Midterm essays

As you have the essay questions in hand, studying for them should be straight-forward. With just 40 minutes or so to write an essay you may be wondering how you you could possibly give it a beginning, a middle, an end, and a point. Here's a trick that should work for essay exams not just for this class but possibly in other courses too. This isn't a requirement, just a suggestion for people who find the old table-pounding thesis statement and restatement format a bit artificial.

      Consider starting off not with the exact topic but with a larger problem or development, something of which the question you're writing on forms a part. One advantage in doing it this way is not having to become a linguistic contortionist to reword the original question without restating it (or even worse just restating it). If you can move from that larger issue to the topic by framing the latter as a question all the better, especially since addressing the question gives you your point and answering it gives you your ending.

      That's the theory, here's an example of how it might work in practice. Let's say the the exam question was about the Dome of the Rock, something like, "As the written sources for the first decades of the Islamic period are neither contemporaneous nor as detailed as later sources, historians of the period place a higher value on material sources. The Dome of the Rock in particular is probably the most important "source" on the end of the 7th century CE, not only for architectural history but for what it says about political and religious history as well. What does the Dome of the Rock tell us about the relationship of politics to religion in this period?" This is probably a question I'd be more likely to ask on a graduate student exam but you get the point.

      There are any number of longer-term developments or larger historical problems we could bring up; let's take one: change and continuity between the Late Antique and Early Islamic periods. To get things going you could start off with a simple descriptive sentence or two telling the reader that the old 'clean wipe of the historical slate' view has recently been challenged by historians who stress continuities with earlier periods. Once this broader problem is established as the context of the paper, you could ask what light the Dome of the Rock sheds on it, and even better you could ask it in the form of a question. As you'd be writing just a Blue Book—length essay, the topic sentence of all or most of your following paragraphs could refer back to this linkage as you go through the issues. When you are ready for your conclusion you are in better shape than you would have been had you started off with a strong thesis statement; in fact you could write your conclusion as a conclusion, not as the restatement of a thesis statement that was itself a restatement of the exam question. By nesting your essay within a larger problem you will have devoted just two paragraphs to setting off with a clear beginning, giving your essay a point, and ending with a conclusion that says something. Again, no requirement here, no attempt to throw a wrench in the finely tuned exam-aceing machinery you've developed over the last four years, just one way of writing exams that seems to work well for many people.

      A question that often comes up is how much detail you should give when referring to textbooks, primary sources, and lectures. If you can, try to avoid citing lectures except when comparing and contrasting or covering some kind of debate in which your lecturer has taken a position. For citations of secondary scholarship and primary sources there isn't a universal rule that I'm aware of, but in this course feel free to adopt a conversational tone, as though you were giving a presentation orally. Cite authors by name (in most cases the last name) and leave titles, page numbers, and the rest to formal written work. And no need to relate biographical details (this works for most other courses too); as long as you're not referring to someone in another field.you're usually best off assuming that your readers will be familiar with her.