Study Guide
Writing
This is my on-going, somewhat eclectic, catalog of tips on writing. You should read everything here and take it to heart, for it's really a confession of my prejudices. I expect that you have read everything here and will follow the guidelines I have taken the trouble to provide.
Everything here is stated as absolutes, and the perceptive student will observe that various history books written by professionals in fact break one or all of my rules. That's fine. They're allowed. You are not.
A published historian having (presumably) learned the rules of good writing, can break said rules for effect. Breaking a rule deliberately for effect is one thing; breaking a rule out of ignorance or sloppiness is quite another. I therefore present these rules as absolutes and I will indeed grade your work down for having broken them.
Grammar and Spelling
To anticipate a common protestation: The course is conducted in English. Therefore, this is indeed an English class.
There's no excuse for grammatical errors because you all have grammar checkers. These grammar checkers are fairly stupid, and using one won't guarantee you won't have grammatical errors, but at least they can catch the obvious stuff.
Spelling counts. See above.
Grammar and spelling count not because they are intrinsically important. In fact, rules of grammar and spelling were (largely) made up in the 18th century by a bunch of ruling-class snobs as one way to mark off the ruling class from the common rabble. They are arbitrary.
Grammar and spelling count because if you make enough mistakes, the reader can't understand you, and the goal of anything you write is to communicate what's in your mind to someone else. Since you are asking me to grade that, it follows that you will want to be as clear as possible. While occasional mistakes do not hinder communication, when the mistakes become too frequent, the reader literally does not know what you are trying to say. That's why grammar and spelling count.
On Quoting
Don't quote.
At all.
Seriously.
There are some good, sensible rules for when to use a quote, but students err on the side of overuse, so the best way to begin learning is to force yourself to use no quotes at all. For graduate students, I loosen the rule a bit.
For undergraduate students, the rule is set. Don't quote. Ever.
Here's the essential rule: quote only when the words themselves are at issue.
For example, if you are writing about Martin Luther's opinions on free will, you may find you need to consider fine points of phrasing. In such a case, the exact words Luther used might be the whole point of your paragraph (or of the entire essay), so it is appropriate to put the words before the reader.
It is never appropriate to quote because you think the source you are quoting says it better than you could. The reader doesn't care. The reader wants to know what you have to say.
When I make a writing assignment I always set a length requirement. When calculating the word count, I do not count quotes because they aren't your words. They're someone else's words.
History is not the Present
Stay in the past tense. Nothing in our course transpires in the present, so the past tense is the appropriate form. Absolutely do not use the present tense.
I wouldn't, if I were You
Do not use conditional constructions. Do not say "King Henry was to fight the Battle of Agincourt." Say "King Henry fought the Battle of Agincourt." Do not say "The Persian army fled and some time later would rejoin Darius in the hills." Say "The Persian army fled and some time later rejoined Darius in the hills." The conditional in these cases adds nothing.
Unfortunately, this style is an affectation often heard on the History Channel, which is a source not on my short list of stylistic models worthy of emulation. The writers on the History Channel have evidently decided such a technique adds Drama. It does not. It is, plain and simple, an affection, and adds only fluff.
The Passive Voice Shall Be Avoided
Use active voice. If you use a passive construction, you are begging the question, for the passive voice leaves off the agent. It says that something was done, but it does not say by whom it was done. In the study of history, the "by whom" bit is rather the point. You are required to supply the agent. Thus, you may not say "War was declared." You must instead say "War was declared by the English."
Capitalization
Capitalize titles when they are used in conjunction with an individual, but otherwise leave them in lower case. You would refer to popes generically in lower case; e.g., "The popes were important moral figures in Christendom." The individual Pope Boniface VIII gets capitalized. The same applies to kings, dukes, bishops, and so on.
First Things
At the first mention of an individual, use the complete name. At his first appearance in your paper, therefore, he would be named G. Julius Caesar or Gaius Julius Caesar. Thereafter, he could be named Caesar. Names can be somewhat problematic, as your source might not give the complete name. Make it as complete as you can.
At the first mention of an individual, give his or her years. For rulers, this is often the years they ruled. For others, it's birth and death dates. For some, we know only the death date, given as (d. 1417). For some, we know only approximately when they lived, given as (fl. 875), meaning "flourished around 875."
At the first mention of an event, state when it happened. This is history, and chronology is vital.
Paragraphing
No one-sentence paragraphs. A paragraph has a specific function in the structure of writing. A paragraph that has but one sentence is a paragraph that is a topic or an idea with nothing to support it. In analytical writing, that means you literally have nothing to say but have only a stray fact that you don't know what to do with but can't bear to leave out. Either find some supporting information, or leave it out.
Paragraphs are, in fact, the most important building blocks of your writing. When you learn to write good paragraphs, you will learn to think clearly about your subject. When you have learned to think clearly about your subject, you will know how to write good paragraphs. It's very Zen.
That means it's very difficult, that you will never achieve perfection, but that you must always strive to improve. The paragraph is the level of writing that most closely parallels the level of argumentation, of interpretation and analysis. It's one of the most important writing skills you will learn, and it's one of the most difficult to teach, because it's like teaching rhythm in music. The teacher can talk about it and demonstrate it, but in the end, the student must acquire a feel for it.
You Be You
Don't hedge. Don't say "I think" or "in my opinion" or "possibly" or in any other way try to back away from what you are saying. I know this is what you think. It has your name on it. By hedging you only invite the reader to have a lower opinion of your argument. State your case as best you know how; you will stand or fall by your own words.
Never write an encyclopedia article. Even when I ask for reports, I am not asking for mere reportage. I don't want just the facts. I don't want a paper that says this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Every work you do should have a point of view, an interpretation, an analysis.
On Footnotes
I call them all footnotes, regardless of where they appear, at the bottom of a page or at the end of the paper. Use whichever is convenient.
Their function is both simple and important: they exist to cite your sources. You are obliged to tell the reader exactly where you found your information, so the reader can check your facts or perhaps do further reading on the point. This is why the footnote has author and title in sufficient detail as to make identification of the book or article unambiguous. And it must have a page number so the reader doesn't have to read 500 pages to check a single point.
The footnote places your writing in the stream of the scholarly dialogue. Sure, no one besides us is going to read your college term paper, but that's beside the point. The purpose of the exercise is to teach you how it's done in the big leagues, to instruct you in the practice of the profession. Key to the profession of history is the scholarly dialogue, the on-going discussion among professionals of the fine points of fact, the variations of interpretation, and it's the footnote that places any one contribution in the context of the larger conversation—a conversation that spans entire generations.
The companion to the footnote is the bibliography. Here is where you give all the publishing information so the reader can track down the book for himself. Having the full form here allows you to use a short form in the footnote. There are lots of other rules about the specific form for footnotes. Turabian or the Chicago Manual of Style will give you all the grisly details.
Points
Get to the point. If your paper is about the Battle of Agincourt, do not start with the beginning of the Hundred Years War. You can assume the reader brings this knowledge to the table. Start with what needs to be known to make sense of the battle.
Stay on the point. If you intend to write about the actual tactics of the battle, do not wander off into talking about the personality and career of Henry V. If you find yourself writing about the Treaty of Paris, you have wandered. If you start writing about the financing of the campaign, you have wandered. Not all who wander are lost, but those who wander in an essay will lose the reader.
Numbers and Words and Titles
For numbers that are one hundred or less, use words. He was sixty-three years old. Twelve men served as jurors. For numbers greater than one hundred, numerals are ok, though simple numbers might still be used: ten thousand soldiers marched. But don't say there were seventeen thousand eight hundred and twenty three people in the town.
When the title is generic, use lower case. When the title is attached to an individual, use upper case. For example, you might talk about this pope or that pope, but if you talk about Pope Innocent III you should use capital letters. The same goes for dukes, kings, presidents, bishops, you name it. Also, if it's a building, it's a church; if it's the institution, it's the Church.
Numbers and Dates
Spell out numbers zero through one hundred; also one thousand, one million, etc. The rule of thumb is that if you can write the number in two words, spell it out. If the number appears at the beginning of a sentence, always spell it out.
I accept either Christian dating system: BC/AD or BCE/CE. "CE" stands for "Common Era" but since it corresponds exactly to "anno domini" it might just as well stand for "Christian Era." Because it still derives from a christo-centric chronology, I see no reason to use it, so all my dates are given BC/AD.
When referencing decades, do not put in an apostrophe. An apostrophe indicates possessive or a contraction, and when used in a date it is neither. Thus 1430's is not correct. The correct form is 1430s.
The Importance of a Date
Dates are important.
Why?
It's not because historians are obsessed with dates, though you are forgiven if you have developed that impression. It's because we need specificity in time. When dealing with causes and consequences, it matters whether something happened a day later, a year later, or a century later. The only way to be unambiguous is to use dates. We use them for much the same reason that an attorney uses dates and times to establish the circumstances of a crime: they are needed in order to make the case.
Dates also help the reader, though again you may be forgiven if sometimes you feel like you are being overwhelmed by them. A date is unambiguous. If you say something happened in the third year of President Roosevelt's presidency, the reader will need to figure out if you mean Theodore or Franklin and, if the latter, which term you mean. If, on the other hand, you say 1935, there is no doubt.
If you don't have the exact day, give the season, or the year, the decade, the century, the era. Any sort of date is better than no sort of date.
Aim for consistency in the degree of precision. If you are writing a general history of the papacy, you don't need to say that Pope Gregory XI went to Rome on November 7, 1377. It's enough to say 1377, or late 14th century, or even late Middle Ages. But it's not enough to say "after Pope Gregory went to Rome" without having established some sort of chronological frame of reference.
Relative Pronouns
When referring to abstractions, such as "the Church" or "the monarchy," you must use the neuter pronouns. A common mistake is to switch over to humans. Thus, this is not correct:
The Church became much more concerned with heresy around 1200. That's when they began the Inquisition.
Since the Church is singular and is not a person, "they" cannot be the correct pronoun. The correct pronoun is "it." It's very easy to make this mistake, so be on watch in your own writing.
"Which" is always set off with commas and is used to introduce a phrase referring to non-humans. Also, you should be able to drop the whole clause and the sentence should retain its meaning. Otherwise, use "that."
Who and Whom
"Who" is used as the subject of a sentence or clause. "Whom" is used as the object of a sentence, clause, or preposition. If you don't know the different between a subject and an object, go tell your English teacher you want your money back!
Split Infinitives
In English, the infinitive form of a verb has two parts: "to" and the verb. The "to" part must always be kept with the verb. My favorite violation of this rule is the Star Trek line: "to boldly go where no one has gone before." The correct form, of course, is "to go boldly where no one has gone before."
In commercial or other writing people it's frequently okay to split the infinitive (or: it's okay to frequently split the infinitive!). In formal writing, however, it is not. This is another one that's easy to do. Sometimes it's okay to split the infinitive, but only if you know you are doing it and are doing it for effect. For my assignments, as an exercise in writing, you will not split the infinitive.
How to Affect the Effective
"Effect" is a noun; "affect" is a verb. The former is most often used in reference to the results of an action. The latter is most often used in reference to influencing an action. The swing of a bat affects the trajectory of a baseball. The effect is a home run.
Therefore, "effective" is an adjective and "affective" is an adverb. The latter deals with matters of the heart; the former speaks to how thoroughly something is done.
One device you might use is "efficiency expert." Nobody talks about an "afficiency expert." So, "efficiency" = "efficient" = "effect."
Punctuation
Quotations of four lines or more will be indented left-right (both) and will be styled as a blockquote.
Sentence punctuation belongs inside quotation marks, but footnote references belong outside.
Avoid bulleted lists. Completely.
Ellipses indicate missing text. That's all they indicate. They are not another form of sentence punctuation.
It's Elementary
Since contractions should not appear in formally writing, you should never find yourself writing "it's." "It's" means "it is" and you should write out the phrase.
If you find yourself writing "it's," turn it into "it is" and see if the phrase makes sense. If it doesn't, then you probably mean "its," which is the possessive form of "it."
The same technique can be applied to "their" and "they're." Turn it into "they are." If your sentence no longer makes sense, you meant "their."
More problematic is "there" along with "their" and "they're." "There" is either a noun or an adverb, whereas "their" is a pronoun. That probably doesn't help much.
"There" indicates place, while "their" indicates people.
A Hopeful Problem
Do not misuse "hopefully." This is an adverb and in student writing is almost never appropriate. "Hopefully, the reader will gain understanding from this essay." What this sentence means to say is "I hope the reader will gain understanding." Well of course the writer hopes this. Remove "hopefully," however, and the sentence retains its meaning, and without the distraction of an adverb that does not modify the verb.
Problem Words
Here follows a list of words that I've found cause confusion for some students. Now that you have read the list, you will not make these mistakes.
The guys riding the horsies are cavalry. The place where Jesus was crucified was Calvary.
The things that shoot are cannons. The guys who pray are canons.
Pheasants are birds; peasants are people.
Be Brave
Don't be rhetorically timid. Do not say "I hope to show..." for example. Say "I will show...." When your prose is hesitant or timid, you invite the reader to reject your argument out of hand. You have a case to make, so make it, and don't ask the reader for mercy.