Midterm details, study suggestion: Identifications

Make comments to this post to bring up any questions or problems you are encountering; you history majors get major points for responding or for asking questions yourselves.

      To repeat for the record, the ID's will be six in number on the exam sheet, out of which you will choose five, each counting for 10% of the grade. That 10% is further divided, half for each of the two sentences you'll write on each ID. A word of advice, please to take this as fair warning: don't take on all six ID's. If you get one wrong you still lose 10% of the total grade. Some of you can't help it, we know and sympathize, so go ahead if you must, just be sure to get them all right.

      Those of you who have been showing up and taking good notes should be able to identify the ID's without much difficulty. If your attendance has been patchy you will have to put in a lot of work to avoid disaster. Same as it ever was. Not to be repetitious, but ID's require more than one sentence and don't need more than two. Some of you are taking a rare break from the hard sciences, others haven't taken many or even any history courses until this one, so herewith some reflections why ID's in a course like this are different from what you'd find in Chemistry or International Relations.

      The good news is that ID's won't be obscure, or at least they aren’t intended to be. In most cases—probably all--you can assess the significance of an ID by linking it to a major question or issue. To plunder some philosophical jargon (apologies, can't help myself), an ID like any word, concept, or thing can be looked at in two ways: as possessing "intrinsic properties", the characteristics that in sum distinguish it; or it can be defined by its "relational characteristics" the linkages between a word or thing and its contexts. The former lends itself well to tests, not to mention flash cards and last-minute cramming, so you've probably seen more of it in other courses; the latter is closer to the way historians think.

       Study suggestions: spare yourselves the tedium of making lists containing every date and Arabic term from both reading and lecture (though I should say I try to keep terminology down to what's important). You'll want to be sure you have the important terms down, but compiling detail after microscopic detail, then memorizing them in isolation, is probably a poor use of your time. If you've been keeping up, the terms shouldn't come as a surprise; the hard part is the second sentence, your macro view of the larger picture and the significance of the term within it. To get this right in one sentence you'd do well to concentrate on one or at most two larger issues per ID. This is where good preparation will show, as it it can be harder to write one thing that's significant than to blast away, hoping that something will stick. How do you figure out out what that one thing (or those two things) should be? Something that might help is to study for the ID's and the essay questions together, rather than taking each as a separate exercise; then fill in the picture with the issues that won't appear on the exam. This should make you better prepared to ask what the larger issue was when a term came up, how the telescopic detail and the wide angle big picture fit together. If you're a list kind of person, try making a shortish outline of the major questions and themes of the course, then use the headings as rubrics under which you can organize terminology. If you find yourself furiously scanning every reading and writing down every unfamiliar word you are probably off-track.

Finally, a question that usually comes up: how much detail? A convincing detail never hurts, but a paragraph-long sentence isn’t necessary or even helpful. Think of adding details not as trying to prove you've nailed it, but as something you'd use to explain the term to someone else.