History – Professor Tips

Tips Straight from Professors!

What is one thing that students must never forget about writing papers for history classes?

• One of the key things to remember about writing in history is that we’re concerned about change over time. That’s what makes history, history. We’re very interested in causal relationships. If you’re not sure how to organize a paper, chronological order is probably best. —Professor Nicole Phelps
• The most important thing that I would encourage students to remember in writing history is that history is an interpretive endeavor and that they need to strive for analytical and argumentative clarity in their writing. History isn’t just about producing a narrative. All writing that students do should be with an eye to creating a well-grounded and historically accurate analysis.—Professor Paul Deslandes
• This is true of any kind of academic writing: pay attention to what the assignment is asking you to do and think carefully about the expectations of the assignment.—Professor Paul Deslandes

What’s the goal of any history paper?

• The goal of a history paper is like the goal of any other paper: to clearly communicate something intelligent and worth hearing. Clear, economical, lucid communication, so that anyone could understand it. —Professor Steven Zdatny
• I want students to read the assigned texts, and think about them. I want students to take my questions seriously, and try to provide the best answers that they can. I want students to have a holistic engagement with the material. I expect them to provide a big picture, rather than focusing on a limited aspect of the class discussions and assigned readings. —Professor Boğaç Ergene

What makes writing for history classes unique from writing in other subjects?

• A historian is a person who brings into his or her research some kind of historical consciousness, historical knowledge, and applies that historical knowledge into his or her research. What makes a historian’s treatment of a topic historically accurate is to ask appropriate questions. What do I mean by appropriate questions? These are not the questions that could be asked based upon today’s behavior modes. Study history on its own terms, in its own context; use terminology and concepts that are appropriate to the history you are studying. Asking the appropriate questions is the basis of good research. The nature of those questions vary from one field to another, but the essence of good writing and good research is the same everywhere. The question is, how do you determine which questions are good? Questions will come if you understand the historical context. The more you know about something, the better questions you will ask. —Professor Boğaç Ergene
• Almost invariably, research in history involves using primary and secondary sources. It also involves being aware of the historiographical traditions and debates on any subject. —Professor Briggs

What makes you go “Wow” when reading papers? –In a good way?

• [What makes me go “wow” is a] piece of writing that shows properly cited engagement with big ideas and smaller details, and that is put together in a way that shows the writer really understands the material and that makes it easy for the reader to understand the material. That’s the whole package. Citation is certainly important. Also, when it’s clear that the writer has done a lot of thinking and is not leaving it up to the reader to figure out what the writer means. —Professor Nicole Phelps
• The thing that always impresses me is when a student has produced an argument that I haven’t seen before: one that is innovative and also shows a depth of understanding and an ability to utilize and read evidence in innovative ways. When students display that, they are thinking as creative historians. I’m also impressed with beautifully written, well-structured papers that show an elegance of language, sophisticated vocabulary, and the ability to construct very readable prose. —Professor Paul Deslandes
• Same thing that makes me go “wow” when I read anything else. I have a graduate student-his work is beautiful. It is so simple and lucid. You can only admire a brain that makes everything easy for a reader. So I when I see that-not a labored intelligence, but a facile intelligence- when I see students that are able to express thoughts clearly and have an aura of competence and intelligence in their writing, I admire their work. —Professor Steven Zdatny
• That requires some sort of synthesis on the part of the student. Reading and thinking about the text is part of it, obviously. More importantly, the student has to make the text relevant to class discussions, and make that class discussion relevant to his or her way of interpreting the texts. This is not an easy process. We are not talking about reporting the material, reviewing the material, discussing a summary of the material. Writing a paper is a dialectic and dialogic process, in the sense that the student has to bring him or herself into the discussion in the process of engaging the text. If something comes out of that process that is creative, that makes me say, “Wow, the student has really thought about the material. —Professor Boğaç Ergene
• A well organized paper with a clear thesis, strong paragraph topic sentences that create a solid framework for a paper, and paragraphs written with clarity and precision directly supporting the topic sentence can only be written by a student who truly understands the material. When these elements are combined with analysis (telling me that the student has really thought about the subject matter), relevant direct quotations to support that analysis, and a richness of detail, I think “wow” what a great paper. —Professor Carr

What makes you go “Wow” when reading papers? –In a bad way?

• The thing that bothers me the most is incoherent paragraph construction. By that I mean the tendency not to see how paragraphs should build on each other and should proceed in a manner that is sequential. There is a method to the placement of paragraphs, to the way they should be structured, and to the way they should appear, building toward a crescendo. That’s a skill that people have to acquire over time, but one that they should be striving for. The thing that strikes me the most is when a paper is really disorganized, and there is no rhyme or reason to the sequence of the paragraphs or the structure of the paragraphs.
  
  The other big problem is the inability to articulate a fully formed argument, the inability to go beyond a thesis statement that is simply a re-articulation of the problem. If the student is researching working class life in nineteenth-century London and says “there were a variety of experiences that the working class had in nineteenth-century London” but doesn’t proceed beyond that: that frustrates me because I know that they have the ability but they opt for the easy solution instead of using their interpretive powers to create a more sophisticated thesis. —Professor Paul Deslandes
• When the language of the paper is so poor or sloppy that it makes it difficult for the reader to understand, which can be the result of malapropisms, other word choice issues, misspellings, and faulty grammar. Sometimes those grammar issues are not that big of a deal, but when they stand in the way of the reader understanding, then that’s a huge problem. It also indicates that the writer has a hazy understanding of the material and was probably hasty in putting the paper together. In addition, all of those mistakes make it difficult to give useful comments to the student. —Professor Nicole Phelps
• Incompetence is not a sin. What is a sin, to me, and what makes me very frustrated, is to see laziness and carelessness. I ask students to make a bibliographic heading: if you spell the author’s name incorrectly, or put apostrophes in the plural of Nazis and make a series of sloppy careless errors, then I say, “wow.”. —Professor Steven Zdatny
• If there is major misinterpretation of the material. If there is deliberate or non-deliberate disengagement, or a lack of effort on the part of the student to provide answers. This breaks the implicit contract between student and teacher. I am not strict in terms of forcing certain kinds of styles. Sometimes colleagues indicate that you shouldn’t use the term ‘I’, or that you have to use the active voice rather than the passive voice. These things are important to some extent, but what is more important for me is that there is an effort on the part of the student to be comprehensive in their engagement with the material rather than focusing on a certain or limited aspect of it. I go “wow” when students do not display that they have had engagement with the material. —Professor Boğaç Ergene

What can turn a good paper into a great paper?

• In a research paper, it would be a paper that displays that the student has done deep research and also thought creatively about how to solve a research problem if the student has mined a broad range of sources and sought out materials and sources that on the surface wouldn’t appear to produce very productive results.—Professor Paul Deslandes
• Vocabulary. Word choice can make a difference between a piece of writing that makes an argument and one that makes a very nuanced and sophisticated argument. The word choice, especially verbs, will make the argument much more precise. But it’s really important that you don’t just play with your thesaurus. This only works if you actually have good command of the vocabulary itself. The right vocabulary can help make your paper more succinct and more powerful, but if you’re not sure what a word means, you shouldn’t use it. It would be better to use more words to say what you actually mean than to pick some random word that may not actually do the job.—Professor Nicole Phelps
• Students should spend a considerable amount of time revising. They should work through a draft process and understand that this process of writing as a creative endeavor takes multiple steps. That applies across the board.—Professor Paul Deslandes

What is your favorite database for online research?

• Definitely follow the instructions on your assignments. In terms of finding good scholarly secondary literature for history, the best place to look is America History and Life or its partner database, Historical Abstracts; America History and Life deals with North America and Historical Abstracts deals with the rest of the world. What’s superior about those databases, as opposed to JSTOR, is that they have the most recent scholarship while JSTOR has a five year gap in most cases. In addition, JSTOR has stuff from a lot of different disciplines; in most cases, if you’re writing a history paper you want to stick with what historians have said.
  
  Wikipedia is not your friend. For American history, Wikipedia is even dangerous. If you need Wikipedia-like information, the Library has a subscription to various Oxford Histories. There’s an Oxford History of the United States under “articles and more” on the Library website. It’s basically an encyclopedia produced by scholars. It’s very succinct, so that’s a better alternative.—Professor Nicole Phelps
• We have access in our own library to a website that I send a lot of student to. It’s called Nineteenth Century British Newspapers. It’s incredibly helpful. It revolutionizes the way students can do research with the nineteenth century press. Rather than doing the old method of ordering up the microfilm and looking through it, maybe using an index, or simply scrolling through it if it didn’t have an index, you can actually search by keyword, author, or topic. This can yield some really interesting results.—Professor Paul Deslandes

What advice would you give to someone who is doing research for the first time?

• It won’t be perfect. Do the work. There’s no magic. Research papers can’t be written without research. The more you know, the more interesting, intelligent, things you’ll be able to say. The more research you do, the more you’ll know. —Professor Steven Zdatny
• Comprehensiveness is important. Try to do your best to collect relevant material. Do a thorough job. You should know most things that have been said about your topic. That’s a pre-requirement. If there are obvious books or articles relevant to the topic you are researching that are not included in your discussion, that is one of the more serious errors that you may commit at the very beginning. —Professor Boğaç Ergene
• Be sure to set up a meeting with a library subject specialist. They are incredibly knowledgeable and helpful! In history, it’s Daisy Benson (new tab). —Professor Briggs

What are some tips for students who are writing in-class essays and answering ID’s? What are some good ways to prepare?

• To prepare for essay exams, I recommend writing an outline for each of the possible topics to get one’s thoughts organized. Secondly, practice writing the essays. Time yourself so that you know what you can do within the allotted time frame, and when finished determine where you are weak on your information, examples, and analysis. Simply glancing through your reading texts, rereading lecture notes, or memorizing some facts will not etch the material into your memory. The purpose is not to memorize every detail of your practice written essay, but the writing and rewriting will help you focus and remember when taking the exam. For the exam itself, I advise students make some brief one word or short phrase notes or an abbreviated outline along with some key names or trigger-words inside the green book before they actually start writing. —Professor Carr

Any last advice for writing papers for history classes, whether for the intro courses or upper levels?

• If you are asked to devise a topic of your own, then do something that you are passionate about and that you’re really interested in exploring and uncovering in some way.—Professor Paul Deslandes
• The most important thing is to make sure that you’re citing your sources. Historians really care about where your evidence comes from. And that’s not just about avoiding plagiarism, although that’s part of it. For historians to really evaluate whether an argument is sound or not, we need to see what evidence you looked at in order to reach that conclusion.—Professor Nicole Phelps
• Leave time to revise. This is different than editing. Revision is much more potentially substantial; you might move paragraphs around, you might add sentences, you might delete sentences. What happens a lot is people start out with an introduction that is kind of weak, but often by the end of the paper they have written themselves into a good argument. Yet they still have that lousy introduction. So they need to go back and make sure that the conclusion matches the introduction and that the argument is sustained throughout the paper. At some point, and for most people it is at some time in college, you reach the point that you can’t just sit down and write a paper from start to finish and hand it in. So you need to make sure that you leave yourself time, including time to edit, which is about proofreading and finding those grammatical mistakes and missing words. But the revision is actually more important.—Professor Nicole Phelps
• Revise, revise, revise. By that I mean students need to think about writing as a process. That process will differ from student to student. Some students work in a very organized fashion from writing an outline to building on that outline and producing a rough draft and going through multiple stages of rewriting and drafting. Others work in a more organic way, where they write outlines as they go along, working on one section and then adding to the outlines as they go along. Students need to discover their own writing process. That’s true for any discipline, not just history. They need to practice enough so they can understand how they write and what allows them to produce the best results.—Professor Paul Deslandes
• The other thing I would say: when in doubt, do more research. You need to explore the topic as fully as you can. Recognize that there are constraints on your time and parameters for the assignment. At the same time you also need to know when to say you’ve done enough. There is a fine balance between doing more research and making sure that you cover the topic, but also knowing that at a certain point you have to stop. That takes practice.—Professor Paul Deslandes