Writing a paper, resources and suggestions

I've added a new section to our learn@uw spaces: How to write as a historian, two highly recommended books therein as you begin to think about writing your papers. We're still a little ways off from that but if you want to get good at this game you won't go wrong following these steps:

1. Read these books as you are settling on a subject.

2. Make an appointment with the writing center; if asked, tell them you want to learn how to turn a topic into a problem as the pros do.

3. Once you have turned your topic into a clearly articulated problem or question describe the sources you intend to use, with a short assessment of each one. Writing an annotated bibliography will be a great help to you: every time you read something on a topic enter the full bibliographical citation and then add general comments about the work's value or appropriateness to the task at hand. Your detailed notes will be in another file: annotated bibliographies quickly lose their usefulness if they end up taking the place of note-taking.

4. Write a short section acknowledging difficulties: these can include scattered and unfocussed scholarship, sources of uncertain reliability, the appropriateness of a concept or method to the issues at hand, outright criticism of an approach or method from other scholars, conceptualization of anything. In historical scholarship the temptation is to get the problems out of the way so you can start writing, when in fact dealing with these problems should be what you are writing about. Some of the best scholarship is one problem after another. The trick is to render the problem into the topic sentence of a paragraph. Once you have done so you can give it full attention.

5. Talk to your TA or me or both about what you've accomplished so far; make another appointment with the writing center if you haven't done so already

6. Write the thing, being careful to signpost where you are going and what you propose to argue through the topic and concluding sentences in many of your paragraphs. Topic sentences in particular are a way of linking the overall problem with the subject of your paragraph.

7. Ask yourself: is there anything in the introduction that might well be put into the conclusion? In other words, is that thing you call a thesis statement really the solution to a problem you could pose at the beginning and work your way towards at the end?

Of course these are broad and general guidelines, not a sure-fire recipe. But I do think most historians go through most of these stages when they are working on a problem. Our equivalent of the writing center is friends and colleagues: every good historian has a secret society to whom she turns while formulating a problem and starts to work on it.