.

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Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

/ AHA Resource Library

/ Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

Published Date

May 1, 2004

Resource Type

For the Classroom

This resource was developed in 2004 as part of “ The Conquest of Mexico ” by Nancy Fitch.

What Is History?

Most people believe that history is a “collection of facts about the past.” This is reinforced through the use of textbooks used in teaching history. They are written as though they are collections of information. In fact, history is NOT a “collection of facts about the past.” History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time. Historians often disagree over what “the facts” are as well as over how they should be interpreted. The problem is complicated for major events that produce “winners” and “losers,” since we are more likely to have sources written by the “winners,” designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

History in Your Textbook

Many textbooks acknowledge this in lots of places. For example, in one book, the authors write, “The stories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru are epic tales told by the victors. Glorified by the chronicles of their companions, the conquistadors, or conquerors, especially Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), emerged as heroes larger than life.” The authors then continue to describe Cortés ’s actions that ultimately led to the capture of Cuauhtómoc, who ruled the Mexicas after Moctezuma died. From the authors’ perspective, there is no question that Moctezuma died when he was hit by a rock thrown by one of his own subjects. When you read accounts of the incident, however, the situation was so unstable, that it is not clear how Moctezuma died. Note: There is little analysis in this passage. The authors are simply telling the story based upon Spanish versions of what happened. There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.   Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?

What Are Primary Sources?

To answer these questions, historians turn to primary sources, sources that were written at the time of the event, in this case written from 1519-1521 in Mexico. These would be firsthand accounts. Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain. Other sources are conventionally used as primary sources, although they were written long after the conquest. One example consists of the account written by Cortés’s companion, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Other accounts consist of Mexica and other Nahua stories and traditions about the conquest of Mexico from their point of view.

Making Arguments in the Textbook

Historians then use these sources to make arguments, which could possibly be refuted by different interpretations of the same evidence or the discovery of new sources.  For example, the Bentley and Ziegler textbook make several arguments on page 597 about why the Spaniards won:

“Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses offered Cortés and his men some advantage over the forces they met and help to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire”.

“Quite apart from military technology, Cortés’ expedition benefited from divisions among the indigenous peoples of Mexico.”

“With the aid of Doña Marina, the conquistadors forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexicas, the leaders of the Aztec empire….”

Ideally, under each of these “thesis statements,” that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their “thesis.” To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the “thesis” or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book does not provide any evidence to back up their main arguments, you can easily use the material available here to provide evidence to support your claim that any one of the above arguments is better than the others.  You could also use the evidence to introduce other possibilities:  Mocteuzuma’s poor leadership, Cortés’ craftiness, or disease.

Become a Critical Reader

To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to “own your own history,” you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book provides only conclusions and not much evidence to back up their main points, you may want to explore your class notes on the topic and then examine the primary sources included on the Conquest of Mexico on this web site.

Your Assignment for Writing History with Primary Sources

There are several ways to make this a successful assignment. First, you might take any of the theses presented in the book and use information from primary sources to disprove it—the “trash the book” approach. Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the “trash the prof” approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence ). Another approach is to include new information that the authors ignored . For example, the authors say nothing about omens. If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook? Or, can one really present a Spanish or Mexica perspective?  Another approach is to make your own thesis, i.e., one of the biggest reasons for the conquest was that Moctezuma fundamentally misunderstood Cortés.

When Sources Disagree

If you do work with the Mexican materials, you will encounter the harsh reality of historical research: the sources do not always agree on what happened in a given event. It is up to you, then, to decide who to believe. Most historians would probably believe Cortés’ letters were the most likely to be accurate, but is this statement justified? Cortés was in the heat of battle and while it looked like he might win easy victory in 1519, he did not complete his mission until 1521.  The Cuban Governor, Diego Velázquez wanted his men to capture Cortés and bring him back to Cuba on charges of insubordination.  Was he painting an unusually rosy picture of his situation so that the Spanish King would continue to support him? It is up to you to decide. Have the courage to own your own history! Díaz Del Castillo wrote his account later in his life, when the Spaniards were being attacked for the harsh policies they implemented in Mexico after the conquest.  He also was upset that Cortés’ personal secretary published a book that made it appear that only Cortés was responsible for the conquest. There is no question that the idea of the heroic nature of the Spanish actions is clearest in his account. But does this mean he was wrong about what he said happened and why? It is up to you to decide. The Mexica accounts are the most complex since they were originally oral histories told in Nahuatl that were then written down in a newly rendered alphabetic Nahuatl. They include additional Mexica illustrations of their version of what happened, for painting was a traditional way in which the Mexicas wrote history. Think about what the pictures tell us. In fact, a good paper might support a thesis that uses a picture as evidence. Again, how reliable is this material? It is up to you to decide.

One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make,

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Content Warning

This page contains words or ideas that might be offensive to modern readers. To maintain the accuracy of historical documentation, the content is reprinted in its entirety as it was originally published. This accurate reproduction of original historical texts therefore contains words and ideas that do not reflect the editorial decisions or views of the American Historical Association.

Writing a Good History Paper

• Top Ten Reasons for Negative Comments
• Making Sure your Paper has Substance

Common Marginal Remarks on Style, Clarity, Grammar, and Syntax

Word and phrase usage problems, analyzing a historical document, writing a book review, writing a term paper or senior thesis, top ten reasons for negative comments on history papers.

(Drawn from a survey of the History Department ) 10. You engage in cheap, anachronistic moralizing .  9. You are sloppy with the chronology .  8. You quote excessively or improperly .  7. You have written a careless “one-draft wonder.” (See revise and proofread)  6. You are vague or have empty, unsupported generalizations .  5. You write too much in the passive voice.  4. You use inappropriate sources .  3. You use evidence uncritically.  2. You are wordy .  1. You have no clear thesis and little analysis.

Making Sure your History Paper has Substance

Get off to a good start..

Avoid pretentious, vapid beginnings. If you are writing a paper on, say, British responses to the rebellion in India in 1857, don't open with a statement like this: “Throughout human history people in all cultures everywhere in the world have engaged in many and long-running conflicts about numerous aspects of government policy and diplomatic issues, which have much interested historians and generated historical theories in many areas.” This is pure garbage, bores the reader, and is a sure sign that you have nothing substantive to say. Get to the point. Here’s a better start: “The rebellion in 1857 compelled the British to rethink their colonial administration in India.” This sentence tells the reader what your paper is actually about and clears the way for you to state your thesis in the rest of the opening paragraph. For example, you might go on to argue that greater British sensitivity to Indian customs was hypocritical.

State a clear thesis.

Whether you are writing an exam essay or a senior thesis, you need to have a thesis. Don’t just repeat the assignment or start writing down everything that you know about the subject. Ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to prove?” Your thesis is your take on the subject, your perspective, your explanation—that is, the case that you’re going to argue. “Famine struck Ireland in the 1840s” is a true statement, but it is not a thesis. “The English were responsible for famine in Ireland in the 1840s” is a thesis (whether defensible or not is another matter). A good thesis answers an important research question about how or why something happened. (“Who was responsible for the famine in Ireland in the 1840s?”) Once you have laid out your thesis, don’t forget about it. Develop your thesis logically from paragraph to paragraph. Your reader should always know where your argument has come from, where it is now, and where it is going.

Be sure to analyze.

Students are often puzzled when their professors mark them down for summarizing or merely narrating rather than analyzing. What does it mean to analyze? In the narrow sense, to analyze means to break down into parts and to study the interrelationships of those parts. If you analyze water, you break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. In a broader sense, historical analysis explains the origins and significance of events. Historical analysis digs beneath the surface to see relationships or distinctions that are not immediately obvious. Historical analysis is critical; it evaluates sources, assigns significance to causes, and weighs competing explanations. Don’t push the distinction too far, but you might think of summary and analysis this way: Who, what, when, and where are the stuff of summary; how, why, and to what effect are the stuff of analysis. Many students think that they have to give a long summary (to show the professor that they know the facts) before they get to their analysis. Try instead to begin your analysis as soon as possible, sometimes without any summary at all. The facts will “shine through” a good analysis. You can't do an analysis unless you know the facts, but you can summarize the facts without being able to do an analysis. Summary is easier and less sophisticated than analysis—that’s why summary alone never earns an “A.”

Use evidence critically.

Like good detectives, historians are critical of their sources and cross-check them for reliability. You wouldn't think much of a detective who relied solely on a suspect’s archenemy to check an alibi. Likewise, you wouldn't think much of a historian who relied solely on the French to explain the origins of World War I. Consider the following two statements on the origin of World War I: 1) “For the catastrophe of 1914 the Germans are responsible. Only a professional liar would deny this...” 2) “It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this war. Neither the people, the government, nor the Kaiser wanted war....”  They can’t both be right, so you have to do some detective work. As always, the best approach is to ask: Who wrote the source? Why? When? Under what circumstances? For whom? The first statement comes from a book by the French politician Georges Clemenceau, which he wrote in 1929 at the very end of his life. In 1871, Clemenceau had vowed revenge against Germany for its defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. As premier of France from 1917 to 1920, he represented France at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was obviously not a disinterested observer. The second statement comes from a manifesto published by ninety-three prominent German intellectuals in the fall of 1914. They were defending Germany against charges of aggression and brutality. They too were obviously not disinterested observers. Now, rarely do you encounter such extreme bias and passionate disagreement, but the principle of criticizing and cross-checking sources always applies. In general, the more sources you can use, and the more varied they are, the more likely you are to make a sound historical judgment, especially when passions and self-interests are engaged. You don’t need to be cynical as a historian (self-interest does not explain everything), but you do need to be critical and skeptical. Competent historians may offer different interpretations of the same evidence or choose to stress different evidence. You will not find a single historical Truth with a capital “T” on any matter of significance. You can, however, learn to discriminate among conflicting interpretations, not all of which are created equal. (See also: Analyzing a Historical Document )

Be precise.

Vague statements and empty generalizations suggest that you haven't put in the time to learn the material. Consider these two sentences: “During the French Revolution, the government was overthrown by the people. The Revolution is important because it shows that people need freedom.” What people? Landless peasants? Urban journeymen? Wealthy lawyers? Which government? When? How? Who exactly needed freedom, and what did they mean by freedom? Here is a more precise statement about the French Revolution: “Threatened by rising prices and food shortages in 1793, the Parisian sans-culottes pressured the Convention to institute price controls.” This statement is more limited than the grandiose generalizations about the Revolution, but unlike them, it can open the door to a real analysis of the Revolution. Be careful when you use grand abstractions like people, society, freedom, and government, especially when you further distance yourself from the concrete by using these words as the apparent antecedents for the pronouns they and it. Always pay attention to cause and effect. Abstractions do not cause or need anything; particular people or particular groups of people cause or need things. Avoid grandiose trans-historical generalizations that you can’t support. When in doubt about the appropriate level of precision or detail, err on the side of adding “too much” precision and detail.

Watch the chronology.

Anchor your thesis in a clear chronological framework and don't jump around confusingly. Take care to avoid both anachronisms and vagueness about dates. If you write, “Napoleon abandoned his Grand Army in Russia and caught the redeye back to Paris,” the problem is obvious. If you write, “Despite the Watergate scandal, Nixon easily won reelection in 1972,” the problem is more subtle, but still serious. (The scandal did not become public until after the election.) If you write, “The revolution in China finally succeeded in the twentieth century,” your professor may suspect that you haven’t studied. Which revolution? When in the twentieth century? Remember that chronology is the backbone of history. What would you think of a biographer who wrote that you graduated from Hamilton in the 1950s?

Cite sources carefully.

Your professor may allow parenthetical citations in a short paper with one or two sources, but you should use footnotes for any research paper in history. Parenthetical citations are unaesthetic; they scar the text and break the flow of reading. Worse still, they are simply inadequate to capture the richness of historical sources. Historians take justifiable pride in the immense variety of their sources. Parenthetical citations such as (Jones 1994) may be fine for most of the social sciences and humanities, where the source base is usually limited to recent books and articles in English. Historians, however, need the flexibility of the full footnote. Try to imagine this typical footnote (pulled at random from a classic work of German history) squeezed into parentheses in the body of the text: DZA Potsdam, RdI, Frieden 5, Erzgebiet von Longwy-Briey, Bd. I, Nr. 19305, gedruckte Denkschrift für OHL und Reichsleitung, Dezember 1917, und in RWA, Frieden Frankreich Nr. 1883. The abbreviations are already in this footnote; its information cannot be further reduced. For footnotes and bibliography, historians usually use Chicago style. (The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.) On the Writing Center’s website you can find a useful summary of Chicago citation style prepared by a former history major, Elizabeth Rabe ’04 ( Footnotes ). RefWorks (on the library’s website) will convert your citations to Chicago style. Don’t hesitate to ask one of the reference librarians for help if you have trouble getting started on RefWorks.

Use primary sources.

Use as many primary sources as possible in your paper. A primary source is one produced by a participant in or witness of the events you are writing about. A primary source allows the historian to see the past through the eyes of direct participants. Some common primary sources are letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, church records, newspaper articles, and government documents of all kinds. The capacious genre “government records” is probably the single richest trove for the historian and includes everything from criminal court records, to tax lists, to census data, to parliamentary debates, to international treaties—indeed, any records generated by governments. If you’re writing about culture, primary sources may include works of art or literature, as well as philosophical tracts or scientific treatises—anything that comes under the broad rubric of culture. Not all primary sources are written. Buildings, monuments, clothes, home furnishings, photographs, religious relics, musical recordings, or oral reminiscences can all be primary sources if you use them as historical clues. The interests of historians are so broad that virtually anything can be a primary source. (See also: Analyzing a Historical Document )

Use scholarly secondary sources.

A secondary source is one written by a later historian who had no part in what he or she is writing about. (In the rare cases when the historian was a participant in the events, then the work—or at least part of it—is a primary source.) Historians read secondary sources to learn about how scholars have interpreted the past. Just as you must be critical of primary sources, so too you must be critical of secondary sources. You must be especially careful to distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly secondary sources. Unlike, say, nuclear physics, history attracts many amateurs. Books and articles about war, great individuals, and everyday material life dominate popular history. Some professional historians disparage popular history and may even discourage their colleagues from trying their hand at it. You need not share their snobbishness; some popular history is excellent. But—and this is a big but—as a rule, you should avoid popular works in your research, because they are usually not scholarly. Popular history seeks to inform and entertain a large general audience. In popular history, dramatic storytelling often prevails over analysis, style over substance, simplicity over complexity, and grand generalization over careful qualification. Popular history is usually based largely or exclusively on secondary sources. Strictly speaking, most popular histories might better be called tertiary, not secondary, sources. Scholarly history, in contrast, seeks to discover new knowledge or to reinterpret existing knowledge. Good scholars wish to write clearly and simply, and they may spin a compelling yarn, but they do not shun depth, analysis, complexity, or qualification. Scholarly history draws on as many primary sources as practical. Now, your goal as a student is to come as close as possible to the scholarly ideal, so you need to develop a nose for distinguishing the scholarly from the non-scholarly. Here are a few questions you might ask of your secondary sources (bear in mind that the popular/scholarly distinction is not absolute, and that some scholarly work may be poor scholarship). Who is the author? Most scholarly works are written by professional historians (usually professors) who have advanced training in the area they are writing about. If the author is a journalist or someone with no special historical training, be careful. Who publishes the work? Scholarly books come from university presses and from a handful of commercial presses (for example, Norton, Routledge, Palgrave, Penguin, Rowman & Littlefield, Knopf, and HarperCollins). If it’s an article, where does it appear? Is it in a journal subscribed to by our library, listed on JSTOR , or published by a university press? Is the editorial board staffed by professors? Oddly enough, the word journal in the title is usually a sign that the periodical is scholarly. What do the notes and bibliography look like? If they are thin or nonexistent, be careful. If they are all secondary sources, be careful. If the work is about a non-English-speaking area, and all the sources are in English, then it's almost by definition not scholarly. Can you find reviews of the book in the data base Academic Search Premier? If the book was published within the last few decades, and it’s not in there, that’s a bad sign. With a little practice, you can develop confidence in your judgment—and you’re on your way to being a historian. If you are unsure whether a work qualifies as scholarly, ask your professor. (See also: Writing a Book Review )

Avoid abusing your sources.

Many potentially valuable sources are easy to abuse. Be especially alert for these five abuses: Web abuse. The Web is a wonderful and improving resource for indexes and catalogs. But as a source for primary and secondary material for the historian, the Web is of limited value. Anyone with the right software can post something on the Web without having to get past trained editors, peer reviewers, or librarians. As a result, there is a great deal of garbage on the Web. If you use a primary source from the Web, make sure that a respected intellectual institution stands behind the site. Be especially wary of secondary articles on the Web, unless they appear in electronic versions of established print journals (e.g., The Journal of Asian Studies in JSTOR). Many articles on the Web are little more than third-rate encyclopedia entries. When in doubt, check with your professor. With a few rare exceptions, you will not find scholarly monographs in history (even recent ones) on the Web. You may have heard of Google’s plans to digitize the entire collections of some of the world’s major libraries and to make those collections available on the Web. Don’t hold your breath. Your days at Hamilton will be long over by the time the project is finished. Besides, your training as a historian should give you a healthy skepticism of the giddy claims of technophiles. Most of the time and effort of doing history goes into reading, note-taking, pondering, and writing. Finding a chapter of a book on the Web (as opposed to getting the physical book through interlibrary loan) might be a convenience, but it doesn’t change the basics for the historian. Moreover, there is a subtle, but serious, drawback with digitized old books: They break the historian’s sensual link to the past. And of course, virtually none of the literally trillions of pages of archival material is available on the Web. For the foreseeable future, the library and the archive will remain the natural habitats of the historian. Thesaurus abuse. How tempting it is to ask your computer’s thesaurus to suggest a more erudite-sounding word for the common one that popped into your mind! Resist the temptation. Consider this example (admittedly, a bit heavy-handed, but it drives the point home): You’re writing about the EPA’s programs to clean up impure water supplies. Impure seems too simple and boring a word, so you bring up your thesaurus, which offers you everything from incontinent to meretricious. “How about meretricious water?” you think to yourself. “That will impress the professor.” The problem is that you don’t know exactly what meretricious means, so you don’t realize that meretricious is absurdly inappropriate in this context and makes you look foolish and immature. Use only those words that come to you naturally. Don’t try to write beyond your vocabulary. Don’t try to impress with big words. Use a thesaurus only for those annoying tip-of-the-tongue problems (you know the word and will recognize it instantly when you see it, but at the moment you just can’t think of it).  Quotation book abuse. This is similar to thesaurus abuse. Let’s say you are writing a paper on Alexander Hamilton’s banking policies, and you want to get off to a snappy start that will make you seem effortlessly learned. How about a quotation on money? You click on the index of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , and before you know it, you’ve begun your paper with, “As Samuel Butler wrote in Hudibras ,  ‘For what is worth in anything/ But so much money as ’t will bring?’” Face it, you’re faking it. You don’t know who Samuel Butler is, and you’ve certainly never heard of Hudibras , let alone read it. Your professor is not fooled. You sound like an insecure after-dinner speaker. Forget Bartlett’s, unless you're confirming the wording of a quotation that came to you spontaneously and relates to your paper.  Encyclopedia abuse. General encyclopedias like Britannica are useful for checking facts (“Wait a sec, am I right about which countries sent troops to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China? Better check.”). But if you are footnoting encyclopedias in your papers, you are not doing college-level research.

Dictionary Abuse. The dictionary is your friend. Keep it by your side as you write, but do not abuse it by starting papers with a definition. You may be most tempted to start this way when you are writing on a complex, controversial, or elusive subject. (“According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , liberalism is defined as...”). Actually, the dictionary does you little good in such cases and makes you sound like a conscientious but dull high-school student. Save in the rare case that competing dictionary definitions are the subject at hand, keep dictionary quotations out of your paper.

Quote sparingly

Avoid quoting a secondary source and then simply rewording or summarizing the quotation, either above or below the quotation. It is rarely necessary to quote secondary sources at length, unless your essay focuses on a critical analysis of the author’s argument. (See also: Writing a Book Review ) Your professor wants to see your ability to analyze and to understand the secondary sources. Do not quote unless the quotation clarifies or enriches your analysis. When in doubt, do not quote; instead, integrate the author’s argument into your own (though be sure to acknowledge ideas from your sources, even when you are paraphrasing). If you use a lot of quotations from secondary sources, you are probably writing a poor paper. An analysis of a primary source, such as a political tract or philosophical essay, might require lengthy quotations, often in block format. In such cases, you might need to briefly repeat key points or passages as a means to introduce the author’s ideas, but your analysis and interpretation of the text’s meaning should remain the most important aim. (See also: Using primary sources and Use scholarly secondary sources .)

Know your audience

Unless instructed otherwise, you should assume that your audience consists of educated, intelligent, nonspecialists. In fact, your professor will usually be your only reader, but if you write directly to your professor, you may become cryptic or sloppy (oh well, she’ll know what I’m talking about). Explaining your ideas to someone who doesn't know what you mean forces you to be clear and complete. Now, finding the right amount of detail can, admittedly, be tricky (how much do I put in about the Edict of Nantes, the Embargo Act, or President Wilson’s background?). When in doubt, err on the side of putting in extra details. You’ll get some leeway here if you avoid the extremes (my reader’s an ignoramus/my reader knows everything).

Avoid cheap, anachronistic moralizing

Many of the people and institutions of the past appear unenlightened, ignorant, misguided, or bigoted by today’s values. Resist the temptation to condemn or to get self-righteous. (“Martin Luther was blind to the sexism and class prejudice of sixteenth-century German society.”) Like you, people in the past were creatures of their time; like you, they deserve to be judged by the standards of their time. If you judge the past by today’s standards (an error historians call “presentism”), you will never understand why people thought or acted as they did. Yes, Hitler was a bad guy, but he was bad not only by today’s standards, but also by the commonly accepted standards of his own time. Someday you’re going to look pretty foolish and ignorant yourself. (“Early twenty-first century Hamilton students failed to see the shocking inderdosherism [that’s right, you don’t recognize the concept because it doesn’t yet exist] implicit in their career plans.”)

Have a strong conclusion

Obviously, you should not just stop abruptly as though you have run out of time or ideas. Your conclusion should conclude something. If you merely restate briefly what you have said in your paper, you give the impression that you are unsure of the significance of what you have written. A weak conclusion leaves the reader unsatisfied and bewildered, wondering why your paper was worth reading. A strong conclusion adds something to what you said in your introduction. A strong conclusion explains the importance and significance of what you have written. A strong conclusion leaves your reader caring about what you have said and pondering the larger implications of your thesis. Don’t leave your reader asking, “So what?”

Revise and proofread

Your professor can spot a “one-draft wonder,” so don't try to do your paper at the last moment. Leave plenty of time for revising and proofreading. Show your draft to a writing tutor or other good writer. Reading the draft aloud may also help. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and a few may slip through no matter how meticulous you are. But beware of lots of mistakes. The failure to proofread carefully suggests that you devoted little time and effort to the assignment. Tip: Proofread your text both on the screen and on a printed copy. Your eyes see the two differently. Don’t rely on your spell checker to catch all of your misspellings. (If ewe ken reed this ewe kin sea that a computer wood nut all ways help ewe spill or rite reel good.)

Note: The Writing Center suggests standard abbreviations for noting some of these problems. You should familiarize yourself with those abbreviations, but your professor may not use them.  

Remarks on Style and Clarity

Wordy/verbose/repetitive..

Try your hand at fixing this sentence: “Due to the fact that these aspects of the issue of personal survival have been raised by recently transpired problematic conflicts, it is at the present time paramount that the ultimate psychological end of suicide be contemplated by this individual.” If you get it down to “To be or not to be, that is the question,” you’ve done well. You may not match Shakespeare, but you can learn to cut the fat out of your prose. The chances are that the five pages you’ve written for your history paper do not really contain five pages’ worth of ideas.

Misuse of the passive voice.

Write in the active voice. The passive voice encourages vagueness and dullness; it enfeebles verbs; and it conceals agency, which is the very stuff of history. You know all of this almost instinctively. What would you think of a lover who sighed in your ear, “My darling, you are loved by me!”? At its worst, the passive voice—like its kin, bureaucratic language and jargon—is a medium for the dishonesty and evasion of responsibility that pervade contemporary American culture. (“Mistakes were made; I was given false information.” Now notice the difference: “I screwed up; Smith and Jones lied to me; I neglected to check the facts.”) On history papers the passive voice usually signals a less toxic version of the same unwillingness to take charge, to commit yourself, and to say forthrightly what is really going on, and who is doing what to whom. Suppose you write, “In 1935 Ethiopia was invaded.” This sentence is a disaster. Who invaded? Your professor will assume that you don't know. Adding “by Italy” to the end of the sentence helps a bit, but the sentence is still flat and misleading. Italy was an aggressive actor, and your passive construction conceals that salient fact by putting the actor in the syntactically weakest position—at the end of the sentence as the object of a preposition. Notice how you add vigor and clarity to the sentence when you recast it in the active voice: "In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia." I n a few cases , you may violate the no-passive-voice rule. The passive voice may be preferable if the agent is either obvious (“Kennedy was elected in 1960”), irrelevant (“Theodore Roosevelt became president when McKinley was assassinated”), or unknown (“King Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings”). Note that in all three of these sample sentences the passive voice focuses the reader on the receiver of the action rather than on the doer (on Kennedy, not on American voters; on McKinley, not on his assassin; on King Harold, not on the unknown Norman archer). Historians usually wish to focus on the doer, so you should stay with the active voice—unless you can make a compelling case for an exception.

Abuse of the verb to be.

The verb to be is the most common and most important verb in English, but too many verbs to be suck the life out of your prose and lead to wordiness. Enliven your prose with as many action verbs as possible. ( “In Brown v. Board of Education it was the opinion of the Supreme Court that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”) Rewrite as “ In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ violated the Fourteenth ”

Explain/what’s your point?/unclear/huh?

You may (or may not) know what you’re talking about, but if you see these marginal comments, you have confused your reader. You may have introduced a non sequitur ; gotten off the subject; drifted into abstraction; assumed something that you have not told the reader; failed to explain how the material relates to your argument; garbled your syntax; or simply failed to proofread carefully.  If possible, have a good writer read your paper and point out the muddled parts. Reading your paper aloud may help too.

Paragraph goes nowhere/has no point or unity.

Paragraphs are the building blocks of your paper. If your paragraphs are weak, your paper cannot be strong. Try underlining the topic sentence of every paragraph. If your topic sentences are vague, strength and precision—the hallmarks of good writing—are unlikely to follow. Consider this topic sentence (from a paper on Ivan the Terrible): “From 1538 to 1547, there are many different arguments about the nature of what happened.”  Disaster looms. The reader has no way of knowing when the arguing takes place, who’s arguing, or even what the arguing is about. And how does the “nature of what happened” differ from plain “what happened”? Perhaps the writer means the following: “The childhood of Ivan the Terrible has provoked controversy among scholars of Russian history.” That's hardly deathless prose, but it does orient the reader and make the writer accountable for what follows in the paragraph. Once you have a good topic sentence, make sure that everything in the paragraph supports that sentence, and that cumulatively the support is persuasive. Make sure that each sentence follows logically from the previous one, adding detail in a coherent order. Move, delete, or add material as appropriate. To avoid confusing the reader, limit each paragraph to one central idea. (If you have a series of supporting points starting with first, you must follow with a second, third , etc.) A paragraph that runs more than a printed page is probably too long. Err on the side of shorter paragraphs.

Inappropriate use of first person.

Most historians write in the third person, which focuses the reader on the subject. If you write in the first person singular, you shift the focus to yourself. You give the impression that you want to break in and say, “Enough about the Haitian revolution [or whatever], now let’s talk about me!” Also avoid the first person plural (“We believe...”). It suggests committees, editorial boards, or royalty. None of those should have had a hand in writing your paper. And don’t refer to yourself lamely as “this writer.” Who else could possibly be writing the paper?

Tense inconsistency.

Stay consistently in the past tense when you are writing about what took place in the past. (“Truman’s defeat of Dewey in 1948 caught the pollsters by surprise.”) Note that the context may require a shift into the past perfect. (“The pollsters had not realized [past perfect] that voter opinion had been [past perfect] changing rapidly in the days before the election.”) Unfortunately, the tense problem can get a bit more complicated. Most historians shift into the present tense when describing or commenting on a book, document, or evidence that still exists and is in front of them (or in their mind) as they write.  (“de Beauvoir published [past tense] The Second Sex in 1949. In the book she contends [present tense] that woman....”) If you’re confused, think of it this way: History is about the past, so historians write in the past tense, unless they are discussing effects of the past that still exist and thus are in the present. When in doubt, use the past tense and stay consistent.

Ill-fitted quotation.

This is a common problem, though not noted in stylebooks. When you quote someone, make sure that the quotation fits grammatically into your sentence.  Note carefully the mismatch between the start of the following sentence and the quotation that follows:  “In order to understand the Vikings, writes Marc Bloch, it is necessary, ‘To conceive of the Viking expeditions as religious warfare inspired by the ardour of an implacable pagan fanaticism—an explanation that has sometimes been at least suggested—conflicts too much with what we know of minds disposed to respect magic of every kind.’” At first, the transition into the quotation from Bloch seems fine. The infinitive (to conceive) fits. But then the reader comes to the verb (conflicts) in Bloch’s sentence, and things no longer make sense. The writer is saying, in effect, “it is necessary conflicts.” The wordy lead-in and the complex syntax of the quotation have tripped the writer and confused the reader. If you wish to use the whole sentence, rewrite as “Marc Bloch writes in Feudal Society , ‘To conceive of...’” Better yet, use your own words or only part of the quotation in your sentence. Remember that good writers quote infrequently, but when they do need to quote, they use carefully phrased lead-ins that fit the grammatical construction of the quotation.

Free-floating quotation.

Do not suddenly drop quotations into your prose. (“The spirit of the Progressive era is best understood if one remembers that the United States is ‘the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress.’”) You have probably chosen the quotation because it is finely wrought and says exactly what you want to say. Fine, but first you inconvenience the reader, who must go to the footnote to learn that the quotation comes from The Age of Reform by historian Richard Hofstadter. And then you puzzle the reader. Did Hofstadter write the line about perfection and progress, or is he quoting someone from the Progressive era? If, as you claim, you are going to help the reader to judge the “spirit of the Progressive era,” you need to clarify. Rewrite as “As historian Richard Hofstadter writes in the Age of Reform , the United States is ‘the only country in the world...’” Now the reader knows immediately that the line is Hofstadter’s.

Who’s speaking here?/your view?

Always be clear about whether you’re giving your opinion or that of the author or historical actor you are discussing. Let’s say that your essay is about Martin Luther’s social views. You write, “The German peasants who revolted in 1525 were brutes and deserved to be crushed mercilessly.” That’s what Luther thought, but do you agree?  You may know, but your reader is not a mind reader. When in doubt, err on the side of being overly clear.

Jargon/pretentious theory.

Historians value plain English. Academic jargon and pretentious theory will make your prose turgid, ridiculous, and downright irritating. Your professor will suspect that you are trying to conceal that you have little to say. Of course, historians can’t get along without some theory; even those who profess to have no theory actually do—it’s called naïve realism. And sometimes you need a technical term, be it ontological argument or ecological fallacy. When you use theory or technical terms, make sure that they are intelligible and do real intellectual lifting.  Please, no sentences like this: “By means of a neo-Althusserian, post-feminist hermeneutics, this essay will de/construct the logo/phallo/centrism imbricated in the marginalizing post-colonial gendered gaze, thereby proliferating the subjectivities that will re/present the de/stabilization of the essentializing habitus of post-Fordist capitalism.”

Informal language/slang.

You don’t need to be stuffy, but stay with formal English prose of the kind that will still be comprehensible to future generations. Columbus did not “push the envelope in the Atlantic.” Henry VIII was not “looking for his inner child when he broke with the Church.” Prime Minister Cavour of Piedmont was not “trying to play in the major leagues diplomatic wise.” Wilson did not “almost veg out” at the end of his second term. President Hindenburg did not appoint Hitler in a “senior moment.” Prime Minister Chamberlain did not tell the Czechs to “chill out” after the Munich Conference, and Gandhi was not an “awesome dude.”

Try to keep your prose fresh. Avoid cliches. When you proofread, watch out for sentences like these: “Voltaire always gave 110 percent and thought outside the box. His bottom line was that as people went forward into the future, they would, at the end of the day, step up to the plate and realize that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.” Ugh. Rewrite as “Voltaire tried to persuade people that the Jesuits were cony, step up to the plate and realize that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.” Ugh. Rewrite as “Voltaire tried to persuade people that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.”

Intensifier abuse/exaggeration.

Avoid inflating your prose with unsustainable claims of size, importance, uniqueness, certainty, or intensity. Such claims mark you as an inexperienced writer trying to impress the reader. Your statement is probably not certain ; your subject probably not unique , the biggest, the best, or the most important. Also, the adverb very will rarely strengthen your sentence. Strike it. (“President Truman was very determined to stop the spread of communism in Greece.”) Rewrite as “President Truman resolved to stop the spread of communism in Greece.”

Mixed image.

Once you have chosen an image, you must stay with language compatible with that image. In the following example, note that the chain, the boiling, and the igniting are all incompatible with the image of the cold, rolling, enlarging snowball: “A snowballing chain of events boiled over, igniting the powder keg of war in 1914.” Well chosen images can enliven your prose, but if you catch yourself mixing images a lot, you're probably trying to write beyond your ability. Pull back. Be more literal.

Clumsy transition.

If your reader feels a jolt or gets disoriented at the beginning of a new paragraph, your paper probably lacks unity. In a good paper, each paragraph is woven seamlessly into the next. If you find yourself beginning your paragraphs with phrases such as “Another aspect of this problem...,” then you are probably “stacking note cards” rather than developing a thesis.

Unnecessary relative clause.

If you don’t need to restrict the meaning of your sentence’s subject, then don’t. (“Napoleon was a man who tried to conquer Europe.”) Here the relative clause adds nothing. Rewrite as “Napoleon tried to conquer Europe.” Unnecessary relative clauses are a classic form of wordiness.

Distancing or demeaning quotation marks.

If you believe that a frequently used word or phrase distorts historical reality, don’t put it in dismissive, sneering quotation marks to make your point (“the communist ‘threat’ to the ‘free’ world during the Cold War”). Many readers find this practice arrogant, obnoxious, and precious, and they may dismiss your arguments out of hand. If you believe that the communist threat was bogus or exaggerated, or that the free world was not really free, then simply explain what you mean.

Remarks on Grammar and Syntax

Ideally, your professor will help you to improve your writing by specifying exactly what is wrong with a particular passage, but  sometimes you may find a simple awk in the margin. This all-purpose negative comment usually suggests that the sentence is clumsy because you have misused words or compounded several errors. Consider this sentence from a book review:

“However, many falsehoods lie in Goldhagen’s claims and these will be explored.”

What is your long-suffering professor to do with this sentence? The however contributes nothing; the phrase falsehoods lie is an unintended pun that distracts the reader; the comma is missing between the independent clauses; the these has no clear antecedent ( falsehoods? claims? ); the second clause is in the passive voice and contributes nothing anyway; the whole sentence is wordy and screams hasty, last-minute composition. In weary frustration, your professor scrawls awk in the margin and moves on. Buried under the twelve-word sentence lies a three-word idea: “Goldhagen often errs.” When you see awk, check for the common errors in this list. If you don’t understand what’s wrong, ask.

Unclear antecedent.

All pronouns must refer clearly to antecedents and must agree with them in number. The reader usually assumes that the antecedent is the immediately preceding noun. Do not confuse the reader by having several possible antecedents. Consider these two sentences:

“Pope Gregory VII forced Emperor Henry IV to wait three days in the snow at Canossa before granting him an audience. It was a symbolic act.”

To what does the it refer? Forcing the Emperor to wait? The waiting itself? The granting of the audience? The audience itself? The whole previous sentence? You are most likely to get into antecedent trouble when you begin a paragraph with this or it , referring vaguely back to the general import of the previous paragraph. When in doubt, take this test: Circle the pronoun and the antecedent and connect the two with a line. Then ask yourself if your reader could instantly make the same diagram without your help. If the line is long, or if the circle around the antecedent is large, encompassing huge gobs of text, then your reader probably will be confused.  Rewrite. Repetition is better than ambiguity and confusion.

Faulty parallelism.

You confuse your reader if you change the grammatical construction from one element to the next in a series. Consider this sentence:

“King Frederick the Great sought to expand Prussia, to rationalize agriculture, and that the state support education.”

The reader expects another infinitive, but instead trips over the that . Rewrite the last clause as “and to promote state-supported education.” Sentences using neither/nor frequently present parallelism problems. Note the two parts of this sentence:

“After 1870 the cavalry charge was neither an effective tactic, nor did armies use it frequently.”

The sentence jars because the neither is followed by a noun, the nor by a verb. Keep the parts parallel.

Rewrite as “After 1870 the cavalry charge was neither effective nor frequently used.”

Sentences with not only/but also are another pitfall for many students. (“Mussolini attacked not only liberalism, but he also advocated militarism.”) Here the reader is set up to expect a noun in the second clause, but stumbles over a verb. Make the parts parallel by putting the verb attacked after the not only .

Misplaced modifier/dangling element.

Do not confuse the reader with a phrase or clause that refers illogically or absurdly to other words in the sentence. (“Summarized on the back cover of the American paperback edition, the publishers claim that...”) The publishers are not summarized on the back cover. (“Upon finishing the book, many questions remain.”) Who finished the book? Questions can’t read. Avoid following an introductory participial clause with the expletives it or there . Expletives are by definition filler words; they can’t be agents. (“Having examined the origins of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, it is apparent that...”) Apparent to whom?  The expletive it didn’t do the examining. (“After going on the Long March, there was greater support for the Communists in China.”) Who went on the Long March? There didn’t go on the Long March. Always pay attention to who’s doing what in your sentences.

Run-on sentence.

Run-on sentences string together improperly joined independent clauses. Consider these three sentences:

“Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved privately he maintained his convictions.” “Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved, privately he maintained his convictions.” “Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved, however, privately he maintained his convictions.”

The first fuses two independent clauses with neither a comma nor a coordinating conjunction; the second uses a comma but omits the coordinating conjunction; and the third also omits the coordinating conjunction (however is not a coordinating conjunction). To solve the problem, separate the two clauses with a comma and the coordinating conjunction but. You could also divide the clauses with a semicolon or make separate sentences. Remember that there are only seven coordinating conjunctions ( and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet ).

Sentence fragment.

Write in sentences. A sentence has to have a subject and a predicate. If you string together a lot of words, you may lose control of the syntax and end up with a sentence fragment. Note that the following is not a sentence:

“While in Western Europe railroad building proceeded rapidly in the nineteenth century, and in Russia there was less progress.”

Here you have a long compound introductory clause followed by no subject and no verb, and thus you have a fragment. You may have noticed exceptions to the no-fragments rule. Skilful writers do sometimes intentionally use a fragment to achieve a certain effect. Leave the rule-breaking to the experts.

Confusion of restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.

Consider these two versions of the same sentence:

1. “World War I, which raged from 1914-1918, killed millions of Europeans.” 2. “World War I that raged from 1914-1918 killed millions of Europeans.”

The first sentence has a nonrestrictive relative clause; the dates are included almost as parenthetical information. But something seems amiss with the second sentence. It has a restrictive relative clause that limits the subject (World War I) to the World War I fought between 1914 and 1918, thus implying that there were other wars called World War I, and that we need to distinguish among them. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the writer of the second sentence appears foolish.  Note carefully the distinction between that (for use in restrictive clauses, with no comma) and which (for use in nonrestrictive clauses, with a comma).

Confusion about who’s doing what.

Remember—history is about what people do, so you need to be vigilant about agency. Proofread your sentences carefully, asking yourself, “Have I said exactly who is doing or thinking what, or have I inadvertently attributed an action or belief to the wrong person or group?” Unfortunately, there are many ways to go wrong here, but faulty punctuation is among the most common. Here’s a sentence about Frantz Fanon, the great critic of European imperialism. Focus on the punctuation and its effect on agency: “Instead of a hierarchy based on class, Fanon suggests the imperialists establish a hierarchy based on race.” As punctuated, the sentence says something absurd: that Fanon is advising the imperialists about the proper kind of hierarchy to establish in the colonies. Surely, the writer meant to say that, in his analysis of imperialism, Fanon distinguishes between two kinds of hierarchy. A comma after suggests fixes the immediate problem. Now look at the revised sentence. It still needs work. Better diction and syntax would sharpen it.  Fanon does not suggest (with connotations of both hinting and advocating); he states outright. What’s more, the comparison of the two kinds of hierarchy gets blurred by too many intervening words. The key point of the sentence is, in effect, “instead of A, we have B.” Clarity demands that B follow A as closely as possible, and that the two elements be grammatically parallel. But between the elements A and B, the writer inserts Fanon (a proper noun), suggests (a verb), imperialists (a noun), and establish (a verb). Try the sentence this way: “Fanon says that the imperialists establish a hierarchy based on race rather than class.” Now the agency is clear: We know what Fanon does, and we know what the imperialists do. Notice that errors and infelicities have a way of clustering. If you find one problem in a sentence, look for others.

Confusion about the objects of prepositions.

Here’s another one of those common problems that does not receive the attention it merits. Discipline your prepositional phrases; make sure you know where they end. Notice the mess in this sentence: “Hitler accused Jewish people of engaging in incest and stating that Vienna was the ‘personification of incest.’” The reader thinks that both engaging and stating are objects of the preposition of. Yet the writer intends only the first to be the object of the preposition. Hitler is accusing the Jews of engaging , but not of stating ; he is the one doing the stating . Rewrite as “Hitler accused the Jews of incest; he stated that Vienna was the ‘personification of incest.’” Note that the wordiness of the original encouraged the syntactical mess. Simplify. It can’t be said too many times: Always pay attention to who’s doing what in your sentences.

Misuse of the comparative.

There are two common problems here. The first might be called the “floating comparative.” You use the comparative, but you don’t say what you are comparing. (“Lincoln was more upset by the dissolution of the union.”) More upset than by what? More upset than who? The other problem, which is more common and takes many forms, is the unintended (and sometimes comical) comparison of unlike elements. Consider these attempts to compare President Clinton to President George H. W. Bush. Often the trouble starts with a possessive:

“President Clinton’s sexual appetite was more voracious than President Bush.”

You mean to compare appetites, but you've forgotten about your possessive, so you absurdly compare an appetite to a man. Rewrite as “more voracious than President Bush’s.” A variation of this problem is the unintended comparison resulting from the omission of a verb:

“President Clinton liked women more than President Bush.”

Re-write as “more than did President Bush.”

A misplaced modifier may also cause comparison trouble: “Unlike the Bush administration, sexual scandal nearly destroyed the Clinton administration.” Rewrite as  “Unlike the Bush administration, the Clinton administration was nearly destroyed by sexual scandal.” Here the passive voice is better than the misplaced modifier, but you could rewrite as “The Bush administration had been free of sexual scandal, which nearly destroyed the Clinton administration.”

Misuse of apostrophe.

Get control of your apostrophes. Use the apostrophe to form singular or plural possessives (Washington’s soldiers; the colonies’ soldiers) or to form contractions (don’t; it’s). Do not use the apostrophe to form plurals. (“The communists [not communists’] defeated the nationalists [not nationalists’] in China.”)

Comma after although.

This is a new error, probably a carryover from the common conversational habit of pausing dramatically after although . ( “Although , coffee consumption rose in eighteenth-century Europe, tea remained far more popular.”) Delete the comma after although . Remember that although is not a synonym for the word however , so you cannot solve the problem in the sentence by putting a period after Europe . A clause beginning with although cannot stand alone as a sentence.

Comma between subject and verb.

This is a strange new error. (“Hitler and Stalin, agreed to a pact in August 1939.”) Delete the comma after Stalin. Finally, two hints: If your word-processing program underlines something and suggests changes, be careful. When it comes to grammar and syntax, your computer is a moron. Not only does it fail to recognize some gross errors, it also falsely identifies some correct passages as errors. Do not cede control of your writing decisions to your computer. Make the suggested changes only if you are positive that they are correct. If you are having trouble with your writing, try simplifying. Write short sentences and read them aloud to test for clarity. Start with the subject and follow it quickly with an active verb. Limit the number of relative clauses, participial phrases, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. You will win no prizes for eloquence, but at least you will be clear. Add complexity only when you have learned to handle it.

An historical/an historian.

The consonant “H” is not silent in historical and historian , so the proper form of the indefinite article is “A.”

Avoid the common solecism of using feel as a synonym for think, believe, say, state, assert, contend, argue, conclude, or write. (“Marx felt that the bourgeoisie exploited the proletariat.” “Emmeline Pankhurst felt that British women should be able to vote.”) The use of feel in these sentences demeans the agents by suggesting undisciplined sentiment rather than carefully formulated conviction. Concentrate on what your historical actors said and did; leave their feelings to speculative chapters of their biographies. As for your own feelings, keep them out of your papers. (“I feel that Lincoln should have freed the slaves earlier.”) Your professor will be delighted that the material engages both your head and your heart, but your feelings cannot be graded. If you believe that Lincoln should have acted earlier, then explain, giving cogent historical reasons.

The fact that.

This is a clumsy, unnecessary construction. ( “The fact that Nixon resigned in disgrace damaged the Republican Party.”) Re-word as “Nixon resigned in disgrace, damaging the Republican Party.” Never use the hideous phrase due to the fact that.

In terms of.

This phrase is filler. Get rid of it. (“Bismarck was a success in terms of uniting Germany.) Rewrite as “Bismarck successfully united Germany.”

Attend carefully to the placement of this limiting word. Note, for example, these three sentences:

“The government only interred Japanese Americans during World War II.” “The government interred only Japanese Americans during World War II.” “The government interred Japanese Americans only during World War II.”

The first limits the action to interring (as opposed to, say, killing); the second limits the group interred (i.e., not Italian Americans); the third limits the time of interring (i.e., not during other wars).

Thus and therefore.

More than likely, you have not earned these words and are implying that you have said more than you actually have. Use them sparingly, only when you are concluding a substantial argument with a significant conclusion.

Misuse of instead.

Instead is an adverb, not a conjunction. Consider this sentence: “Charles Beard argued that the framers of the constitution were not idealists, instead they promoted their economic interests.” Revise as “The framers of the constitution, Charles Beard argued, did not uphold ideals; instead , they promoted their economic interests.” Now the instead appears properly as an adverb. (Note also that the two clauses are now parallel—both contain transitive verbs.)

Essentially and basically.

These are usually either filler words (the written equivalent of “uh” or “um”) or weasel words that merely call attention to your vagueness, lack of conviction, or lazy unwillingness to qualify precisely. (“ Essentially , Churchill believed that Nazi Germany presented a grave danger to Britain.”) Delete essentially and basically unless you are writing about essences or bases.

Both share or both agree.

These are redundant. If two people share or agree , they are both involved by definition. (“Stalin and Mao both agreed that capitalism belonged in the dustbin of history.”) Delete both .

This word means one of a kind. It is an absolute. Something cannot be very unique, more unique, or somewhat unique.

Incredible.

In casual conversation incredible often means extraordinary, astonishing, or impressive (“Yesterday’s storm was incredible.”). To avoid confusion in historical prose, you should stick with the original meaning of incredible : not believable. If you write that “William Jennings Bryan gave incredible speeches,” you’re saying that you don’t believe his speeches, or that his audiences didn’t believe them at the time—in other words, that he appeared to be lying or mistaken. You probably mean that he gave great speeches. If you write that “It’s incredible that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor,” you’re calling into question the very existence of a historical event. You probably mean that the Japanese attack was unwise or reckless. English is rich with adjectives. Finding the best one forces you to think about what you really mean.

As a synonym for subject matter, bone of contention, reservation, or almost anything else vaguely associated with what you are discussing, the word issue has lost its meaning through overuse. (“There were many issues involved with Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, and some historians have issues with his decision.”) Stop talking about issues and get to the point.

Beware of the word literally . It’s commonly misused, and you almost never need it in historical prose. Literally means actually, factually, exactly, directly, without metaphor. The careful writer would never say, “Roosevelt literally swamped Landon in the election of 1936.” One imagines Roosevelt (in his wheelchair no less!) dumping the hapless Landon off a pier in the Everglades on election night. The swamping was figurative, strictly a figure of speech. The adverb literally may also cause you trouble by falsely generalizing the coverage of your verb. “London was literally destroyed by the blitz.” This suggests that the whole city was destroyed, when, in fact, only parts were destroyed. Rewrite as “The blitz destroyed parts of London.” Now you’ve qualified properly (and gotten rid of the passive).

When you’re tempted to use this word, resist. Like issue , involve tells the reader too little. (“Erasmus was involved in the Renaissance.”) This statement could mean virtually anything. Delete it and discuss specifically what Erasmus said or did.

This is a fine old word with many precise meanings, but as an overused synonym for feature, side, or part, it is usually a sign of insipid prose (“Another aspect of the issues in this area is the fact that...”). Just get directly to the point.

Most good writers frown on the use of this word as a verb.(“Eisenhower’s military background impacted his foreign policy.”) Affected, influenced, or shaped would be better here. Impacted suggests painfully blocked wisdom teeth or feces. Had an impact is better than impacted , but is still awkward because impact implies a collision.

Here is another beloved but vapid word. (“Many factors led to the Reformation.”) Such a sentence usually opens a vague, boring, weaseling paragraph. If you believe (quite reasonably) that the Reformation had many causes, then start evaluating them.

Meaningful.

Overuse has drained the meaning from meaningful . (“Peter the Great took meaningful steps to westernize Russia.”) Just get to the point.

Interesting.

The adjective interesting is vague, overused, and does not earn its keep. (“Burckhardt had an interesting perspective on the Renaissance.”) This sentence is filler. Delete it and explain and analyze his perspective.

The events that transpired.

Your professor will gag on this one. Events take place or happen by definition, so the relative clause is redundant. Furthermore, most good writers do not accept transpire as a synonym for happen. Again, follow the old rule of thumb: Get right to the point, say what happened, and explain its significance. You don’t need any filler about events and transpiring .

The reason is because.

This phrase is awkward and redundant. Replace it with the reason is, or better still, simply delete it and get right to your reason.

For all intensive purposes.

The phrase is for all intents and purposes , and few good writers use it in formal prose anyway.

Take for granite.

This is an illiteracy. The phrase is “ take for granted .”

Should of/could of.

You mean should have or could have .

Center around.

Good writers frown on this phrase because it’s illogical and jarring. Use center on or center in. Attention to a small detail like this indicates that you’re thinking carefully about what you’re saying, so when the big problems confront you, you’ll be disciplined and ready.

Begs the question.

Recently, many people have started to use this phrase to mean raises, invites, or brings up the question. (“Stalin’s purges beg the question of whether he was paranoid.”) Actually, begging the question is the common logical fallacy of assuming your conclusion as part of your argument. (“In the late nineteenth century, many Americans moved to the cities because of urbanization.”) Note that the use of abstractions (e.g., urbanization) encourages begging the question . Understanding this fallacy is central to your education. The formal Latin term, petitio principii, is too fancy to catch on, so you need to preserve the simple English phrase. If something raises a question, just say so.

Historic/historical confusion.

Everything in the past or relating to the past is historical. Resist the media-driven hype that elevates the ordinary to the historic . (“A three-alarm fire last night destroyed the historic site of the first Portuguese-owned dry cleaners in Cleveland.”) Reserve the word historic for the genuinely important events, persons, or objects of the past. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 was indeed historic . Historically , historians have gathered annually for a historical convention; so far, none of the conventions has been historic .

Affect/effect confusion.

The chances are that the verb you want is affect , which means to have an influence on (“The Iranian hostage crisis affected [not effected] the presidential election of 1980”). Effect as a verb means to bring about or cause to exist ( effect change). Effect as a noun means result or consequence (“The effect of the Iranian hostage crisis on the election...”).

While/whereas confusion.

If you’re stressing contrast, the word you want is whereas . While stresses simultaneity. “Hobbes had a dismal view of human nature, whereas [not while] Rousseau believed that man had a natural sense of pity.”

It’s/its confusion.

This is the classic bonehead error. Note that the spell checker won’t help you. And remember— its’ is not a word at all.

Reign/rein confusion.

A queen reigns during her reign. You rein in a horse with reins.

Their/there/they’re confusion.

You do know the difference. Pay attention.

Everyday/every day confusion.

As an adjective, everyday (one word) means routine. If you wish to say that something happened on every successive day, then you need two words, the adjective every and the noun day . Note the difference in these two sentences: “Kant was famous for going on the same constitutional at the same time every day . For Kant, exercise and thinking were everyday activities.”

Refer/allude confusion.

To allude means to refer to indirectly or to hint at. The word you probably want in historical prose is refer , which means to mention or call direct attention to. “In the first sentence of the ‘Gettysburg Address’ Lincoln refers [not alludes ] to the fathers of the nation [he mentions them directly]; he alludes to the ‘Declaration of Independence’ [the document of four score and seven years earlier that comes to the reader’s mind, but that Lincoln doesn’t directly mention].”

Novel/book confusion.

Novel is not a synonym for book. A novel is a long work of fiction in prose. A historical monograph is not a novel —unless the historian is making everything up.

Than/then confusion.

This is an appalling new error. If you are making a comparison, you use the conjunction than . (“President Kennedy’s health was worse than [not then ] the public realized.”)

Lead/led confusion.

The past tense of the verb to lead is led (not lead ). “Sherman led [not lead ] a march to the sea.”

Lose/loose confusion.

The opposite of win is lose , not loose . “Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment suspected that they would lose [not loose ] the battle to amend the constitution.”

However/but confusion.

However may not substitute for the coordinating conjunction but. (“Mussolini began his career as a socialist, but [not however ] he later abandoned socialism for fascism.”) The word however has many proper uses; however , [note the semicolon and comma] graceful writers use it sparingly.

Cite/site/sight confusion.

You cited a source for your paper; ancient Britons sited Stonehenge on a plain; Columbus’s lookout sighted land.

Conscience/conscious confusion.

When you wake up in the morning you are conscious , though your conscience may bother you if you’ve neglected to write your history paper.

Tenet/tenant confusion.

Your religion, ideology, or worldview all have tenets —propositions you hold or believe in. Tenants rent from landlords.

All are not/not all are confusion.

If you write, “ All the colonists did not want to break with Britain in 1776,” the chances are you really mean, “ Not all the colonists wanted to break with Britain in 1776.” The first sentence is a clumsy way of saying that no colonists wanted to break with Britain (and is clearly false). The second sentence says that some colonists did not want to break with Britain (and is clearly true, though you should go on to be more precise).

Nineteenth-century/nineteenth century confusion.

Historians talk a lot about centuries, so you need to know when to hyphenate them. Follow the standard rule: If you combine two words to form a compound adjective, use a hyphen, unless the first word ends in ly. (“ Nineteenth-century [hyphenated] steamships cut the travel time across the Atlantic.”) Leave out the hyphen if you’re just using the ordinal number to modify the noun century. (“In the nineteenth century [no hyphen] steamships cut the travel time across the Atlantic.”) By the way, while you have centuries in mind, don’t forget that the nineteenth century is the 1800s, not the 1900s. The same rule for hyphenating applies to middle-class and middle class —a group that historians like to talk about.

Bourgeois/bourgeoisie confusion.

Bourgeois is usually an adjective, meaning characteristic of the middle class and its values or habits. Occasionally, bourgeois is a noun, meaning a single member of the middle class. Bourgeoisie is a noun, meaning the middle class collectively. (“Marx believed that the bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat; he argued that bourgeois values like freedom and individualism were hypocritical.”)

Your professor may ask you to analyze a primary document. Here are some questions you might ask of your document. You will note a common theme—read critically with sensitivity to the context. This list is not a suggested outline for a paper; the wording of the assignment and the nature of the document itself should determine your organization and which of the questions are most relevant. Of course, you can ask these same questions of any document you encounter in your research.

• What exactly is the document (e.g., diary, king’s decree, opera score, bureaucratic memorandum, parliamentary minutes, newspaper article, peace treaty)?
• Are you dealing with the original or with a copy? If it is a copy, how remote is it from the original (e.g., photocopy of the original, reformatted version in a book, translation)? How might deviations from the original affect your interpretation?
• What is the date of the document?
• Is there any reason to believe that the document is not genuine or not exactly what it appears to be?
• Who is the author, and what stake does the author have in the matters discussed? If the document is unsigned, what can you infer about the author or authors?
• What sort of biases or blind spots might the author have? For example, is an educated bureaucrat writing with third-hand knowledge of rural hunger riots?
• Where, why, and under what circumstances did the author write the document?
• How might the circumstances (e.g., fear of censorship, the desire to curry favor or evade blame) have influenced the content, style, or tone of the document?
• Has the document been published? If so, did the author intend it to be published?
• If the document was not published, how has it been preserved? In a public archive? In a private collection? Can you learn anything from the way it has been preserved? For example, has it been treated as important or as a minor scrap of paper?
• Does the document have a boilerplate format or style, suggesting that it is a routine sample of a standardized genre, or does it appear out of the ordinary, even unique?
• Who is the intended audience for the document?
• What exactly does the document say? Does it imply something different?
• If the document represents more than one viewpoint, have you carefully distinguished between the author’s viewpoint and those viewpoints the author presents only to criticize or refute?
• In what ways are you, the historian, reading the document differently than its intended audience would have read it (assuming that future historians were not the intended audience)?
• What does the document leave out that you might have expected it to discuss?
• What does the document assume that the reader already knows about the subject (e.g., personal conflicts among the Bolsheviks in 1910, the details of tax farming in eighteenth-century Normandy, secret negotiations to end the Vietnam war)?
• What additional information might help you better interpret the document?
• Do you know (or are you able to infer) the effects or influences, if any, of the document?
• What does the document tell you about the period you are studying?
• If your document is part of an edited collection, why do you suppose the editor chose it? How might the editing have changed the way you perceive the document? For example, have parts been omitted? Has it been translated? (If so, when, by whom, and in what style?) Has the editor placed the document in a suggestive context among other documents, or in some other way led you to a particular interpretation?

Your professor may ask you to write a book review, probably of a scholarly historical monograph. Here are some questions you might ask of the book. Remember that a good review is critical, but critical does not necessarily mean negative. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, nor is it a suggested outline. Of course, you can ask these same questions of any secondary historical work, even if you’re not writing a review.

• Who is the author, and what are his or her qualifications? Has the author written other books on the subject?
• When was the book written, and how does it fit into the scholarly debate on the subject? For example, is Smith writing to refute that idiot Jones; to qualify the work of the competent but unimaginative Johnson; or to add humbly to the evidence presented by the redoubtable Brown’s classic study? Be sure not to confuse the author’s argument with those arguments he or she presents only to criticize later.
• What is the book’s basic argument? (Getting this right is the foundation of your review.)
• What is the author’s method? For example, does the author rely strictly on narrative and anecdotes, or is the book analytical in some way?
• What kinds of evidence does the author use? For example, what is the balance of primary and secondary sources? Has the author done archival work? Is the source base substantial, or does it look thin? Is the author up-to-date in the scholarly literature?
• How skillfully and imaginatively has the author used the evidence?
• Does the author actually use all of the material in the bibliography, or is some of it there for display?
• What sorts of explicit or implicit ideological or methodological assumptions does the author bring to the study? For example, does he or she profess bland objectivity? A Whig view of history? Marxism?
• How persuasive is the author’s argument?
• Is the argument new, or is it old wine in new bottles?
• Is the argument important, with wide-ranging implications, or is it narrow and trivial?
• Is the book well organized and skillfully written?
• What is your overall critical assessment of the book?
• What is the general significance, if any, of the book? (Make sure that you are judging the book that the author actually wrote, not complaining that the author should have written a different book.)

Here are some tips for those long, intimidating term papers or senior theses:

• Start early. If you don’t, none of these tips will matter. Big trouble is looming if you don’t have a specific topic by the end of the first week. You should be delving into the sources during the second week.
• Keep in mind all of the dos and don’ts in this booklet.
• Work closely with your professor to assure that your topic is neither too broad nor too narrow.
• Set up a schedule with your professor and check his or her policy about reading rough drafts or parts of rough drafts. Then keep your professor informed about what you’re doing. You don’t want any unpleasant surprises. You certainly don’t want to hear, “I haven’t seen you for weeks, and it sounds like you’re way off base. How can you possibly get this done with only two weeks left in the semester?”
• Make an appointment with Kristin Strohmeyer, the history reference librarian in Burke Library. She will help you to find and use the appropriate catalogs and indexes.
• Use your imagination in compiling a bibliography. Think of all of the possible key words and subjects that may lead you to material. If you find something really good, check the subjects under which it is cataloged. Comb the notes and bibliographies of books and articles you’ve already found.
• Much of what you need will not be in our library, so get to know the friendly folks in the Interlibrary Loan department.
• Start early. This can’t be said too often.
• Use as many primary sources as you can.
• Jot down your ideas as they come to you. You may not remember them later.
• Take careful notes on your reading. Label your notes completely and precisely. Distinguish meticulously and systematically between what you are directly quoting and what you are summarizing in your own words. Unintended plagiarism is still plagiarism. Stay clean as a hound’s tooth. Write down not just the page of the quotation or idea, but also the whole run of pages where the matter is discussed. Reread all of your notes periodically to make sure that you still understand them and are compiling what you will need to write your paper. Err on the side of writing down more than you think you will need. Copious, precise notes won’t come back to haunt you; skimpy, vague notes will. Just accept that there is something anal about good note-taking.
• If you take notes directly into your computer, they will be easy to index and pull up, but there are a couple of downsides. You will not be able to see all of them simultaneously, as you can note cards laid out on a big table. What you gain in ease of access may come at the price of losing the big picture. Also, if your notes are in your computer, you may be tempted to save time and thought by pasting many of them directly into your paper. Note cards encourage you to rethink and to rework your ideas into a unified whole.
• Don’t start to write until you have a good outline.
• Make sure that your paper has a thesis. (See the entry State a clear thesis. )
• Check and recheck your facts.
• Footnote properly. (See the entry Cite sources carefully .)
• Save plenty of time to proofread.
• Start early.

Top Ten Signs that you may be Writing a Weak History Paper

10. You’re overjoyed to find that you can fill the required pages by widening all margins.

9. You haven’t mentioned any facts or cited any sources for several paragraphs.

8. You find yourself using the phrase “throughout history mankind has...”

7. You just pasted in another 100 words of quotations.

6. You haven’t a clue about the content of your next paragraph.

5. You’re constantly clicking on The Britannica, Webster’s, and Bartlett’s.

4. Your writing tutor sneaks another look at her watch as she reminds you for the third time to clarify your thesis.

3. Your main historical actors are this, it, they, the people, and society, and they are all involved with factors, aspects, impacts, and issues.

2. You just realize that you don’t understand the assignment, but it’s 3:00 A.M, the paper is due at 9:00, and you don’t dare call your professor.

1. You’re relieved that the paper counts for only 20 percent of the course grade.

Final Advice

You guessed it — start early.

Studying History at Hamilton

Students will learn to use interdisciplinary methods from the humanities and social sciences to probe the sources of the past for answers to present questions. They will learn to draw comparisons and connections among diverse societies across a range of historical eras. They will further learn to convey their findings through writing that is clearly structured, precise, and persuasive.

Tutor Appointments

Peer tutor and consultant appointments are managed through TracCloud (login required). Find resources and more information about the ALEX centers using the following links.

Office / Department Name

Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center

Contact Name

Jennifer Ambrose

Writing Center Director

Help us provide an accessible education, offer innovative resources and programs, and foster intellectual exploration.

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What is Historiography? 

A historiography is a summary of the historical writings on a particular topic - the history of eugenics in America, or the history of epidemics, for example.  It sets out in broad terms the range of debate and approaches to the topic. It identifies the major thinkers and arguments , and establishes connections between them. If there have been major changes in the way a particular topic has been approached over time, the historiography identifies them.

Unlike a research paper, a historiography paper is not a study of a historical subject; instead, it is an analysis of the way in which historians have interpreted that topic. 

How to Write a Historiography?

The most important step in writing a historiography is to become familiar with the history of your topic in broad terms. A good historiography is written from a position of authority on a topic.

A historiography is best situated early on in an essay, preferably in the introduction in order to familiarize the reader with the topic and to set out the scope of previous work in broad terms.

Your historiography should establish:

• the major thinkers on the topic, and
• their main arguments (or theses).

Your historiography may also explain:

• the perspective from which the authors are writing (e.g. Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, structuralist, etc.)
• the type of history they have written (e.g. political, social, cultural, economic, etc.)

A good historiography will present this information in a way that shows the connections between these major works. For example, does one work respond to an argument set out in another? Does it expand on that argument or disagree with it? A good historiography will also situate the author's work within the dialogue, explaining whether his or her thesis builds on or rejects the work that has come before.

Still a little unsure of what a historiography is ? Check out these great examples  or get help . 

Adapated from: http://www.trentu.ca/history/workbook/historiography.php

Clear, quick video defining historiography. 

3. Search for Specific Article & Cross-Reference

The following may refer you to important works, thinkers, or schools of thought on your topic. 

• class notes
• course readings
• bibliographies/footnotes/endnotes of your textbook, journal articles, or other secondary sources
• sources for history of medicine background info

They can also help you identify relevant authors, concepts, works, or keywords for searching the library catalogue ,  history databases , or specific history of medicine journals .  

There are lots of ways to find historiographical essays. Here's one strategy: 

Did you know when a bibliographic database (ex. America: History & Life or MEDLINE) receives an article, indexers apply a certain number of SUBJECT HEADINGS to an article to describe the article's content? Did you know that those subject headings are searchable? Did you know that Historiography is a subject heading? 

The following sample search strategies in 3 databases of history secondary sources available in EbscoHost (ex. America: History & Life; History of Science Technology and Medicine; Historical Abstracts) are a quick way to find historiographical essays. 

1. DE "Historiography" AND (psychiatry OR psychoanalysis OR psychosurgery)

2. DE "Historiography" AND social AND medicine

3. DE "Historiography" AND (eugenics OR social darwinism)

What's going on here? 

DE "Historiography" -> searches Historiography as the SUBJECT of the article. The DE code tells these particular databases to search the subject field. Other databases use different codes (ex. CINAHL uses MH). Library databases all have helpful HELP features that tell you which code searches which field. 

DE "Historiography" is combined with keywords on a topic (ie. psychiatry OR psychoanalysis OR psychosurgery)

This query is applied to three databases, and results that have Historiography in the subject field AND psychiatry OR psychoanalysis OR psychosurgery in the text fields are retrieved. 

Now try to make a search strategy of your own!

Want more HELP with databases? 

Use a citation database like SCOPUS or WEB of SCIENCE to search for a specific article, and use the database features to find its references, see who has cited it, and search for any related citations. 

For example, if I search SCOPUS for ' Grand Narrative and Its Discontent: Medical History in the Social Transformation of American Medicine ' in the Article Title field, I see that it has been cited 7 times in the SCOPUS database and that there are 5,113 other citations that share references with my article. I can also easily link to the full-text or catalogue records for each of the author's references. 

• Next: Hist. of Med. Databases & Major Journals >>
• Last Updated: Jan 9, 2024 12:36 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/his423his489

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How to write a conclusion for a history essay

Every essay needs to end with a concluding paragraph. It is the last paragraph the marker reads, and this will typically be the last paragraph that you write.

What is a ‘concluding paragraph?

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay that reminds the reader about the points you have made and how it proves the argument which you stated in your hypothesis .

By the time your marker reads your conclusion, they have read all the evidence you have presented in your body paragraphs . This is your last opportunity to show that you have proven your points.

While your conclusion will talk about the same points you made in your introduction , it should not read exactly the same.  Instead, it should state the same information in a more developed form and bring the essay to an end.

In general, you should never use quotes from sources in your conclusion.

Concluding paragraph structure

While the concluding paragraph will normally be shorter than your introductory and body paragraphs , it still has a specific role to fulfil.

A well-written concluding paragraph has the following three-part structure:

• Restate your key points
• Restate your hypothesis
• Concluding sentence

Each element of this structure is explained further, with examples, below:

1. Restate your key points

In one or two sentences, restate each of the topic sentences from your body paragraphs . This is to remind the marker about how you proved your argument.

This information will be similar to your elaboration sentences in your introduction , but will be much briefer.

Since this is a summary of your entire essay’s argument, you will often want to start your conclusion with a phrase to highlight this. For example: “In conclusion”, “In summary”, “To briefly summarise”, or “Overall”.

Example restatements of key points:

Middle Ages (Year 8 Level)

In conclusion, feudal lords had initially spent vast sums of money on elaborate castle construction projects but ceased to do so as a result of the advances in gunpowder technology which rendered stone defences obsolete.

WWI (Year 9 Level)

To briefly summarise, the initially flood of Australian volunteers were encouraged by imperial propaganda but as a result of the stories harsh battlefield experience which filtered back to the home front, enlistment numbers quickly declined.

Civil Rights (Year 10 Level)

In summary, the efforts of important First Nations leaders and activist organisations to spread the idea of indigenous political equality had a significant effect on sway public opinion in favour of a ‘yes’ vote.

Ancient Rome (Year 11/12 Level)  

Overall, the Marian military reforms directly changed Roman political campaigns and the role of public opinion in military command assignments across a variety of Roman societal practices.

2. Restate your hypothesis

This is a single sentence that restates the hypothesis from your introductory paragraph .

Don’t simply copy it word-for-word. It should be restated in a different way, but still clearly saying what you have been arguing for the whole of your essay.

Make it clear to your marker that you are clearly restating you argument by beginning this sentence a phrase to highlight this. For example: “Therefore”, “This proves that”, “Consequently”, or “Ultimately”.

Example restated hypotheses:

Therefore, it is clear that while castles were initially intended to dominate infantry-dominated siege scenarios, they were abandoned in favour of financial investment in canon technologies.

This proves that the change in Australian soldiers' morale during World War One was the consequence of the mass slaughter produced by mass-produced weaponry and combat doctrine.

Consequently, the 1967 Referendum considered a public relations success because of the targeted strategies implemented by Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Ultimately, it can be safely argued that Gaius Marius was instrumental in revolutionising the republican political, military and social structures in the 1 st century BC.

3. Concluding sentence

This is the final sentence of your conclusion that provides a final statement about the implications of your arguments for modern understandings of the topic. Alternatively, it could make a statement about what the effect of this historical person or event had on history. 

Example concluding sentences:

While these medieval structures fell into disuse centuries ago, they continue to fascinate people to this day.

The implications of the war-weariness produced by these experiences continued to shape opinions about war for the rest of the 20 th century.

Despite this, the Indigenous Peoples had to lobby successive Australian governments for further political equality, which still continues today.

Ancient Rome (Year 11/12 Level)

The impact of these changes effectively prepared the way for other political figures, like Pompey, Julius Caesar and Octavian, who would ultimately transform the Roman republic into an empire.

Putting it all together

Once you have written all three parts of, you should have a completed concluding paragraph. In the examples above, we have shown each part separately. Below you will see the completed paragraphs so that you can appreciate what a conclusion should look like.

Example conclusion paragraphs: 

In conclusion, feudal lords had initially spent vast sums of money on elaborate castle construction projects but ceased to do so as a result of the advances in gunpowder technology which rendered stone defences obsolete. Therefore, it is clear that while castles were initially intended to dominate infantry-dominated siege scenarios, they were abandoned in favour of financial investment in canon technologies. While these medieval structures fell into disuse centuries ago, they continue to fascinate people to this day.

To briefly summarise, the initially flood of Australian volunteers were encouraged by imperial propaganda, but as a result of the stories harsh battlefield experience which filtered back to the home front, enlistment numbers quickly declined. This proves that the change in Australian soldiers' morale during World War One was the consequence of the mass slaughter produced by mass-produced weaponry and combat doctrine. The implications of the war-weariness produced by these experiences continued to shape opinions about war for the rest of the 20th century.

In summary, the efforts of important indigenous leaders and activist organisations to spread the idea of indigenous political equality had a significant effect on sway public opinion in favour of a ‘yes’ vote. Consequently, the 1967 Referendum considered a public relations success because of the targeted strategies implemented by Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Despite this, the Indigenous Peoples had to lobby successive Australian governments for further political equality, which still continues today.

Overall, the Marian military reforms directly changed Roman political campaigns and the role of public opinion in military command assignments across a variety of Roman societal practices. Ultimately, it can be safely argued that Gaius Marius was instrumental in revolutionising the republican political, military and social structures in the 1st century BC. The impact of these changes effectively prepared the way for other political figures, like Pompey, Julius Caesar and Octavian, who would ultimately transform the Roman republic into an empire.

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How to Write a History Essay

Last Updated: December 27, 2022 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Emily Listmann, MA . Emily Listmann is a Private Tutor and Life Coach in Santa Cruz, California. In 2018, she founded Mindful & Well, a natural healing and wellness coaching service. She has worked as a Social Studies Teacher, Curriculum Coordinator, and an SAT Prep Teacher. She received her MA in Education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2014. Emily also received her Wellness Coach Certificate from Cornell University and completed the Mindfulness Training by Mindful Schools. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 245,401 times.

Writing a history essay requires you to include a lot of details and historical information within a given number of words or required pages. It's important to provide all the needed information, but also to present it in a cohesive, intelligent way. Know how to write a history essay that demonstrates your writing skills and your understanding of the material.

Preparing to Write Your Essay

• The key words will often need to be defined at the start of your essay, and will serve as its boundaries. [2] X Research source
• For example, if the question was "To what extent was the First World War a Total War?", the key terms are "First World War", and "Total War".
• Do this before you begin conducting your research to ensure that your reading is closely focussed to the question and you don't waste time.

• Explain: provide an explanation of why something happened or didn't happen.
• Interpret: analyse information within a larger framework to contextualise it.
• Evaluate: present and support a value-judgement.
• Argue: take a clear position on a debate and justify it. [3] X Research source

• Your thesis statement should clearly address the essay prompt and provide supporting arguments. These supporting arguments will become body paragraphs in your essay, where you’ll elaborate and provide concrete evidence. [4] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source
• Your argument may change or become more nuanced as your write your essay, but having a clear thesis statement which you can refer back to is very helpful.
• For example, your summary could be something like "The First World War was a 'total war' because civilian populations were mobilized both in the battlefield and on the home front".

• Pick out some key quotes that make your argument precisely and persuasively. [5] X Research source
• When writing your plan, you should already be thinking about how your essay will flow, and how each point will connect together.

Doing Your Research

• Primary source material refers to any texts, films, pictures, or any other kind of evidence that was produced in the historical period, or by someone who participated in the events of the period, that you are writing about.
• Secondary material is the work by historians or other writers analysing events in the past. The body of historical work on a period or event is known as the historiography.
• It is not unusual to write a literature review or historiographical essay which does not directly draw on primary material.
• Typically a research essay would need significant primary material.

• Start with the core texts in your reading list or course bibliography. Your teacher will have carefully selected these so you should start there.
• Look in footnotes and bibliographies. When you are reading be sure to pay attention to the footnotes and bibliographies which can guide you to further sources a give you a clear picture of the important texts.
• Use the library. If you have access to a library at your school or college, be sure to make the most of it. Search online catalogues and speak to librarians.
• Access online journal databases. If you are in college it is likely that you will have access to academic journals online. These are an excellent and easy to navigate resources.
• Use online sources with discretion. Try using free scholarly databases, like Google Scholar, which offer quality academic sources, but avoid using the non-trustworthy websites that come up when you simply search your topic online.
• Avoid using crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia as sources. However, you can look at the sources cited on a Wikipedia page and use them instead, if they seem credible.

• Who is the author? Is it written by an academic with a position at a University? Search for the author online.
• Who is the publisher? Is the book published by an established academic press? Look in the cover to check the publisher, if it is published by a University Press that is a good sign.
• If it's an article, where is published? If you are using an article check that it has been published in an academic journal. [8] X Research source
• If the article is online, what is the URL? Government sources with .gov addresses are good sources, as are .edu sites.

• Ask yourself why the author is making this argument. Evaluate the text by placing it into a broader intellectual context. Is it part of a certain tradition in historiography? Is it a response to a particular idea?
• Consider where there are weaknesses and limitations to the argument. Always keep a critical mindset and try to identify areas where you think the argument is overly stretched or the evidence doesn't match the author's claims. [9] X Research source

• Label all your notes with the page numbers and precise bibliographic information on the source.
• If you have a quote but can't remember where you found it, imagine trying to skip back through everything you have read to find that one line.
• If you use something and don't reference it fully you risk plagiarism. [10] X Research source

Writing the Introduction

• For example you could start by saying "In the First World War new technologies and the mass mobilization of populations meant that the war was not fought solely by standing armies".
• This first sentences introduces the topic of your essay in a broad way which you can start focus to in on more.

• This will lead to an outline of the structure of your essay and your argument.
• Here you will explain the particular approach you have taken to the essay.
• For example, if you are using case studies you should explain this and give a brief overview of which case studies you will be using and why.

Writing the Essay

• Try to include a sentence that concludes each paragraph and links it to the next paragraph.
• When you are organising your essay think of each paragraph as addressing one element of the essay question.
• Keeping a close focus like this will also help you avoid drifting away from the topic of the essay and will encourage you to write in precise and concise prose.
• Don't forget to write in the past tense when referring to something that has already happened.

• Don't drop a quote from a primary source into your prose without introducing it and discussing it, and try to avoid long quotations. Use only the quotes that best illustrate your point.
• If you are referring to a secondary source, you can usually summarise in your own words rather than quoting directly.
• Be sure to fully cite anything you refer to, including if you do not quote it directly.

• Think about the first and last sentence in every paragraph and how they connect to the previous and next paragraph.
• Try to avoid beginning paragraphs with simple phrases that make your essay appear more like a list. For example, limit your use of words like: "Additionally", "Moreover", "Furthermore".
• Give an indication of where your essay is going and how you are building on what you have already said. [15] X Research source

• Briefly outline the implications of your argument and it's significance in relation to the historiography, but avoid grand sweeping statements. [16] X Research source
• A conclusion also provides the opportunity to point to areas beyond the scope of your essay where the research could be developed in the future.

Proofreading and Evaluating Your Essay

• Try to cut down any overly long sentences or run-on sentences. Instead, try to write clear and accurate prose and avoid unnecessary words.
• Concentrate on developing a clear, simple and highly readable prose style first before you think about developing your writing further. [17] X Research source
• Reading your essay out load can help you get a clearer picture of awkward phrasing and overly long sentences. [18] X Research source

• When you read through your essay look at each paragraph and ask yourself, "what point this paragraph is making".
• You might have produced a nice piece of narrative writing, but if you are not directly answering the question it is not going to help your grade.

• A bibliography will typically have primary sources first, followed by secondary sources. [19] X Research source
• Double and triple check that you have included all the necessary references in the text. If you forgot to include a reference you risk being reported for plagiarism.

Sample Essay

Community Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.historytoday.com/robert-pearce/how-write-good-history-essay
• ↑ https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/writing/writing-resources/writing-a-good-history-paper
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/thesis_statement_tips.html
• ↑ http://history.rutgers.edu/component/content/article?id=106:writing-historical-essays-a-guide-for-undergraduates
• ↑ https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=344285&p=2580599
• ↑ http://www.hamilton.edu/documents/writing-center/WritingGoodHistoryPaper.pdf
• ↑ http://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/
• ↑ https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/hppi/publications/Writing-History-Essays.pdf

About This Article

To write a history essay, read the essay question carefully and use source materials to research the topic, taking thorough notes as you go. Next, formulate a thesis statement that summarizes your key argument in 1-2 concise sentences and create a structured outline to help you stay on topic. Open with a strong introduction that introduces your thesis, present your argument, and back it up with sourced material. Then, end with a succinct conclusion that restates and summarizes your position! For more tips on creating a thesis statement, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Types of Writing Assignments

• Narrative History
• Response Papers
• Creative Approaches
• Annotated Bibliographies
• Book Reviews

Historiographic Essays

• Research Papers

Basic Considerations When Writing on History

• Cause and Effect
• Establishing a Broader Context
• Common Fallacies

Types of Sources

• Secondary Sources
• Primary Sources
• Fiction/Art/Poetry
• The Internet

Critical Reading

• Historiography
• Bias/Prejudice
• Evaluating Contradictory Data and Claims

Preparation and Writing

• Time Management
• Note-Taking Tips
• Developing a Thesis
• Organization
• Formulating a Conclusion

Basic Quoting Skills

• Quotation/Annotation
• Bibliographies
• Advanced Quoting Skills
• The Ethics of Quoting

Style and Editing

• Drafts and Revisions
• Common Stylistic Errors

What is historiography?

Parts of a historiographic essay, a sample historiographic essay, works cited.

In a nutshell, historiography is the history of history. Rather than subjecting actual events - say, the Rape of Nanking - to historical analysis, the subject of historiography is the history of the history of the event: the way it has been written, the sometimes conflicting objectives pursued by those writing on it over time, and the way in which such factors shape our understanding of the actual event at stake, and of the nature of history itself.

A historiographic essay thus asks you to explore several sometimes contradictory sources on one event. An annotated bibliography might come in handy as you attempt to locate such sources; you should also consult the footnotes and bibliographies of any text you read on a certain event, as they will lead you to other texts on the same event; if your research is web-based, follow links - always bearing in mind the pitfalls of the Internet - and if you are researching in the library, check out the books on nearby shelves: you'll be surprised by how often this yields sources you may otherwise never have found.

For an example of an essay on multiple perspectives on the same event (for our purposes, the Rape of Nanking, an event also examined in the context of Book Reviews ), click here .

The purpose of an historiographic essay is threefold: 1.) to allow you to view an historical event or issue from multiple perspectives by engaging multiple sources; 2.) to display your mastery over those sources and over the event or issue itself; and 3.) to develop your critical reading skills as you seek to answer why your sources disagree, and what their disagreement tells you about the event or issue and the very nature of history itself.

Specific skills honed by such an exercise include your ability to discern bias or prejudice and to evaluate contradictory data and claims . As you will have to quote from your sources in order to make your point, you will also have to display basic quoting skills . The very nature of an essay on multiple sources also requires a Works Cited page, of course, on which, see Bibliography .

You will begin a historiographic essay with a thesis that presents the issue or event at stake, then introduces your sources and articulates, in brief, their authors' perspectives and their main points of (dis)agreement. In the main body of your paper you will elaborate upon and develop this latter point, pulling out specific points of (dis)agreement, juxtaposing quotes (and/or paraphrasing arguments) and subjecting them to analysis as you go along. As you do so, ask (and answer) why you think the authors of your various sources disagree. Is their disagreement a product of personal or professional rivalry, ideological incompatibility, national affiliation? These questions go to the heart of historiography. In your conclusion , finally, you will briefly summarize your findings and, more importantly, assess the credibility of your various sources, and specify which one(s) you find to be most compelling, and why. In final conclusion you might articulate in brief the insights you have gained into the event or issue at stake, the sources you have used, and the nature of history itself.

Let us assume that the subject of your historiographic essay is the Rape of Nanking, an event discussed in some detail in the Book Reviews section. There, we examine the event as it is described and analyzed by Iris Chang in her bestselling book The Rape of Nanking . To this we now add several other sources, all of which are listed in the Works Cited section at the end of this page , and cited in the text immediately following, which exemplifies, in brief, some of the basic strategies of a historiographic essay.

• THESIS: The so-called Rape of Nanking of 1937, a six-week massacre of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanking perpetrated by the invading Japanese army, was presented to a largely uninitiated American mass audience by Iris Chang in her best-selling book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997). Chang's vivid book spawned international interest and a number of responses from fellow historians worldwide. Western historians generally agreed with Chang's insistence that the event - long a mere footnote in the popular historiography of World War II - deserved larger notice, but some criticized her for displaying personal bias as well as historical inaccuracies and methodological weaknesses of various sorts. The response from a number of Japanese scholars was overwhelmingly negative. They denied her account of a post-war Japanese "cover up," yet at the same time also, to varying degrees, denied that the event had even occurred.
• EXAMPLE (1): Tanaka Masaaki, for example, author of the website "What Really Happened at Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth," refers to Chang's work as one of "lies, hyperbole, propaganda." Chang's "mountains of dead bodies," according to Matsaaki, were mountains "that no one saw." Her "Reports of mass murders of prisoners of War [were] fabricated," he claims, offering as evidence that there was "no mention of the 'Nanking Massacre'" - a term he pointedly places in quotation marks - "in Chinese Communist Party Records"; and that "No protests against the 'Nanking Massacre' [was] submitted to the League of Nations [or] ... by the United States, Great Britian, or France." The event, he concludes - if there even was one - was "a massacre with no witnesses" (Masaaki).

ANALYSIS: Much of Masaaki's criticism smacks of precisely the kind of revisionism Chang critiques in her book, and is easily exposed as such. The fact that Chinese communist party records make no mention of the event, for example, is hardly surprising, as the Chinese communists were at this time in disarray, operating largely underground in the Nanking area. Not until 1949 did the communists begin their rule over China and begin keeping official records: why then should we expect there to exist records dating back to 1937? Nor should the silence of the League of Nations, the United States, Great Britain and France come as any surprise. In the same year that France and Britain stood by as Nazi Germany re-militarized the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; and that the United States and the League of Nation stood by as Franco and Mussolini continued in their campaigns against the rightful governments of Spain and Ethiopia, why would we expect the United States or the League of Nations to have registered any protest over events halfway around the world?

• EXAMPLE (2): Other arguments by Masaaki are more compelling. For example, he notes of one of the many disturbing photographs in Chang's book - a famous one, apparently showing a Chinese prisoner of war about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer brandishing a sword - that its "fakery is easy to detect if you look at the shadow cast by the man at the center [the officer] and that cast by [a lower-ranking] soldier to his right. [The shadows] are facing in different directions" (Masaaki). The photograph does indeed seem to be a composite, and while stopping short of supporting Masaaki's claim that "not a single one of [Chang's photographs] bears witness to a 'Nanking Massacre'," even American historian Robert Entenmann concedes that several of the photos in Chang's book are indeed "fakes, forgeries and composites," including one (also singled out by Masaaki) "of a row of severed heads," which, according to Entenmann, in fact depicts "bandits executed by Chinese police in 1930 rather than victims of the Nanking Massacre" (Masaaki, Entenmann).

COUNTER-ARGUMENT: Faked though some of Chang's twelve pages of photos might be - perhaps even all of them, as Masaaki suggests - the fact that there exist literally hundreds of photographs of the Nanking Massacre, many of them "souvenir photos" taken by Japanese soldiers themselves, strains the credibility of his larger point and even more so the point made by his stridently anti-Chang colleagues Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo. In their The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre': Japan's Rebuttal to China's Forged Claims , these writers state that "none of these photos are dated, and the names of places and photographers are not stated. In other words, there exist [no] photos that are rigidly authentic, and definitely, these photos can not be used as evidence of [the] 'Nanking Massacre'" (Tadao and Yasuo 101). In fact, several hundred photographs have been published in one volume - The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs , by Shi Young and James Yin, many of them showing female rape victims with legs spread and genitalia exposed - graphic photographs it is hard to conceive of as staged. Such pictures, while not settling the matter beyond dispute, offer powerful testimony that speaks for itself.

• EXAMPLE (3): Notwithstanding the many graphic photographs that exist, it is precisely the accusation of widespread rape - most likely because of its abhorrent nature - that Chang's Japanese critics wish to deny. "The number of 'cases of rape' [the Chinese] claim is from 20,000 to 80,000 cases," Tadao and Yasuo note. "Suppose we took this number, there should have been from 500 to 2,000 cases of rapes...daily [during the six week period of the Massacre]. This number is absolutely not trustworthy," they conclude, citing instead the number of only 361 official complaints of rape actually registered during this period (130). Of course, they are parsing numbers here. The fact is, whether there were three hundred rapes, thirty thousand, more, or less, rape perpetrated by an occupying force against a civilian population (and that such was the case is amply documented in Chang and virtually all extant sources on Nanking, including the Japanese sources, although they, of course, acknowledge only 361) is a crime of war. But that it is an individual crime of war, rather than a collective, government-sponsored crime against humanity (such as the Holocaust) is precisely the point for the Japanese historians: "[Holocaust] killings were indeed ... 'crimes against humanity', [but] those crimes are fundamentally different from the 'war crimes' which the Japanese troops are said to have committed. ... Those acts of crimes [were] the responsibility of each individual soldier" (136, 130). Following this line of reasoning, the Japanese government is absolved of any blame for the rapes that did occur in Nanking, the exact number of which remains unknown. (On this issue, see Evaluating Contradictory Data and Claims ).
• EXAMPLE (4): More trenchant criticism of Chang than that offered by Japanese historians comes from the American academy. Robert Entenmann, for example, a China expert and senior faculty member in the History department at St. Olaf College, faults Chang on the very premise of her book. He denies that there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding Nanking in Japan; maintains (in contradiction to Chang's claims) that Japanese textbooks do address the event (it is rather quaintly referred to as an "incident" in Japanese historiography, if at all, rather than a massacre, far less a rape); states that those textbooks that do mention it offer fatality rates listed between 150,000 to 300,000 (the Western consensus is around 250,000; Chang claims 300,000); and that 80% of respondents to a 1994 opinion poll in Japan found "that their government had not adequately compensated victimized peoples in countries Japan had colonized or invaded" (Entenmann). On this last count, it is worth noting that the specific wording of the question does not appear to address Nanking explicitly, and that the opinion poll's finding thus bears little relevance to the question at hand. We might also be skeptical of Entenmann's generous appraisal of Japanese textbooks: on its role in World War II, Japan's high school textbooks in particular are subject to constant revision, much of it aimed at mitigating the government's role in wartime atrocities, as a 2007 New York Times article reminds us (Onishi 12).
• EXAMPLE (5): Entenmann's more fundamental criticism of Chang's work and perspective, however, goes deeper. As the granddaughter of former Nanking residents who barely escaped the city, she is guilty, he writes, of having fallen victim to "her own ethnic prejudice. ... Her explanations are, to a large extent, based on unexamined [anti-Japanese] ethnic stereotypes." Furthermore, she engages in "implausible speculations," according to Entenmann, for example, her claim that Emperor Hirohito himself exulted in the news of the Rape of Nanking (see Chang 179). In fact, Entenmann points out, Hirohito's response is unknown, and Chang may be guilty here of "confus[ing] Japanese leaders' delight in the fall of the Chinese capital with exulting in the massacre that occurred afterward" (Entenmann).

ANALYSIS: Such sleights of hand (which Entenmann himself indulges in, as his opinion poll example above shows) are perhaps conscious on Chang's part, or perhaps a function of her not being a professional historian and therefore applying a less-than-rigorous methodology in her efforts to tell a good story. She is after all, a popular (rather than an academic) historian, whom another bestselling historian, Stephen Ambrose, whose scholarship has also been faulted on several counts, once called "the best young historian we've got because she understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way" (Ambrose qtd. in Sullivan B6).

• CONCLUSION: It is this zeal to tell a good story and back it up with sensational evidence (even if - like some of her photographs - it is faked), as well as her occasionally emotional prose, sometimes bordering on hyperbole, that remains Chang's greatest liability. In an effort to place the Rape of Nanking into historical context, for example, she states that "[u]sing numbers killed alone" it "surpasses much of the worst barbarism of the ages." Its casualties exceeded those of the Carthaginians at the hands of the Romans, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, and those of the Mongolian leader Timur Lenk, she writes in a series of specious comparisons that culminate with the observation that "the deaths at Nanking far exceeded the deaths from the American raids on Tokyo ... and even the combined death toll of the two atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Chang 6). In The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography , an anthology generally sympathetic to Chang's project (if not to her methodology), George Washington University history and international affairs professor Daqing Yang, himself a native of Nanking, notes that "such a comparison [as Chang's] is methodologically sterile" and "morally misguided" (Yang 161). Indeed, it is precisely the sort of parsing of numbers for which Chang herself would most likely challenge the above-mentioned Japanese historians in their effort to deny the extent to which rape occurred at Nanking. Despite these failings, Chang's book ultimately emerges as a more persuasive argument of what did in fact happen at Nanking than those offered by her Japanese detractors. The enduring controversy surrounding the event, however, and the specific criticism against Chang from even those who support her premise, point both to the endlessly debatable nature of history, and to the need for a more rigorous, analytical approach in its telling. As Joshua Fogel notes in his introduction to The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography , "The Massacre and related events must be lifted beyond the popular level ... to be studied with greater nuance and with a wider range of sources" (Fogel 1). In such a project, the contradictory data and claims of Chang and her critics need not necessarily be mutually exclusive but, instead, might help establish a broader context within which the event can be understood more fully, from all sides.
• Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).
• Entenmann, Robert. "Review of Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." October 29, 1998. H-Net List for Asian History and Culture , 1998. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55/481.html .
• Yang, Daqin. "The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Refections on Historical Inquiry." The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Ed. Joshua Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 133 - 180.
• Masaaki, Tanaka. "What Really Happened in Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth." N.d. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.ne.jp/asahi/unko/tamezou/nankin/whatreally/index.html .
• Onishi, Norimitsu. "Japan's Textbooks Reflect Revised History." The New York Times , April 1, 2007, A12.
• Sullivan, Patricia. "'Rape of Nanking' Author Irish Chang Dies." November 12, 2004, B6. Washington Post , November 12, 2004, B6. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44139-2004Nov11.html .
• Takemoto, Tadao and Ohara Yasuo. The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre': Japan's Rebuttal to China's Forged Claims. Tokyo: Meisei-sha, Inc., 2000.
• Young, Shi and James Ying. The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, expanded 2nd edition. Chicago, Innovative Publishing Group, Inc., 1997.

The interested reader will find another brief exercise in historiographical inquiry - this one on the disputed relationship between the Catholic Church and fascism during the 1930s - in the Research Paper section of this site, under "Conducting Research for 'The Austrian Catholic Church and the Anschluss': Catholicism and fascism."

Oral History

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you figure out how to use oral histories in essays. It will give you suggestions for how to prepare for and conduct oral history interviews and help you determine, based on your context and purpose, how to integrate raw material into your essay.

Introduction

If we aren’t experts on a particular time or culture, our knowledge of it is often limited to major events and sweeping trends. This doesn’t necessarily help us understand the everyday experience of life in the past or in another culture. However, we do know a great deal about everyday experience in our own time and culture, and a large part of that knowledge comes not from textbooks but from talking to others. We learn about the histories of our families through conversation with those who remember them and about what various cultures value by observing their celebrations and listening to their music, among other things. So if you want to learn about another culture, country, era, etc., why not use a version of this strategy and talk to people who are or were part of it about their experiences and memories?

Oral history involves interviewing a person or group to get an inside perspective into what it was like to live in a particular time or is like to live as the member of a particular group within a society. Interviewing a group of people can create a picture of that experience, and a large project of this kind (such as UNC’s Southern Oral History Project) can be a way of preserving a piece of history. When we interview one person, we gain knowledge of an individual’s experiences, which may or may not be typical of their time and culture. We can also learn more about the experiences of groups from all sections of society, including the ones whose experience is not always thoroughly known or well documented, such as the working class, ethnic or religious minorities, or women.

When professors use oral history projects in classes, they usually ask you to interview only one or two people. The interview stage of the process requires effective question-making and interviewing skills. Usually, the project consists of taking raw material from an interview and shaping it into an essay. This step requires you to make some decisions about how you want to present the material and analytical skill to help you interpret what you learn.

Who uses oral history projects and why

Fields in which you might be assigned an oral history paper include history, anthropology, and other disciplines that study the experiences of specific social groups such as women or ethnic groups. The goals of these fields affect the ways they use this kind of project:

• History : Historians use evidence to understand the experiences of people in the past. Oral history can be a valuable source of evidence for understanding the experiences of individuals or groups within a certain historical period. Oral testimony cannot replace analysis of traditional historical materials (official documents, letters, newspapers, secondary sources, etc.). It can, however, reveal the role of individuals in shaping the past and/or how larger trends impacted the individual. When an oral history essay places the experiences of an individual within the context of a historical period, it can help illuminate both the individual’s experience and the historical period.
• Folklore : Folklorists study culture as it is expressed in everyday life and often use oral history projects to gather materials to preserve and study. Interviewing individuals is one of the primary means of accessing folklore; for example, folklorists use oral histories to learn about a culture’s musical traditions or festivals.
• Anthropology : An archeologist might use oral history to learn more about the lifeways of peoples who have living descendants or to locate sites for archeological excavation. A cultural anthropologist might use oral history as a way to understand how individuals think of themselves in relation to the rest of the world. This technique can help anthropologists understand how culture shapes individuals either consciously or unconsciously, on the one hand, and the ways that individuals contribute to the production of culture, on the other hand.

Fields that study marginalized social groups (such as women, African-Americans, Latino/as): In these fields, conducting and analyzing an interview is a way of uncovering experience that might be underrepresented in mainstream culture. Dominant cultures have a tendency not to notice or acknowledge the experiences of certain subgroups, viewing them as peripheral rather than central—in other words, marginalizing them. Academic fields have emerged to explore the experiences of marginalized groups, and these fields tend to value experiential knowledge. Oral history projects can be a way of accessing such knowledge.

Preparing for the interview

Before the interview, familiarize yourself with the history and characteristics of the culture your interviewee is from. That way, you’ll have a context for what you learn.

Some interviews may be fairly unstructured, with only general guidance from you. For instance, you may just choose some topics to discuss, allowing the interviewee to lead the way. This is appropriate when your goal is relatively broad, such as the preservation of the person’s voice, memories, and perspective, as opposed to using the interview to construct a focused argument. Some interviews, especially those in undergraduate course assignments, are more highly structured and take the shape of a list of questions and responses. This is especially useful when you hope to use the raw material of the interview to make a particular point or are looking to address very focused issues. If you are planning a more structured interview, prepare a list of questions, including some basic ones about aspects of the person’s identity (such as age, level of education, and occupation). In devising your questions, consider the interviewee’s cultural context. Think about what kinds of issues would be most helpful for you to learn about. For instance, learning how the person felt about major life events might help you understand how your interviewee sees their life as a whole. Questions about what it was actually like to live through segregation or the Vietnam War might give you a new perspective on a historical time period. As you ask your questions, work from your list, but be ready to ask follow-up questions in case you don’t understand the response or want to know more. A response to one of your questions may also trigger curiosity about some other issue, so it’s good to be ready to follow whatever path seems most promising. Include open-ended questions, especially “how” and “why” questions, as they will probably yield the richest raw material for your essay; asking yes/no questions is okay for gathering factual information. Ask for examples when you think it would help you (and the readers of your essay) understand the person’s perspective.

Conducting the interview

To conduct the interviewing process in an ethical way, ask the person’s permission to use their comments in your essay; written consent is ideal so you have a record of it. If you are recording a phone conversation, the interviewee’s written consent is required by law. Ask if the interviewee would prefer that you not use their actual name.

Tape record the interview if possible. If you try to work only from notes, you won’t have an exact record of the person’s comments and could end up distorting their meaning. Test your tape recorder, digital voice recorder, or videocamera ahead of time and bring extra batteries if necessary. If you’re recording, try to minimize background noise. In any interview setting, try to select an environment free from distractions, so that both you and the interviewee will be able to concentrate. Choose a spot where you will both feel comfortable. Silence will feel awkward at first, but give your interviewee a chance to think. Don’t move on too quickly just because there is a bit of a pause. Watch for signs of fatigue. If the person you’re interviewing begins to seem tired, take a break or set up another time to finish the interview. Treat the person you’re interviewing with respect, regardless of your own attitudes and opinions. Making assumptions about the person may damage trust and skew the essay you write.

Transcribing oral histories

Sometimes, you may be asked to transcribe your oral history interview or part of it. Transcription is the process of taking a sound file and translating it to text; it creates a written transcript of an oral conversation. One of the goals of transcribing interviews is to give readers a sense of the interview—how was it formatted, was it formal or informal, did the interviewer ask a lot of questions or did the interview subject do most of the talking with just a few prompts, what language and speaking style did the participants use?

A transcript of an oral history interview is, in the words of one style guide, “at best an imperfect representation of an oral interview. The transcriber’s most important task is to render as close a replica to the actual event as possible. Accuracy, not speed, is the transcriber’s goal” (Baylor Style Guide). Therefore, the transcript should reflect, as closely as possible, the words, speech patterns, and thought patterns of the interview subject. Their word choice, grammar, and ideas should be transcribed as accurately as possible. It’s not generally necessary, though, to reproduce a dialect or accent, unless you have specific training in doing so. The same style guide says, “Oral history is not an exercise in literary composition; the transcriber should avoid value judgments about the grammar or vocabulary of an interviewee.”

Transcribing can be a long and very detailed process. It will be easiest if you take detailed notes during the interview about the different questions, topics, and themes that you discuss. Write down any memorable phrases or ideas, so you have some markers for different points in the interview. You will need to listen to the entire portion of the interview to be transcribed several times. Many people find it helpful to listen all the way through a section once, then again, transcribing as much as possible, then a third (or fourth, or fifth!) time in order to fill in all the holes. At the end of this handout, you will find some websites that detail how to transcribe an oral history interview.

When you have a complete transcript, it is common practice to return it to the interviewee for editing—these changes can be noted in various ways or integrated into the document. Interviewees may need to correct things like dates, names, or places. Or they may want to provide more elaboration or clarification on a subject. Though this is standard practice for professional historians, your instructor may or may not expect you to do this.

Turning the raw material into an essay

The process you use will depend on what you want your essay to do. If, for instance, you want your essay merely to showcase an individual’s thoughts on a time or subject, you will simply need to frame the comments of the interviewee and shape them into a narrative. If, on the other hand, your intention is to interpret the interviewee’s comments, using them as evidence for an argument, you will need to make a strong argument while still letting the interviewee’s experience and insights come through. Your essay might use the interviewee’s comments to advance an alternate interpretation of a historical time or culture, confirm a commonly held characterization, or enrich an existing view.

Because oral history papers can vary a great deal according to their aims, make sure to develop a clear sense of your purpose. The assignment itself may specify quite clearly what kind of an oral history project you may do or leave many of the choices up to you. In either case, figuring out what you want your essay to accomplish will help you make definitive decisions about how to write it.

Decisions you’ll need to make about your project

First, determine the overall purpose of your essay. What would you like your essay to do?

A . Transcribe the comments of the individual.

B . Present the experiences and/or perspective of the individual.

C . Place the individual’s experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical or social context.

D . Use the individual’s experiences and/or perspective to make an argument about a larger historical or social context.

(C and D are especially common in undergraduate assignments of this type, but every assignment is different.)

Based on your answer to the above question, choose which section of this handout you’d like to read. If you’re not certain what you’d like your essay to do, read through all of the following sections to get a better sense of what your essay might include.

If you answered A., that you want your essay to transcribe the comments of the individual, consider the following questions and responses

What should you say about the interviewee’s comments?

Introduce the individual, explain the circumstances of the interview, and then literally transcribe your questions and their responses.

How should you structure your essay?

Present the questions and responses in the order you asked the questions. You may also include an introduction that briefly describes the person.

How should you present quotes and use paraphrases?

Transcribe the questions and responses so that paraphrases won’t be necessary. A question and answer format is a clear way to present a transcription (see the “examples” section at the end of this handout).

Should you read and/or incorporate secondary sources?

Whether or not you need to use secondary sources is partially a matter of what the assignment calls for. Secondary sources about the cultural context might help you think of your questions, but you won’t need to include them in your transcription of the responses.

Here is an example of how you might handle one of your interviewee’s comments within the body of the essay. Suppose that your paper is for a women’s studies project in which your instructor has asked you to interview a female family member; you have chosen to interview your grandmother, Lucretia. Suppose that you asked the following question: “How free did you feel in terms of choosing your jobs? If you felt limited, why do you think that might have been?”

If you want your essay to transcribe the interview, you will just present the questions and answers:

[Your name]: How free did you feel in terms of choosing your jobs? If you felt limited, why do you think that might have been? Lucretia: I have always been good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it easy for me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women executives. That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women for those jobs.

If you answered B., that you want your essay to present the experiences and/or perspective of the individual, consider the following questions and responses

Introduce the individual and outline the topics that the interview explored. Then use these topics to help you decide whether you want to organize the essay by the sequence of your questions or by topics that emerged as you reviewed your notes. You may frame the interviewee’s comments by providing transitions and a conclusion that reiterates the central point(s) that the interview revealed.

Your introduction should say a few things about who the person is and name some of the recurring themes or issues to prepare the reader to notice those in the body of the essay. The body of the essay should organize the interviewee’s comments, for instance chronologically or topically, and provide bridges (transitions) between sections.

Frame your quotes will phrases like “Sue Ellen explained . . .” or “Horatio’s view on plum trees is that . . .”; if you use paraphrases, be careful not to change their implications or lose their intent, since your goal is to present rather than interpret. For this approach as well as the next, our handout on quotations might be helpful.

If your assignment asks you to present (“B”) the results in essay form, you will integrate the questions and answers into your text, although sometimes you may find it easier to just paraphrase the question:

While Lucretia does feel that her occupational life offered her some opportunities, she describes feeling a sense of limitation, at least in retrospect: “I have always been good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it easy for me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women executives. That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women for those jobs.”

If you answered C., that you want your essay to place the individual’s experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical or social context, consider the following questions and responses

Analyze the responses to your questions and what they illustrate about their historical or social context. You might consider how your interviewee’s identity (their class, gender, and ethnicity, for instance) relates to the nature of the interviewee’s experience or perspective. For this kind of essay, you’ll need an analytical thesis statement (see our handout on thesis statements ), a plan for how to organize the subtopics that demonstrate your thesis, analysis/interpretation of the interviewee’s comments, and a conclusion that draws your analysis together.

Your introduction should contain and explain a thesis statement that makes a claim about the nature of the historical or social context. Organizing the body paragraphs by topic may be an effective way of explaining how the individual’s experiences fit into the broader historical or social context.

You’ll provide framing phrases as in the previous case, but you’ll also need to include your explanation of the significance of the quotes. A good general guideline is to include at least as much explanation of the quote as the quote is long. Paraphrases are helpful when you need just the content of the comment to make your point—that is, when the language the interviewee uses is not the primary issue. If you’re writing an analytical or argumentative essay, a mixture of paraphrases and quotes will probably serve your purpose best.

Whether or not you need to use secondary sources is partially a matter of what the assignment calls for. But if the assignment doesn’t specify, you’ll probably need to read and perhaps refer explicitly to some secondary sources so that you will have the necessary evidence to create a picture of the broader historical or social context.

If your assignment asks you to place the responses in their social context, you will need to integrate the quotes into text, paired with either the questions themselves or paraphrases, along with some analysis of how the individual’s experiences fit into their social context. You may even include some references to secondary sources, depending on the assignment and your own sense of whether they would strengthen your analysis:

Lucretia describes feeling limited in terms of her occupational life: “I have always been good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it easy for me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women executives. That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women for those jobs.” Her account reveals a sense of how fixed gender roles were in the workplace and seems fairly typical for the time and place, as feminist historian Tammy Ixplox’s scholarship suggests (Ixplox 39).

If you answered D., that you want your essay to use the individual’s experiences and/or perspective to make an argument about a larger historical or social context, consider the following questions and responses

Use the interviewee’s comments as evidence for an argument you want to make about a particular historical or social context. For instance, you might want to argue that working-class women’s experience in 1950s America does not necessarily fit with popularly-held notions of the fifties housewife. Or you might want to show how racism affected one African-American man’s everyday life to demonstrate how insidious racism can be. For these kinds of essays, you may need some supporting research to get a better sense of the historical and social context, so you’ll understand how the individual’s experience relates to broader cultural trends and phenomena. In terms of what the essay will look like, you’ll need a thesis that makes a claim, an organizational plan that reflects the main points you think will best support that thesis, lots of explanation of how the interviewee’s comments illustrate the thesis, and a conclusion that draws your argument together.

You’ll need an introduction with a strong, interpretive thesis statement that the body of the essay explains and demonstrates. The interviewee’s comments will function as evidence for your argument, so each body paragraph should correspond to a point in your argument.

You’ll provide framing phrases as in the previous case, but you’ll also need to include your explanation of the significance of the quotes. A good rule of thumb is to include at least as much explanation of the quote as the quote is long. Paraphrases are helpful when you need just the content of the comment to make your point—that is, when the language the interviewee uses is not the primary issue. If you’re writing an analytical or argumentative essay, a mixture of paraphrases and quotes will probably serve your purpose best.

Whether or not you need to use secondary sources is partially a matter of what the assignment calls for. But if the assignment doesn’t specify, you’ll probably need to read and incorporate some secondary sources to complement or provide a counterpoint to the interviewee’s comments and to support your claims about the larger historical or social context.

If your assignment asks you to make an argument, for example, about how the interviewee’s responses reflect gender issues and roles, you will need to integrate the quotes into your text as evidence for your argument about gender roles, perhaps with reference to secondary sources if appropriate:

Lucretia’s experiences reveal gender roles in the workplace, in which only men tended to fill the executive positions. She describes feeling limited in terms of her occupational life: “I have always been good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it easy for me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women executives. That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women for those jobs.” In her experience, no one questioned these roles, which reveals how ingrained and even internalized social expectations for different genders were at the time. This phenomenon is consistent with feminist historian Tammy Ixplox’s scholarship on this cultural context (Ixplox 39).

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Baylor University. n.d. “Transcribing Style Guide.” Institute for Oral History. Accessed June 24, 2019. https://www.baylor.edu/oralhistory/index.php?id=931752 .

Library of Congress. n.d. “Indexing and Transcribing Your Interviews.” Veterans History Project. Last updated August 2020. http://www.loc.gov/vets/transcribe.html .

Moyer, Judith. 1993. “Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History.” DoHistory . Harvard University. http://dohistory.org/on_your_own/toolkit/oralHistory.html .

Shopes, Linda. 2002. “Making Sense of Oral History.” History Matters: The US Survey Course on the Web. February 2002. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/oral/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

A case study research paper examines a person, place, event, condition, phenomenon, or other type of subject of analysis in order to extrapolate  key themes and results that help predict future trends, illuminate previously hidden issues that can be applied to practice, and/or provide a means for understanding an important research problem with greater clarity. A case study research paper usually examines a single subject of analysis, but case study papers can also be designed as a comparative investigation that shows relationships between two or more subjects. The methods used to study a case can rest within a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method investigative paradigm.

Case Studies. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Mills, Albert J. , Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010 ; “What is a Case Study?” In Swanborn, Peter G. Case Study Research: What, Why and How? London: SAGE, 2010.

How to Approach Writing a Case Study Research Paper

General information about how to choose a topic to investigate can be found under the " Choosing a Research Problem " tab in the Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper writing guide. Review this page because it may help you identify a subject of analysis that can be investigated using a case study design.

However, identifying a case to investigate involves more than choosing the research problem . A case study encompasses a problem contextualized around the application of in-depth analysis, interpretation, and discussion, often resulting in specific recommendations for action or for improving existing conditions. As Seawright and Gerring note, practical considerations such as time and access to information can influence case selection, but these issues should not be the sole factors used in describing the methodological justification for identifying a particular case to study. Given this, selecting a case includes considering the following:

• The case represents an unusual or atypical example of a research problem that requires more in-depth analysis? Cases often represent a topic that rests on the fringes of prior investigations because the case may provide new ways of understanding the research problem. For example, if the research problem is to identify strategies to improve policies that support girl's access to secondary education in predominantly Muslim nations, you could consider using Azerbaijan as a case study rather than selecting a more obvious nation in the Middle East. Doing so may reveal important new insights into recommending how governments in other predominantly Muslim nations can formulate policies that support improved access to education for girls.
• The case provides important insight or illuminate a previously hidden problem? In-depth analysis of a case can be based on the hypothesis that the case study will reveal trends or issues that have not been exposed in prior research or will reveal new and important implications for practice. For example, anecdotal evidence may suggest drug use among homeless veterans is related to their patterns of travel throughout the day. Assuming prior studies have not looked at individual travel choices as a way to study access to illicit drug use, a case study that observes a homeless veteran could reveal how issues of personal mobility choices facilitate regular access to illicit drugs. Note that it is important to conduct a thorough literature review to ensure that your assumption about the need to reveal new insights or previously hidden problems is valid and evidence-based.
• The case challenges and offers a counter-point to prevailing assumptions? Over time, research on any given topic can fall into a trap of developing assumptions based on outdated studies that are still applied to new or changing conditions or the idea that something should simply be accepted as "common sense," even though the issue has not been thoroughly tested in current practice. A case study analysis may offer an opportunity to gather evidence that challenges prevailing assumptions about a research problem and provide a new set of recommendations applied to practice that have not been tested previously. For example, perhaps there has been a long practice among scholars to apply a particular theory in explaining the relationship between two subjects of analysis. Your case could challenge this assumption by applying an innovative theoretical framework [perhaps borrowed from another discipline] to explore whether this approach offers new ways of understanding the research problem. Taking a contrarian stance is one of the most important ways that new knowledge and understanding develops from existing literature.
• The case provides an opportunity to pursue action leading to the resolution of a problem? Another way to think about choosing a case to study is to consider how the results from investigating a particular case may result in findings that reveal ways in which to resolve an existing or emerging problem. For example, studying the case of an unforeseen incident, such as a fatal accident at a railroad crossing, can reveal hidden issues that could be applied to preventative measures that contribute to reducing the chance of accidents in the future. In this example, a case study investigating the accident could lead to a better understanding of where to strategically locate additional signals at other railroad crossings so as to better warn drivers of an approaching train, particularly when visibility is hindered by heavy rain, fog, or at night.
• The case offers a new direction in future research? A case study can be used as a tool for an exploratory investigation that highlights the need for further research about the problem. A case can be used when there are few studies that help predict an outcome or that establish a clear understanding about how best to proceed in addressing a problem. For example, after conducting a thorough literature review [very important!], you discover that little research exists showing the ways in which women contribute to promoting water conservation in rural communities of east central Africa. A case study of how women contribute to saving water in a rural village of Uganda can lay the foundation for understanding the need for more thorough research that documents how women in their roles as cooks and family caregivers think about water as a valuable resource within their community. This example of a case study could also point to the need for scholars to build new theoretical frameworks around the topic [e.g., applying feminist theories of work and family to the issue of water conservation].

Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. “Building Theories from Case Study Research.” Academy of Management Review 14 (October 1989): 532-550; Emmel, Nick. Sampling and Choosing Cases in Qualitative Research: A Realist Approach . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2013; Gerring, John. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?” American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004): 341-354; Mills, Albert J. , Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010; Seawright, Jason and John Gerring. "Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research." Political Research Quarterly 61 (June 2008): 294-308.

Structure and Writing Style

The purpose of a paper in the social sciences designed around a case study is to thoroughly investigate a subject of analysis in order to reveal a new understanding about the research problem and, in so doing, contributing new knowledge to what is already known from previous studies. In applied social sciences disciplines [e.g., education, social work, public administration, etc.], case studies may also be used to reveal best practices, highlight key programs, or investigate interesting aspects of professional work.

In general, the structure of a case study research paper is not all that different from a standard college-level research paper. However, there are subtle differences you should be aware of. Here are the key elements to organizing and writing a case study research paper.

I.  Introduction

As with any research paper, your introduction should serve as a roadmap for your readers to ascertain the scope and purpose of your study . The introduction to a case study research paper, however, should not only describe the research problem and its significance, but you should also succinctly describe why the case is being used and how it relates to addressing the problem. The two elements should be linked. With this in mind, a good introduction answers these four questions:

• What is being studied? Describe the research problem and describe the subject of analysis [the case] you have chosen to address the problem. Explain how they are linked and what elements of the case will help to expand knowledge and understanding about the problem.
• Why is this topic important to investigate? Describe the significance of the research problem and state why a case study design and the subject of analysis that the paper is designed around is appropriate in addressing the problem.
• What did we know about this topic before I did this study? Provide background that helps lead the reader into the more in-depth literature review to follow. If applicable, summarize prior case study research applied to the research problem and why it fails to adequately address the problem. Describe why your case will be useful. If no prior case studies have been used to address the research problem, explain why you have selected this subject of analysis.
• How will this study advance new knowledge or new ways of understanding? Explain why your case study will be suitable in helping to expand knowledge and understanding about the research problem.

Each of these questions should be addressed in no more than a few paragraphs. Exceptions to this can be when you are addressing a complex research problem or subject of analysis that requires more in-depth background information.

II.  Literature Review

The literature review for a case study research paper is generally structured the same as it is for any college-level research paper. The difference, however, is that the literature review is focused on providing background information and  enabling historical interpretation of the subject of analysis in relation to the research problem the case is intended to address . This includes synthesizing studies that help to:

• Place relevant works in the context of their contribution to understanding the case study being investigated . This would involve summarizing studies that have used a similar subject of analysis to investigate the research problem. If there is literature using the same or a very similar case to study, you need to explain why duplicating past research is important [e.g., conditions have changed; prior studies were conducted long ago, etc.].
• Describe the relationship each work has to the others under consideration that informs the reader why this case is applicable . Your literature review should include a description of any works that support using the case to investigate the research problem and the underlying research questions.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research using the case study . If applicable, review any research that has examined the research problem using a different research design. Explain how your use of a case study design may reveal new knowledge or a new perspective or that can redirect research in an important new direction.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies . This refers to synthesizing any literature that points to unresolved issues of concern about the research problem and describing how the subject of analysis that forms the case study can help resolve these existing contradictions.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research . Your review should examine any literature that lays a foundation for understanding why your case study design and the subject of analysis around which you have designed your study may reveal a new way of approaching the research problem or offer a perspective that points to the need for additional research.
• Expose any gaps that exist in the literature that the case study could help to fill . Summarize any literature that not only shows how your subject of analysis contributes to understanding the research problem, but how your case contributes to a new way of understanding the problem that prior research has failed to do.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important!] . Collectively, your literature review should always place your case study within the larger domain of prior research about the problem. The overarching purpose of reviewing pertinent literature in a case study paper is to demonstrate that you have thoroughly identified and synthesized prior studies in relation to explaining the relevance of the case in addressing the research problem.

III.  Method

In this section, you explain why you selected a particular case [i.e., subject of analysis] and the strategy you used to identify and ultimately decide that your case was appropriate in addressing the research problem. The way you describe the methods used varies depending on the type of subject of analysis that constitutes your case study.

If your subject of analysis is an incident or event . In the social and behavioral sciences, the event or incident that represents the case to be studied is usually bounded by time and place, with a clear beginning and end and with an identifiable location or position relative to its surroundings. The subject of analysis can be a rare or critical event or it can focus on a typical or regular event. The purpose of studying a rare event is to illuminate new ways of thinking about the broader research problem or to test a hypothesis. Critical incident case studies must describe the method by which you identified the event and explain the process by which you determined the validity of this case to inform broader perspectives about the research problem or to reveal new findings. However, the event does not have to be a rare or uniquely significant to support new thinking about the research problem or to challenge an existing hypothesis. For example, Walo, Bull, and Breen conducted a case study to identify and evaluate the direct and indirect economic benefits and costs of a local sports event in the City of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. The purpose of their study was to provide new insights from measuring the impact of a typical local sports event that prior studies could not measure well because they focused on large "mega-events." Whether the event is rare or not, the methods section should include an explanation of the following characteristics of the event: a) when did it take place; b) what were the underlying circumstances leading to the event; and, c) what were the consequences of the event in relation to the research problem.

If your subject of analysis is a person. Explain why you selected this particular individual to be studied and describe what experiences they have had that provide an opportunity to advance new understandings about the research problem. Mention any background about this person which might help the reader understand the significance of their experiences that make them worthy of study. This includes describing the relationships this person has had with other people, institutions, and/or events that support using them as the subject for a case study research paper. It is particularly important to differentiate the person as the subject of analysis from others and to succinctly explain how the person relates to examining the research problem [e.g., why is one politician in a particular local election used to show an increase in voter turnout from any other candidate running in the election]. Note that these issues apply to a specific group of people used as a case study unit of analysis [e.g., a classroom of students].

If your subject of analysis is a place. In general, a case study that investigates a place suggests a subject of analysis that is unique or special in some way and that this uniqueness can be used to build new understanding or knowledge about the research problem. A case study of a place must not only describe its various attributes relevant to the research problem [e.g., physical, social, historical, cultural, economic, political], but you must state the method by which you determined that this place will illuminate new understandings about the research problem. It is also important to articulate why a particular place as the case for study is being used if similar places also exist [i.e., if you are studying patterns of homeless encampments of veterans in open spaces, explain why you are studying Echo Park in Los Angeles rather than Griffith Park?]. If applicable, describe what type of human activity involving this place makes it a good choice to study [e.g., prior research suggests Echo Park has more homeless veterans].

If your subject of analysis is a phenomenon. A phenomenon refers to a fact, occurrence, or circumstance that can be studied or observed but with the cause or explanation to be in question. In this sense, a phenomenon that forms your subject of analysis can encompass anything that can be observed or presumed to exist but is not fully understood. In the social and behavioral sciences, the case usually focuses on human interaction within a complex physical, social, economic, cultural, or political system. For example, the phenomenon could be the observation that many vehicles used by ISIS fighters are small trucks with English language advertisements on them. The research problem could be that ISIS fighters are difficult to combat because they are highly mobile. The research questions could be how and by what means are these vehicles used by ISIS being supplied to the militants and how might supply lines to these vehicles be cut off? How might knowing the suppliers of these trucks reveal larger networks of collaborators and financial support? A case study of a phenomenon most often encompasses an in-depth analysis of a cause and effect that is grounded in an interactive relationship between people and their environment in some way.

NOTE:   The choice of the case or set of cases to study cannot appear random. Evidence that supports the method by which you identified and chose your subject of analysis should clearly support investigation of the research problem and linked to key findings from your literature review. Be sure to cite any studies that helped you determine that the case you chose was appropriate for examining the problem.

IV.  Discussion

The main elements of your discussion section are generally the same as any research paper, but centered around interpreting and drawing conclusions about the key findings from your analysis of the case study. Note that a general social sciences research paper may contain a separate section to report findings. However, in a paper designed around a case study, it is common to combine a description of the results with the discussion about their implications. The objectives of your discussion section should include the following:

Reiterate the Research Problem/State the Major Findings Briefly reiterate the research problem you are investigating and explain why the subject of analysis around which you designed the case study were used. You should then describe the findings revealed from your study of the case using direct, declarative, and succinct proclamation of the study results. Highlight any findings that were unexpected or especially profound.

Explain the Meaning of the Findings and Why They are Important Systematically explain the meaning of your case study findings and why you believe they are important. Begin this part of the section by repeating what you consider to be your most important or surprising finding first, then systematically review each finding. Be sure to thoroughly extrapolate what your analysis of the case can tell the reader about situations or conditions beyond the actual case that was studied while, at the same time, being careful not to misconstrue or conflate a finding that undermines the external validity of your conclusions.

Relate the Findings to Similar Studies No study in the social sciences is so novel or possesses such a restricted focus that it has absolutely no relation to previously published research. The discussion section should relate your case study results to those found in other studies, particularly if questions raised from prior studies served as the motivation for choosing your subject of analysis. This is important because comparing and contrasting the findings of other studies helps support the overall importance of your results and it highlights how and in what ways your case study design and the subject of analysis differs from prior research about the topic.

Consider Alternative Explanations of the Findings Remember that the purpose of social science research is to discover and not to prove. When writing the discussion section, you should carefully consider all possible explanations revealed by the case study results, rather than just those that fit your hypothesis or prior assumptions and biases. Be alert to what the in-depth analysis of the case may reveal about the research problem, including offering a contrarian perspective to what scholars have stated in prior research if that is how the findings can be interpreted from your case.

Acknowledge the Study's Limitations You can state the study's limitations in the conclusion section of your paper but describing the limitations of your subject of analysis in the discussion section provides an opportunity to identify the limitations and explain why they are not significant. This part of the discussion section should also note any unanswered questions or issues your case study could not address. More detailed information about how to document any limitations to your research can be found here .

Suggest Areas for Further Research Although your case study may offer important insights about the research problem, there are likely additional questions related to the problem that remain unanswered or findings that unexpectedly revealed themselves as a result of your in-depth analysis of the case. Be sure that the recommendations for further research are linked to the research problem and that you explain why your recommendations are valid in other contexts and based on the original assumptions of your study.

V.  Conclusion

As with any research paper, you should summarize your conclusion in clear, simple language; emphasize how the findings from your case study differs from or supports prior research and why. Do not simply reiterate the discussion section. Provide a synthesis of key findings presented in the paper to show how these converge to address the research problem. If you haven't already done so in the discussion section, be sure to document the limitations of your case study and any need for further research.

The function of your paper's conclusion is to: 1) reiterate the main argument supported by the findings from your case study; 2) state clearly the context, background, and necessity of pursuing the research problem using a case study design in relation to an issue, controversy, or a gap found from reviewing the literature; and, 3) provide a place to persuasively and succinctly restate the significance of your research problem, given that the reader has now been presented with in-depth information about the topic.

Consider the following points to help ensure your conclusion is appropriate:

• If the argument or purpose of your paper is complex, you may need to summarize these points for your reader.
• If prior to your conclusion, you have not yet explained the significance of your findings or if you are proceeding inductively, use the conclusion of your paper to describe your main points and explain their significance.
• Move from a detailed to a general level of consideration of the case study's findings that returns the topic to the context provided by the introduction or within a new context that emerges from your case study findings.

Note that, depending on the discipline you are writing in or the preferences of your professor, the concluding paragraph may contain your final reflections on the evidence presented as it applies to practice or on the essay's central research problem. However, the nature of being introspective about the subject of analysis you have investigated will depend on whether you are explicitly asked to express your observations in this way.

Problems to Avoid

Overgeneralization One of the goals of a case study is to lay a foundation for understanding broader trends and issues applied to similar circumstances. However, be careful when drawing conclusions from your case study. They must be evidence-based and grounded in the results of the study; otherwise, it is merely speculation. Looking at a prior example, it would be incorrect to state that a factor in improving girls access to education in Azerbaijan and the policy implications this may have for improving access in other Muslim nations is due to girls access to social media if there is no documentary evidence from your case study to indicate this. There may be anecdotal evidence that retention rates were better for girls who were engaged with social media, but this observation would only point to the need for further research and would not be a definitive finding if this was not a part of your original research agenda.

Failure to Document Limitations No case is going to reveal all that needs to be understood about a research problem. Therefore, just as you have to clearly state the limitations of a general research study , you must describe the specific limitations inherent in the subject of analysis. For example, the case of studying how women conceptualize the need for water conservation in a village in Uganda could have limited application in other cultural contexts or in areas where fresh water from rivers or lakes is plentiful and, therefore, conservation is understood more in terms of managing access rather than preserving access to a scarce resource.

Failure to Extrapolate All Possible Implications Just as you don't want to over-generalize from your case study findings, you also have to be thorough in the consideration of all possible outcomes or recommendations derived from your findings. If you do not, your reader may question the validity of your analysis, particularly if you failed to document an obvious outcome from your case study research. For example, in the case of studying the accident at the railroad crossing to evaluate where and what types of warning signals should be located, you failed to take into consideration speed limit signage as well as warning signals. When designing your case study, be sure you have thoroughly addressed all aspects of the problem and do not leave gaps in your analysis that leave the reader questioning the results.

Case Studies. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education . Rev. ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998; Miller, Lisa L. “The Use of Case Studies in Law and Social Science Research.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 14 (2018): TBD; Mills, Albert J., Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010; Putney, LeAnn Grogan. "Case Study." In Encyclopedia of Research Design , Neil J. Salkind, editor. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010), pp. 116-120; Simons, Helen. Case Study Research in Practice . London: SAGE Publications, 2009;  Kratochwill,  Thomas R. and Joel R. Levin, editors. Single-Case Research Design and Analysis: New Development for Psychology and Education .  Hilldsale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992; Swanborn, Peter G. Case Study Research: What, Why and How? London : SAGE, 2010; Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods . 6th edition. Los Angeles, CA, SAGE Publications, 2014; Walo, Maree, Adrian Bull, and Helen Breen. “Achieving Economic Benefits at Local Events: A Case Study of a Local Sports Event.” Festival Management and Event Tourism 4 (1996): 95-106.

Writing Tip

At Least Five Misconceptions about Case Study Research

Social science case studies are often perceived as limited in their ability to create new knowledge because they are not randomly selected and findings cannot be generalized to larger populations. Flyvbjerg examines five misunderstandings about case study research and systematically "corrects" each one. To quote, these are:

Misunderstanding 1 :  General, theoretical [context-independent] knowledge is more valuable than concrete, practical [context-dependent] knowledge. Misunderstanding 2 :  One cannot generalize on the basis of an individual case; therefore, the case study cannot contribute to scientific development. Misunderstanding 3 :  The case study is most useful for generating hypotheses; that is, in the first stage of a total research process, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building. Misunderstanding 4 :  The case study contains a bias toward verification, that is, a tendency to confirm the researcher’s preconceived notions. Misunderstanding 5 :  It is often difficult to summarize and develop general propositions and theories on the basis of specific case studies [p. 221].

While writing your paper, think introspectively about how you addressed these misconceptions because to do so can help you strengthen the validity and reliability of your research by clarifying issues of case selection, the testing and challenging of existing assumptions, the interpretation of key findings, and the summation of case outcomes. Think of a case study research paper as a complete, in-depth narrative about the specific properties and key characteristics of your subject of analysis applied to the research problem.

Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12 (April 2006): 219-245.

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How To Write A History Assignment?

History is a subject that deals with the events, people, and situations from the past. If you are a student of history or you take a keen interest in history, then you can choose to write an assignment on this subject. While writing a research paper, you have to be very sure that you are doing the best as your grades depend on your performance. Also, your grades decide your future career. If you have been given a history paper to write or you have chosen the subject for yourself, don’t worry as we are here to help you. We will tell you about how you can write the best paper on history. Read on to know about all the important criteria that you need to cover. Or just skip all the steps below and buy assignment online .

Step-By-Step Process For Writing History Assignment

Here are some of the steps that you need to follow to ensure that you are writing your history research paper in the best possible way. History research paper or dissertation needs a lot of work as this can assess and evaluate your progress. So, follow these steps:

1. Decide The Right Topic

History is a vast subject with several topics that you can cover. So, while writing a history assignment for your school or college, you need to decide on one of the topics that can be a perfect fit for your paper. This topic has to be relevant and you must have a proper interest in it. A general topic may not evoke interest. You have to choose a topic that can be controversial or can be fun to research.

2. Do Thorough Research

Talking about how to write a dissertation on history, you must know that research plays a vital role. You need to make sure that you are doing thorough research on the topic. There are different sources available online as well as offline. You can take the help of the internet to do proper research or you can simply go to a library and find some great books on the topic. Books and journals can have some hidden gems in them that can be quite valuable for your paper.

3. Create A Proper Outline

Before you start to write the paper, you have to create a proper outline for your writing. This outline is essential to figure out what you are going to write and how to write it. With the outline, you will know exactly which subhead to choose after which one. This can help you in writing down the essay or dissertation quite effectively. Having an outline can help you to keep the assignment well-organized and framed too.

4. Write A Very Compelling Introduction

Make sure to start your essay with a very effective and compelling introduction. The introduction is the most important part of your entire essay. It is going to create the first impression as well as the reader will know what to expect from the entire essay. You need to be very precise yet you have to express the contention of the essay properly in the introduction. It has to be unique, interesting, and quite catchy. Do not use fillers and ramble unnecessarily in the introduction.

5. No Grammatical Error Or Syntax Error

While writing the essay, make sure that you keep on proofreading it after each and every paragraph. This will ensure that you are not making any grammatical errors or syntax errors in the essay. The essay has to be flawless to get the best grade. If the essay contains a lot of flaws and grammatical errors, it can have a strong impact on your grade.

6. Finish Off With A Summary

Make sure that the final paragraph of your essay is quite effective. The conclusion is actually the summary of the entire article which should close off ideally with a very polished and effective ending. Don’t end the essay abruptly as that can result in an awkward finish.

These are some of the tips that you have to follow while writing your history assignment for your college or school. With the help of these above-mentioned steps, it will be quite easy for you to write an effective, interesting, and flawless essay on your preferred topic. After all, these assignments play a crucial role in your grade system. To get the best grades, you need to ace the essay.

Independence Day of India, 15 August 2024: History, Significance, Facts and all you need to know

The history of Indian independence

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, choosing a progressive yet plain-spoken VP candidate from America’s heartland to help her win over rural, white voters.

“I’m pleased to share that I’ve made my decision: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will join our campaign as my running mate,” Harris said via text to supporters. “Tim is a battle-tested leader who has an incredible track record of getting things done for Minnesota families. I know that he will bring that same principled leadership to our campaign, and to the office of the vice president.”

We look at Walz, a 60-year-old U.S. Army National Guard veteran, and his military career over the years.

More: Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' VP pick: Minnesota governor named running mate: Live updates

How long was Walz in the military?

Walz served in the military for 24 years, enlisting in the Nebraska National Guard at 17 in 1981 and then transferring to the Minnesota National Guard in 1996. He retired in 2005 to begin his successful run for the U.S. House, representing Minnesota as command sergeant major, among the highest ranks for enlisted soldiers. His battalion went on to deploy to Iraq shortly after Walz's retirement.

Walz specialized in heavy artillery and had proficiency ribbons in sharpshooting and hand grenades.

But during the 21 years that Walz spent working with large artillery pieces, he suffered hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears, Minnesota Public Radio reported. He was allowed to continue his service after undergoing surgery, which partially resolved his hearing loss.

Where did Walz serve, and what did he do in the National Guard?

During his service, Walz responded to natural disasters, including floods and tornadoes in Minnesota and Nebraska, and was deployed overseas for months at a time, according to MPR.

In 2003, he was sent to Italy, where he served with the European Security Force to support the war in Afghanistan. He was also stationed in Norway for joint training with other NATO militaries.

Walz told MPR that he reenlisted in the National Guard after the September 11 attacks but never saw active combat in his years in the military.

Stars and Stripes reported in 2020 that Walz credited his Army experience with helping him steer Minnesota through the COVID-19 pandemic as governor.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz is commander in chief of the 13,000-soldier Minnesota National Guard. “I’m certainly proud of my military service, but it’s one piece of me,” he told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018. “It doesn’t define me.”

Reuters and USA TODAY reporter Tom Vanden Brook contributed to this story.