How to write a strong essay

Writing a strong historical essay:

All really good first-class historical essays share a number of common features.

First, they will have a clear and clearly-stated argument. You are not JUST telling a good descriptive story, although that is really important. You are also telling your reader why that story is important, and what it means or contributes to the big historical picture. Imagine your reader sitting there, asking you: ‘So what?’…

Here’s an example. Suppose you want to write about one particular migrant family or subgroup. Of course, you need to tell your reader all about them, their experiences, their home, destination, and reasons for migrating, etc. But you also have to explain why this particular and unique set of individuals and experiences, occurring in a specific place, time, etc., is relevant: how does this story speak to the wider history of migration/nation/ the ‘ism’ of your choice? And what does it tell us that adds to what we already know about that process/place/‘ism’?

The same is true if you are following a process, an opinion or prejudice, a form or cause of movement – or any historical phenomenon or actor. The answer to your particular ‘So what?’ question might involve:

an argument about what another historian or school of history claims;

arguing for the inclusion of someone or something that has been excluded or under-represented in the historiography so far;

it might involve identifying a new or poorly documented or little understood factor/cause/effect or site;

it might involve introducing new kinds of evidence or new tools of analysis – new ways to explore and examine the past;

or it might involve something completely different – but your reader needs to know why he or she is spending time with the story you are telling.

Second: you need to have evidence and support for your argument. In fact, you need to have two kinds of evidence and support: first, you need to show that you are very familiar with what has already been written and what is already known about your subject – so lots of secondary sources from the historical literature (and sometimes other types of scholarship too). NO reader wants to watch you reinventing the wheel, and it is very rare that truly NOTHING has been written that is relevant to any given historical event/person/trend. If you think you can’t find anything that is relevant, come have a chat, and we’ll rummage around together.

Also on the secondary source front, no matter how tempting it is, don’t stop researching the instant you find one secondary source that backs you up – that author (gulp) might be wrong, discredited, or simply out-of-date.

And don’t forget to CITE your sources: this is how you show me how expert you are, as well as an essential and required step to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is not just stealing someone’s exact words in a quote. It is also paraphrasing them (keeping the same idea and just saying it in your own words), or just using information that they found without citing them – so, for example, Author X quotes a juicy primary source that you haven’t read yourself. You then quote that same material, but only cite the primary source and not Author X, who found it in the first place. Both of these are very easily done by accident, ESPECIALLY if your notes get a bit messy, so be careful!

Then, of course, you need primary source evidence: the fruits of your original research, and the material that will allow you to say something new. Now, it is true (and sometimes a bit confusing) that some scholarly evidence – especially if it was written more than 20 or 30 years ago – is actually primary source material. It is hard to see beyond the preconceptions and assumptions of your time, so they are likely to be embedded in your writing, but also in the very questions you ask and the kinds of evidence you use to answer them. This happens a lot in the area of migration, so we’ll be discussing it in class. Also remember that LOTS of things, items with visible bias and those without; archival and published, quantitative and qualitative, visual and textual, material and ethnographic, popular and expert, all speak to the debates and subject we will cover. Have fun, and by all means rummage around in the various e-resources I mention. But do be careful on the uncurated web: all sources and all databases/blogs are not created equal.

Third: writing matters. If you don’t express your ideas, arguments and evidence clearly, accurately, and indeed grammatically, then your brilliant ideas may be lost altogether. I do look for well-written as well as well-informed argument. What does this mean? Well, you may want to use spell-check and grammar-check, for one thing!

I prefer active voice writing (and it will also save you space), so instead of ‘it was believed’ or ‘it came to be understood’, or ‘it was argued’, tell me WHO believed, understood, or argued whatever it is! If you don’t know, then you need to do some more research! In fact, it’s a pretty good test of whether you are standing on firm ground in your argument. If you can’t bear to say, e.g. ‘I will argue that…’, you can say, ‘This essay will argue that…’ -- but it saves words to just own it.

Also, it is painful to do, but if you can bring yourself to read your draft essays aloud to yourself, you will often find the weak points in your writing and expression.