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.’

This is a good paraphrase because it clearly refers to who the ideas belong to in the prose; we don’t also need a footnote.

This is a poor paraphrase because it does not provide a reference; we don’t need to name the source in the prose.

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:

As Song-Chuan Chen points out in Merchants of war and peace, the profits from the Chinese opium trade enabled James Matheson to buy the Isle of Lewis for £190,000 in 1844, and build a castle there costing £60,000.

The profits from the Chinese opium trade enabled James Matheson ‘to buy, in 1844 for £190,000, the Isle of Lewis – the largest of the Western Isles off the western coast of mainland Scotland – and spend an additional £60,000 to build Lews castle on it.’^[1]

The profits from the Chinese opium trade enabled James Matheson to buy one of the largest Scottish islands, the Isle of Lewis, for £190,000 in 1844, and build a castle there costing £60,000.^[1]

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.

We should have used a direct quote to really demonstrate that we’ve read their work.

We didn’t need to name-drop the scholar and the title of their work, that’s what the footnote is for.

We didn’t need all that context – they can look up the work in the footnote and read it for themselves!

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

Whenever you need to prove that you actually read the whole thing.

When their work has been highly influential in the field.

When their work underpins a key part of your argument (i.e. they have highly influenced your work).

Whenever you have not provided a footnote, so they know you’re not stealing their ideas.

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”?

Whatever information is most important to understanding our analysis – not all the information will necessarily be relevant.

Everything you know about the source, from who produced it, to when it was created, to who has owned it, what type of source it is, its genre etc.

The same bare essentials every time: author, title, date.

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]’

Yes. They situate the portrait in its wider context, and reference it appropriately. They do not raise who produced the portrait because it would undermine their argument, and it makes an essay more effective if we provide cool images.

No. This example is not really analysing how the imagery supports their argument about how the portrait presents the King. Nor does it acknowledge the source’s limitations – this was created to promote the King positively.

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.

Jesuits like Robert Parsons were accused by secular priests such as Robert Charnock of writing only ‘to such as he thinks will not be evil-conceited of him’.^[1] In other words, Jesuits were happy to ignore norms.

Jesuits were accused by priests of only writing for gullible audiences, implying they were happy to ignore established norms.^[1]

Jesuits like Robert Parsons were accused by secular priests of only writing for gullible audiences because it implied that Jesuits were happy to ignore the established norms for making public appeals.^[1]

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:

By the 1870s, Richard Graham estimates that ‘thirty-five hundred slave women were arriving annually in Rio’ and ‘many, perhaps most, ended up as domestics’ with others ‘used as prostitutes’.^[45]

In Brazil, the massive internal slave trade had, since the 1850s, been a gendered affair. The women who were sold in Rio – around 3,500 per year in the 1870s – were also more likely to be kept in the city, with its voracious appetite for female domestic labor and enslaved prostitutes.^[45]

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

Taking such an ‘Atlantic approach’ to the history of geographical knowledge and ideas chimes with several important themes in the growing revisionist historiography of the discipline.^[12]

Thinking about ideas in the context of the whole of the Atlantic matches revisionist historiography.^[12]

10. Select the example you feel is stronger in making its point about how Protestants described heaven:

In striving for the metaphor which best expressed this face-to-face exaltation of the deity, writers recalled the congregational psalm-singing that was characteristic of developed Protestant worship: ‘their time shall be spent in singing the hymnes of prayses to the harpe of glory’; ‘singing praise to God with the whole Church’; ‘singing our ditty Allelujah, the quire Angels and Saints’.^[161] It is no surprise to discover that to some puritans the most pleasing analogy was that of a perpetual sabbath.^[162]

In striving for the metaphor which best expressed this face-to-face exaltation of the deity, writers evoked characteristics of Protestant worship.^[161]

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(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)

Department of History

Finalist Integrating Sources Quiz

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