WRITING A GOOD
HISTORY PAPER
Social Studies Department
James B. Conant High School
1) A successful history paper is:
a) clear
b) concise
c) organized
d) analytical
2) It:
a) uses the active voice
b) has a thesis
c) explains the significance of the topic
d) tells the reader who, what, when, where, why, and how
Reasons for Negative Comments on History Papers
10. You refer to a wrong time or out of proper historical time.
9. You are sloppy with the chronology of the subject.
8. You quote excessively or improperly.
7. You have written a careless “one-draft wonder.”
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
1. Get off to a good start. Avoid pretentious beginnings. If you are writing a paper on, say, British responses to the rebellion in India in 1857, do not open with a vague, boring statement. Get to the point. For example, “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.
2. State a clear thesis. Whether you are writing an exam essay or a research paper, you need to have a thesis. 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 are going to argue. A good thesis answers an important research questions about how or why something happened. Develop your thesis logically from paragraph to paragraph.
3. Be sure to analyze. Do not summarize or merely narrate; instead, analyze. 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. Historical analysis is critical; it evaluates sources, assigns significance to causes, and weighs competing explanations. For example, who, what, when, and where are the stuff of summary and how, why, and to what effect are the stuff of analysis. Try to begin you analysis as soon as possible, sometimes without any summary at all.
4. Use evidence critically. Like good detectives, historians are critical of their sources and cross check them for reliability. Who wrote the source? Why? When? Under what circumstances? For whom? You need to be critical and skeptical.
5. Be precise. Vague statements and empty generalizations suggest that you have not put in the time to learn the material. Be careful when you use grand abstractions like people, society, freedom, and government. Always pay attention to cause and effect. Abstractions do not cause or need anything.
6. Watch the chronology. Anchor your thesis in a clear chronological framework and do not jump around confusingly. Remember that chronology is the backbone of history.
7. Cite sources carefully. You should use footnotes for any research paper in history but parenthetical citations in a short paper with one or two sources is fine. Footnotes provide flexibility to insert the full footnote.
8. Thesaurus abuse. Do not try to write beyond your vocabulary. Do not 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 cannot think of it).
9. Encyclopedia abuse. General encyclopedias like Britannica are useful for checking facts. But if you are footnoting encyclopedias in your papers, you are not doing actual research.
10. Quote sparingly. Avoid quoting a source, especially a secondary source, and then simply rewording or summarizing the quotation, either above or below the quotation. Your teacher wants to see your ability to analyze and to understand. Do not quote unless the quotation clarifies or enriches your analysis.
11. Avoid cheap, out of proper moralizing. Resist the temptation to condemn or to get self-righteous. 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 you will never understand why people thought or acted as they did.
12. Have a strong conclusion. Your conclusion should conclude something. A weak conclusion leaves the reader unsatisfied and bewildered, wondering why your paper was worth reading. 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.
13. Revise and Proofread. Your teacher can spot a “one-draft wonder,” so do not try to do your paper at the last moment. Leave plenty of time for revising and proofreading.
Common Marginal Remarks on Style, Clarity, Grammar, and Syntax
1. Wordy/verbose/repetitive. It is easy to recognize when the five pages you have written for your history paper do not really contain five pages worth of ideas. Use the word "because" instead of "due to the fact that." Also, do not write "time period," when either "time" or "period" will suffice.
2. Misuse of the passive voice. Write in the active voice. The passive voice encourages vagueness and dullness. On history papers the passive voice usually signals an unwillingness to take charge, to commit yourself, and to say forthrightly what is really going on, and who is doing what to whom. For example, In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia. The passive voice focuses the reader on the receiver of the action rather than on the doer. Historians usually wish to focus on the doer. Remember the order of subject-verb-object. For example, “Washington chopped down the cherry tree” sounds a lot better than “The cherry tree was chopped down by George Washington.”
3. 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. Make sure that everything in the paragraph supports that sentence, and that cumulatively the support is persuasive. To avoid confusing the reader, limit each paragraph to one central idea. A paragraph that runs more than a printed page is probably too long. Err on the side of shorter paragraphs.
4. 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. Also, avoid the first person plural, for example, we believe. The author is assumed to have “distance” from his or her subject. You should therefore write as an outside observer, not a participant, and you should treat the reader in the same way. This means that pronouns such as “I,” “we,” or “you” are inappropriate.
5. Tense inconsistency. Stay consistently in the past tense when you are writing about what took place in the past. Most historians shift into the present tense when describing or commenting a book, document, or evidence that still exists and is in front of them as they write. 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.
6. Who’s speaking here?/your view? Always be clear about whether you are giving your opinion or that of the author or historical actor you are discussing. Be clear.
7. Jargon. Historians value plain English. You do not need to be stuffy, but stay with formal English prose of the kind that sill still be comprehensible to future generations.
8. Clumsy transition. If the 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.
Remarks on Grammar and Syntax
1. Awkward. That the sentence is clumsy because you have misused words or compounded several errors.
2. Unclear antecedent. All pronouns must refer clearly to antecedents and must agree with them in number. The reader usually assumes that the antecedent is immediately preceding the noun. For example, “Each of them had their own ideas” is wrong. “Each of them had his [or her] own ideas” is correct.
3. Run-on sentence. Run-on sentences string together improperly joined independent clauses. 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, and yet.
4. Sentence fragment. Write in sentences. A sentence has to have a subject and a verb.
5. Misuse of the apostrophe. Use the apostrophe to form singular or plural possessives (Washington’s soldiers; the colonies’ soldieries). Do not use the apostrophe to form plurals (the communists not the communists’). Words like “didn’t,” “couldn’t,” and “wouldn’t” should not appear in scholarly writing. Instead use the full words. Again, apostrophes should only be used to indicate possession (for example, George Washington’s presidency)
Word and Phrase Usage Problems
1. An historical/an historian. The consonant “H” is not silent in historical and historian, so the proper form of the definite article is “A.”
2. Feel. Avoid using feel for think, believe, say, state, assert, content, argue, conclude, or write. The use of feel in sentences demeans the agents by suggesting undisciplined sentiment rather than carefully formulated conviction.
3. The fact that. This is a clumsy, unnecessary construction. Remove and never use.
4. Impact. Stay away; instead, use affected, influenced, or shaped.
5. Historic/historical confusion. Everything in the past or relating to the past is historical. Reserve the word historic for the genuinely important events, persons, or objects of the past. For example, The Norman invasion of England in 1066 was indeed historic. Historically, historians have gathered annually for a historical conference.
6. Affect/effect confusion. Affect means to have an influence on while effect means to bring about or cause to exist or a result or consequence.
7. It’s/its confusion. It’s means it is while its means possessive.
8. Than/then confusion. If you are making a comparison, you use the conjunction than.
Top Ten Signs that you may be Writing a Weak History Paper
10. You are overjoyed to find that you can fill the required pages by widening all margins.
9. You have not mentioned any actual 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 quotation.
6. You have not a clue about the content of your next paragraph.
5. You are constantly clicking on The Britannica, Webster’s, and Bartlett’s.
4. Your writing partner sneaks another look at their watch as they remind you for the third time to clarify your thesis.
- Your main historical actors are this, it, they, the people, and society and they are all involved with factors, aspects, impacts, and issues.
- You just realized that you do not understand the assignment, but it’s 3:00 A.M. and the paper is due in a couple of hours.
1. You are relieved that the paper counts for only 20 percent of the course grade.
Final Advice: Start Early.
[Information was gathered from the website of the Department of History at Hamilton College]