Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Finalist Integrating Sources Quiz

This quiz is designed to develop your prose further, particularly for your dissertation. We are testing some trickier ideas here about how to edit our work, and make best use of the writing tools available to us. You are also welcome, and indeed encouraged, to take the previous year quiz if you would like a refresher, and you can take the quiz as many times as you like!

1. Is this a good paraphrase?

‘Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes (1598) only succeeded because of the important groundwork which was laid by previous attempts to find a political solution to the religious violence. As Penny Roberts points out in Peace and Authority During the French Religious Wars c.1560-1600, the fact that most of it was taken from previous legislation, particularly the Edict of Bergerac (1577) has been under-acknowledged.’

2. We are making a minor point which builds on the main point being made in a paragraph, choose the sentence which is most effective:

3. How can we improve the following sentence:

As Song-Chuan Chen points out in, Merchants of War and Peace: British knowledge of China in the making of the Opium War (2017), foreigners set up the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (SDUKC) in Canton during 1834, before the First Opium War. This organisation was set up to change Chinese perceptions of Europeans, and the society explicitly saw itself as engaged in intellectual warfare.[1] Thus, before a single shot had even been fired, the British clearly perceived relations with China in antagonistic and warlike terms.

4. When is it a good idea to name-drop a scholar in the prose of your essay? (select all that apply)

5. It is important to make sure you establish key context for a primary source before you start analysing it, but what do we mean by “key context”?

6. This essay on the extent to which Henry IV of France brought stability to his kingdom is using a portrait of the King as a primary source. Read the extract and decide whether they have used it effectively in their prose:

‘This stability is reflected in portraits of the king painted around 1600, which present the King as physically strong – creating order out of chaos (Figure 1). The confidence seen in such portraits reflects the general optimism which followed the Edict of Nantes (1598), which settled religious matters, and the King’s marriage to Marie de Medici in 1600, which would settle the succession by producing an heir.[12]

7. Editing our essays is hard but useful. We can dramatically reduce our word count by rephrasing our point and reconsidering our use of direct quotes. Here’s a sentence which tries to use a source:

‘When secular priests like Robert Charnock accused the Jesuit Robert Parsons of writing only ‘to such as he thinks will not be evil-conceited of him, howsoever he abuses them or himself, but will rather take his words for oracles, how contrary soever they are to the truth’,[1] he was essentially claiming, as Peter Lake put it, that he had failed to engage in a ‘properly constructed and directed appeal to the public’.[2]

Select the edited sentence which strikes the balance between cutting down words and remaining clear.

8. In the next few examples, we will have two options to choose from. Both options will be trying to make the same point in an essay. Select the example you feel is stronger in making its point:

9. Select the example you feel is stronger in making its point:

10. Select the example you feel is stronger in making its point about how Protestants described heaven:
Privacy notice
This quiz is anonymous. No data which personally identifies you is collected on the quiz, and the data you provide is used solely to help us improve the delivery of our courses.

The University of Warwick is the Data Controller of any information you have entered on this form and is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection Legislation. The University's Data Protection webpages provide further information on your rights and how the University processes personal data. If you wish to submit a data subjects rights request, make a complaint or report a suspected personal data breach, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email at infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk.

Spam prevention

Failure to load reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a utility used to verify you're not a robot filling out this form. Unfortunately this has failed to load correctly.

Please try reloading the page. If the problem persists, or if you are in a country which blocks Google products, please contact us by using the 'page contact' link at the foot of this page.


(Wellcome Library, London, CC BY 4.0, via WikiMedia commons)


(Henri IV en Hercule terrassant l'hydre de Lerne, Musée du Louvre, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)


(John Rapkin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)


Let us know you agree to cookies