tutorial on essay writing

Essay Writing: A complete guide for students and teachers

P LANNING, PARAGRAPHING AND POLISHING: FINE-TUNING THE PERFECT ESSAY

Essay writing is an essential skill for every student. Whether writing a particular academic essay (such as persuasive, narrative, descriptive, or expository) or a timed exam essay, the key to getting good at writing is to write. Creating opportunities for our students to engage in extended writing activities will go a long way to helping them improve their skills as scribes.

But, putting the hours in alone will not be enough to attain the highest levels in essay writing. Practice must be meaningful. Once students have a broad overview of how to structure the various types of essays, they are ready to narrow in on the minor details that will enable them to fine-tune their work as a lean vehicle of their thoughts and ideas.

In this article, we will drill down to some aspects that will assist students in taking their essay writing skills up a notch. Many ideas and activities can be integrated into broader lesson plans based on essay writing. Often, though, they will work effectively in isolation – just as athletes isolate physical movements to drill that are relevant to their sport. When these movements become second nature, they can be repeated naturally in the context of the game or in our case, the writing of the essay.

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Planning an essay

The Boys Scouts’ motto is famously ‘Be Prepared’. It’s a solid motto that can be applied to most aspects of life; essay writing is no different. Given the purpose of an essay is generally to present a logical and reasoned argument, investing time in organising arguments, ideas, and structure would seem to be time well spent.

Given that essays can take a wide range of forms and that we all have our own individual approaches to writing, it stands to reason that there will be no single best approach to the planning stage of essay writing. That said, there are several helpful hints and techniques we can share with our students to help them wrestle their ideas into a writable form. Let’s take a look at a few of the best of these:

BREAK THE QUESTION DOWN: UNDERSTAND YOUR ESSAY TOPIC.

Whether students are tackling an assignment that you have set for them in class or responding to an essay prompt in an exam situation, they should get into the habit of analyzing the nature of the task. To do this, they should unravel the question’s meaning or prompt. Students can practice this in class by responding to various essay titles, questions, and prompts, thereby gaining valuable experience breaking these down.

Have students work in groups to underline and dissect the keywords and phrases and discuss what exactly is being asked of them in the task. Are they being asked to discuss, describe, persuade, or explain? Understanding the exact nature of the task is crucial before going any further in the planning process, never mind the writing process .

BRAINSTORM AND MIND MAP WHAT YOU KNOW:

Once students have understood what the essay task asks them, they should consider what they know about the topic and, often, how they feel about it. When teaching essay writing, we so often emphasize that it is about expressing our opinions on things, but for our younger students what they think about something isn’t always obvious, even to themselves.

Brainstorming and mind-mapping what they know about a topic offers them an opportunity to uncover not just what they already know about a topic, but also gives them a chance to reveal to themselves what they think about the topic. This will help guide them in structuring their research and, later, the essay they will write . When writing an essay in an exam context, this may be the only ‘research’ the student can undertake before the writing, so practicing this will be even more important.

RESEARCH YOUR ESSAY

The previous step above should reveal to students the general direction their research will take. With the ubiquitousness of the internet, gone are the days of students relying on a single well-thumbed encyclopaedia from the school library as their sole authoritative source in their essay. If anything, the real problem for our students today is narrowing down their sources to a manageable number. Students should use the information from the previous step to help here. At this stage, it is important that they:

●      Ensure the research material is directly relevant to the essay task

●      Record in detail the sources of the information that they will use in their essay

●      Engage with the material personally by asking questions and challenging their own biases

●      Identify the key points that will be made in their essay

●      Group ideas, counterarguments, and opinions together

●      Identify the overarching argument they will make in their own essay.

Once these stages have been completed the student is ready to organise their points into a logical order.

WRITING YOUR ESSAY

There are a number of ways for students to organize their points in preparation for writing. They can use graphic organizers , post-it notes, or any number of available writing apps. The important thing for them to consider here is that their points should follow a logical progression. This progression of their argument will be expressed in the form of body paragraphs that will inform the structure of their finished essay.

The number of paragraphs contained in an essay will depend on a number of factors such as word limits, time limits, the complexity of the question etc. Regardless of the essay’s length, students should ensure their essay follows the Rule of Three in that every essay they write contains an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Generally speaking, essay paragraphs will focus on one main idea that is usually expressed in a topic sentence that is followed by a series of supporting sentences that bolster that main idea. The first and final sentences are of the most significance here with the first sentence of a paragraph making the point to the reader and the final sentence of the paragraph making the overall relevance to the essay’s argument crystal clear. 

Though students will most likely be familiar with the broad generic structure of essays, it is worth investing time to ensure they have a clear conception of how each part of the essay works, that is, of the exact nature of the task it performs. Let’s review:

Common Essay Structure

Introduction: Provides the reader with context for the essay. It states the broad argument that the essay will make and informs the reader of the writer’s general perspective and approach to the question.

Body Paragraphs: These are the ‘meat’ of the essay and lay out the argument stated in the introduction point by point with supporting evidence.

Conclusion: Usually, the conclusion will restate the central argument while summarising the essay’s main supporting reasons before linking everything back to the original question.

ESSAY WRITING PARAGRAPH WRITING TIPS

●      Each paragraph should focus on a single main idea

●      Paragraphs should follow a logical sequence; students should group similar ideas together to avoid incoherence

●      Paragraphs should be denoted consistently; students should choose either to indent or skip a line

●      Transition words and phrases such as alternatively , consequently , in contrast should be used to give flow and provide a bridge between paragraphs.

HOW TO EDIT AN ESSAY

Students shouldn’t expect their essays to emerge from the writing process perfectly formed. Except in exam situations and the like, thorough editing is an essential aspect in the writing process. 

Often, students struggle with this aspect of the process the most. After spending hours of effort on planning, research, and writing the first draft, students can be reluctant to go back over the same terrain they have so recently travelled. It is important at this point to give them some helpful guidelines to help them to know what to look out for. The following tips will provide just such help: 

One Piece at a Time: There is a lot to look out for in the editing process and often students overlook aspects as they try to juggle too many balls during the process. One effective strategy to combat this is for students to perform a number of rounds of editing with each focusing on a different aspect. For example, the first round could focus on content, the second round on looking out for word repetition (use a thesaurus to help here), with the third attending to spelling and grammar.

Sum It Up: When reviewing the paragraphs they have written, a good starting point is for students to read each paragraph and attempt to sum up its main point in a single line. If this is not possible, their readers will most likely have difficulty following their train of thought too and the paragraph needs to be overhauled.

Let It Breathe: When possible, encourage students to allow some time for their essay to ‘breathe’ before returning to it for editing purposes. This may require some skilful time management on the part of the student, for example, a student rush-writing the night before the deadline does not lend itself to effective editing. Fresh eyes are one of the sharpest tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Read It Aloud: This time-tested editing method is a great way for students to identify mistakes and typos in their work. We tend to read things more slowly when reading aloud giving us the time to spot errors. Also, when we read silently our minds can often fill in the gaps or gloss over the mistakes that will become apparent when we read out loud.

Phone a Friend: Peer editing is another great way to identify errors that our brains may miss when reading our own work. Encourage students to partner up for a little ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’.

Use Tech Tools: We need to ensure our students have the mental tools to edit their own work and for this they will need a good grasp of English grammar and punctuation. However, there are also a wealth of tech tools such as spellcheck and grammar checks that can offer a great once-over option to catch anything students may have missed in earlier editing rounds.

Putting the Jewels on Display: While some struggle to edit, others struggle to let go. There comes a point when it is time for students to release their work to the reader. They must learn to relinquish control after the creation is complete. This will be much easier to achieve if the student feels that they have done everything in their control to ensure their essay is representative of the best of their abilities and if they have followed the advice here, they should be confident they have done so.

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Credits: This tutorial was the result of a collaborative effort by Annette Timm, Alexander Hill, and Jerremie Clyde. It was written by Nicole Freiheit under the supervision of Drs. Timm and Hill.

Navigation Instructions: The tutorial is broken up into six parts. Each of these parts includes an overview and sections on research strategies, writing, strategies, and thoughts and feelings. You can reach individual sections by clicking on the hyperlinks in the "Table of Contents."

Quiz Instructions: Some of you will have navigated to this page because you are taking a course that includes an essay-writing quiz. After you have read the tutorial, go to the Blackboard site for your course to take the quiz, following your professor's instructions on deadlines and timing.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Topic Selection Part 2: Pre-Focus Research Part 3: Formulating an Argument Part 4: Focused Research Part 5: Refining an Argument Part 6: Presenting an Argument

Topic Selection

What is a history paper?  What should you write about?

Historians are interested in understanding and explaining cause, consequence, change, continuity, similarity and difference in human history. They make arguments explaining how and why things happened in the past on the basis of evidence that has survived into the present.

Historians attempt to understand the actions of individuals and societies in the past in the context of the time; they do not set out to moralize about the past.

An undergraduate history research essay seeks to answer a specific question about the past. A history essay does more than list facts and dates or summarize a topic or event. It explores a historical problem by analyzing the sources that address it.  The frist step in writing any research paper is to identify, locate and retrieve the relevant sources. 

The sources you use, how you organize your evidence, and the form of your argument will determine how compelling your explanation is and ultimately how successful your paper will be.

Research Strategies

Topics When selecting a topic (if one is not assigned to you) you should start by consulting your textbook. Not only will this provide you with the general facts surrounding possible topics, but the bibliography will also be a springboard for further research. You might also consult your lecture notes or research databases such as Historical Abstracts or Oxford Reference Online , available through the library website, for relevant books and articles (more on this in the next section).

In the light of your initial research, you may need to narrow your focus down by asking a more specific question to answer in your paper. If you have chosen your own topic, run it past your professor or TA to make sure it is manageable.

Types of Sources For a research paper, you will consult a variety of sources, some you will cite in your essay and some you will not. There are three different types of sources.

Primary sources come from the time period that you are studying. They include diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, government documents, speeches, court transcripts and artwork. For example, if you are writing a research essay on World War I, you might consult newspapers from the period or a soldier’s diary. Primary sources are the closest sources temporally to the time at which the event or events occurred that are available to historians to study an event or person. They must be critically analyzed. Ask for what purpose the source was produced and what factors might have influenced its content. Your professor may ask that you use one or more primary sources to complete your assignment.

Primary sources can be rich with relevant information for a project, but you cannot simply accept everything they say as fact. You must interpret their meaning in light of the author, the context, the purpose and the intended audience of the work.

Some questions you should be asking yourself about a primary source:

• For what purpose was the source produced? How has this influenced content?
• How well informed was the author about the subject under discussion?
• Does the source contain useful information peripheral to the principle purpose of the document that might be less influenced by the personal motives of the author than other content?

Secondary sources are typically works written about the past by contemporary scholars. Secondary sources include books, chapters and articles. At the undergraduate level, the majority of your research materials will be secondary sources.

A good secondary source is written by a professional or academic historian and is based on extensive primary source research. Historians publish their latest research as chapters in edited works, books and in articles in scholarly journals. There are journals concerned with numerous facets of history, including the Middle Ages, China, Alberta, war, labour, women, science and so on. You are advised to only use articles from peer-reviewed journals. Peer review means that other scholars in the field have critically reviewed the article and its research and found it to be sound.

Use a variety of secondary sources for your paper. Books tend to have a broader scope, while articles and chapters are more specific. You should be using both.

Some sources are not clearly either primary or secondary. While the memoirs of a prominent political figure might primarily be concerned with the author’s personal recollections or portrayals of events, they are often embellished with material from secondary sources. In this case it would also be important to consider how long after the events being described the memoirs were written. The longer after the events the more likely the author’s portrayal has been influenced by other sources.

Some sources can be both primary and secondary sources depending on the way in which you use them. An article in a magazine such as Time or MacLean’s written about the anniversary of an important event would be a secondary source if you were writing about the event—avoid using such sources for this purpose. However, if you were looking at the cultural impact of the event on a particular society it could become a primary source!

Tertiary sources are primarily encyclopedic and include dictionary entries as well as textbooks. Tertiary sources provide the basic facts about the past and are based on secondary sources. While you may find it useful to consult an encyclopedia or a dictionary for information about an important person or a definition of a word, tertiary sources do not count towards the total number of sources required for a paper. Your textbook is a great springboard for topic ideas and primary and secondary sources, but the information a textbook contains is often too general to be directly applied to a research assignment.

Scholarly versus Popular is an important distinction and one you need to keep in mind.  You want to make sure your secondary sources are sound, and the way to do that is to make sure they are scholarly.  Most things in the University Library or available through the University Library's website are scholarly, but not everything.  The Calgary Public Library contains both popular and scholarly books, and if you use books from there you should be more careful about examining their quality. Books that you use for your essays should have footnotes or endnotes and a bibliography. You should be able to easily determine what evidence was used to make the argument.  Journal articles will be similar, and should be in a scholarly journal.  Most scholarly journals use a process called peer-review to ensure they only publish quality research.  Each article that is submitted is reviewed by subject experts to make sure it is of reasonable quality.

Writing Strategies

Time management. Students tend to underestimate how long a project will take. The sooner you start your research the more likely the books you need will be in the library.  If a book you need is signed out it can take up to two weeks before you can get it.  If the book you need has to come from another library it can take even longer.  Not getting the resources you need is no excuse for turning in a paper late (although it could be the reason if you are not careful). 

Students should allow a few weeks to work on their essay, ideally allowing some time between stages for reflection. Allot at least two hours of work for each page of your essay. 

Thoughts and Feelings

The Topic Selection Phase is often characterized by uncertainty and apprehension, but also anticipation as it can be exciting to learn about a new topic area. Some causes of this are:

Not understanding the assignment - you may feel uncertain about the assignment when you read through it at first. It may seem overwhelming, difficult, or even impossible. However, spending time reviewing all the criteria for the assignment helps to alleviate some uncertainty. Often professors and instructors provide detailed instructions in the assignment that you need to consider even before choosing your general topic.

Not knowing anything about a topic - professors often provide a list of topics from which you can pick. You may be apprehensive when scanning the list and realizing you don't know anything about any of the proposed topics. Or you are able to choose your own topic for the research paper, but you are unable to do so because you don't know anything yet about the topics discussed in class. You can alleviate some of your apprehension by starting to think about appropriate topics right at the beginning of the term. As new ideas are presented in class and your assigned readings, your knowledge base builds so that you can make a more informed decision on topic selection.

Now write Quiz 1 on Blackboard!

Pre-Focus Research

Frequently characterized by confusion, uncertainty and doubt, this is often the most difficult part of the research process. So if you are experiencing frustration, don't despair! This is normal.  Really, it is.

Many students feel they should be able to go straight from topic selection into the focused research stage or even presenting their arguement, and frequently try to do so. This will seldom be productive. You need to learn more about your topic, the details, nuances, and issues surrounding it, in order to find a focus for your research.

It is a misconception that the more information you find on a topic, the clearer things become. In the process of exploring your topic, you will find information that is sometimes contradictory, questionable or incompatible with your ideas. It takes time and persistence and to wade through this information and make sense of it. One researcher referred to this type of exploration as a process of "patience and faith". Eventually, you will be able to find a focus for your research.

The purpose of this phase is to investigate information with the intent of finding a focus, choosing not only your topic but how you want to approach it or what you will say about it.  This will mean using the library, whether it is print resources in the library itself or electronic ones that the library provides access to.  At this stage in your research you will be primarily looking for tertiary sources and some secondary sources. 

There are a few initial steps you can take to ensure your research time is effective and well spent.  Skipping these steps often results in frustrating and unsuccessful searches, leaving the research with the feeling that there is nothing on the topic.  The reality however might be that there is plenty of information available, but unless it is approached in a particular way it can not be found.

As a general rule make sure what you are looking at is scholarly.  There is a lot of information out there and many different sources, but scholarly or academic sources are most efficient as they provide you with the clues you need to find more items on the same topic.  Ideally every source you find should be able to lead you to another related source.

Using what you already know . Searching the library, whether its print collection using the online catalogue or its online journals can be a challenge if you don't know exactly what you are looking for.  The search tools all work best when you are looking for something you already know exists, or should exist.  The first place to start then is to look at your course readings and lecture notes. 

You will want to make some notes from these to guide your research.  These notes are not necessarily about the topic itself but also about the research on the topic.  Note the following types of information:

• authors of course readings that deal with your topic
• authors of other books or articles listed in the footnotes or bibliographies of your course readings
• dates of the relevant events you are looking at (if you happen to have them in your notes)
• particular individuals or places involved in the event - proper nouns are very effective search tools
• all the different names for the event or issue - do your readings and lecture notes describe the same event but call it something different?  If so note this down. 
• i.e. - Falklands War, Falklands Conflict, Falklands Crisis, Malvinas War, Guerra de las Malvinas

Using the library website: encyclopaedias. There are a number of encyclopedias you can link to from the library's website.  Oxford Reference Online is often a great tool to start your search with.  Taking the notes you compiled from lectures and readings, search Oxford Reference Online for information on your topic.  You will find articles from several different Oxford resources.  These articles are not something you should cite or will count towards your total number of sources, they are tertiary.  You are looking at them to get a broader understanding of the topic, to find different terms or words to describe the topic (which are necessary for effectively finding online articles), to make sure that you have all the relevant dates and spellings for places, persons and things, and finally and maybe most importantly for the list of related readings at the bottom.  They will not only give you other books or articles to look for on your topic but also the names of some researchers who work on your topic.  You can then search the catalogue or online databases with the author's name to find what else they have written on the topic.

Using the library website: subject guides & bibliographies. There are a number of subject guides setup on the library websites.  It can take time to search through them but it can be time well spent. The most important thing to look for on these pages when you are just starting a topic are bibliographies.  The majority of bibliographies are in print and while they may seem less convenient than, say, a google search from the comfort of your own home, they can make research both fast and easy. 

Bibliographies are books that organize, list, and often comment on all the published research on a given topic up to the date of the bibliography's publication.  Bibliographies often organize the existing research in the field by how authors have approached the topic -- what particular aspects of it they have looked at. This organization gives you a good idea how the information on your topic is organized and described. From a bibliography you will get the following information:

• Titles of books or articles on your subject which can then be looked up in the catalogue and online resources
• The names of researchers working on your topic who you will want to look up in the catalogue and online resources
• Subject headings for how your topic is organized, which can be used as keywords in catalogue and online resource searches
• Background and context for how your topic has been approached.  Approaching it in similar ways, at least while doing your research makes research  much easier.
• A place to browse!  The call number on the bibliography will be the same as other works on the same subject, so you can browse the shelves in the Library Tower and in the reference collection using the bibliography's call number as a guide.

If the bibliography is a little bit older that is not necessarily a problem as research in history does not become irrelevant simply because it is old.  The bibliography will also give you names of researchers who work on the topic, and you can use those names in searches to find what they have written since the bibliography was published.

Using the library website: the catalogue. The library catalogue is the main tool for finding  books and  journals  held on campus.  It works best when you are searching for a known title, author or subject heading.  The steps above give you the first of these three things.  The subject headings are a set of controlled vocabulary used to organize and describe the knowledge that books contain.  They govern how the library is organized and get broken down to call numbers (those things on the book) so that books on the same topic are shelved together.  You can determine the third in the following way.

• Go to the library website and click on the "direct to catalogue" link
• In the "search for" box enter a likely keyword for your topic. You can find them by looking in a book's front papers under the copyright information (if you already have a book) or choose a country then history (i.e. Canada History) or an individual's name (last name first). 
• Click off Browse under the search box then click on subject

You can then browse forward and back (do not use browser navigation, but use the previous and next links at the top of the search results) to see how your subject is handled by the catalogue and if you look to the right of a subject how many books have that subject attached.  Clicking on the subject brings up the books themselves

Once you find a likely looking book click on it, and using the tabs at the top open ups its complete record.  At the bottom of the record you will see the subjects attached to the book at the bottom.  Clicking on anyone of those will start a search.       

Journal Articles and Electronic Books. At this point, you can also start searching journal article databases, primarily Historical Abstracts and the electronic books in Ebrary using authors names, but the more information you have the better you can use these tools.  Scholarly articles are detailed and specific and are easier to use when you know exactly what it is you are looking for.  Ebrary lets you search within the full text of books, but to do that effectively you need as much detail as possible.  The use of Historical Abstracts/America History and Life and Ebrary will be discussed under focused research .

Read looking for questions rather than just information.   Be open to the ideas you read about and be conscious of what questions pop into your mind as you are reading. What are the important aspects of this topic? Who are the key people involved? Why was this written? Is there more you'd like to know about that you aren't finding out?

Be tolerant of inconsistency . There is often a huge variety of expert opinions on a topic. Scholars do not always agree and are frequently critical of one another's approach or findings. This does not necessarily mean that one is right and the other wrong, but simply that there are many possible answers to complex issues or problems. The aspects of a topic where scholars don't agree are often the most interesting ones to research!

At this stage you are doing more reading than writing, but try to be aware of what you are doing.  Take appropriate notes and read effectively.

Don't forget to keep notes on both your search itself (what was done where and what has and has not worked) and on your topic.

Take notes on facts and ideas . Write things down that stand out, look for aspects of the topic that interest you or for elements of the topic that seem controversial or open to various interpretations. Intentionally seek these aspects as a possible focus for your research. Write down key terms that describe these ideas.

Record relevant citations.  Keep a record of those sources of information you use that you may want to return to, and make sure to keep bibliographic information with your notes. Consider using a reference manager software program like Zotero, DEVONthink or Reference Manager to keep notes and bibliographic information linked and organized. It's very frustrating when you want to use a particularly interesting idea or great quote and can't remember where you found it! Bibliographic software will also help you create your footnotes when you are ready to write.

Reading effectively will speed up the research phase considerably. When looking at a book pertaining to your topic, check the table of contents first to see if there are especially relevant chapters to your essay. You will likely not need to read the whole book, as most of it will be irrelevant. Next look for some key terms in the index at the back. Look for the same nouns (person, place, event or thing) you searched in the library catalogue and research databases. The index will point you to specific pages where you might find pertinent information. Now that you know what parts of the book are relevant to your essay, skim the book’s introduction and conclusion to see if the author makes an important argument relevant to your topic. Often an author’s thesis statement will vary from others who have written on the topic or even challenge what others have written. Take notes as you read. Mark down all pertinent information for future citation, including page numbers, of passages that will be useful when you sit down to write your paper. Take notes in your own words; only write out verbatim particularly poignant passages, and be sure to clear mark these in your notes as direct quotations. You might want to quote these passages in your essay to support your argument.

To identify a secondary source’s thesis statement , closely read the introduction. The thesis statement should make itself clear. Historians will often examine what has previously been written then situate their own methodology (method of study) and argument within that context. When comparing thesis statements and how they might be discussed in your essay, ask: What sources do the authors use? Do newer works use sources and methods that make older sources obsolete?  This is a key piece of information to consider with every source you are looking at.

The Pre-focus Exploration Phase is often characterized by anxiety and uncertainty. Some causes of this are:

Information encountered doesn't fit . It is natural to feel frustrated and possibly overwhelmed when you encounter a large amount of new information, especially when much of that information seems contradictory or inconsistent. This may lead to feelings of personal inadequacy (I can't do this!) or frustration with library systems (this library doesn't have what I'm looking for!)

Inability to express information need . Because you haven't reached a focus yet, it's often hard to articulate what it is you're looking for. This can increase the frustration of using research tools like the library catalogue and databases because you aren't sure what terms to use.

Feeling that time is being wasted.  Research shows that students frequently feel unproductive during this stage because it may not seem like they are moving forward with their research. Many abandon their topic altogether. But the exploration phase is essential; it simply takes time and patience.

Not open to change and adjustment.  If you have too firm an idea of what you're looking for at this point, it may only increase your frustration if the information you find doesn't fit. Try to be receptive to new concepts and flexible in your approach.

Now write Quiz 2 on Blackboard!

Formulating an Argument

Formulating an Argument: The Thesis Statement

Developing a thesis statement is the first major writing step and is crucial for directing both your research and how you formulate your argument.  Do not delay on this step.

Your essay’s thesis statement is , above all, an answer to a question. The question might be one that interests you from the list provided by your professor or one you have thought of on your own. Historians do not ask questions with definite answers. They ask questions with debatable answers. It is crucial to note that a “debatable” question cannot be answered with a statement of personal belief. Your purpose in writing a history paper is not to articulate your own values, but rather to offer a convincing argument about why or how things happened. You must concentrate on explanation rather than moral judgment and you must go beyond a mere description of what happened. For instance, instead of asking “What did Britain’s navy do during World War II?” ask “Did Britain’s navy contribute to the Allies’ victory in World War II?” The first question’s answer would be merely descriptive. The second question demands an assessment and a persuasive argument. Never write a paper that implicitly or explicitly answers a moral question such as why slavery is wrong or how horrible the Holocaust was. Answering these questions inevitably involves moralizing rather than analytical argument.

Assess whether you have enough information to proceed.   Some of the information you have gathered will be of the most general, factual kind. They are the things that you needed to learn to understand the basic narrative of your subject. While you might need this information to introduce your theme, it probably will not help you to make your specific argument. Other bits of information will no longer be specifically relevant to the topic as you have now narrowed it down. You should understand each bit of evidence that you have collected as a sub-argument of your larger thesis—your answer to the specific historical problem that you have outlined for yourself. Look at your notes to determine if you have enough to sustain your argument, likely you will need to do some directed research to support your thesis.

Construct a working thesis statement early. While it will change as your research continues, thinking about what you want to argue while you are still conducting your research will help focus your reading and note taking. Always choose a topic that you are personally interested in, whether it is something you have formulated yourself or something you have chosen from your professor’s list of questions. If you choose your own subject, first pick the topic, then think about how it can be broken up. For instance, if you want to study the Civil War for an American history class, you might break it up into smaller subjects: economy, slavery, Union army, Confederate army, Abraham Lincoln. When you narrow your topic down in this way, you can focus your reading so that questions will inevitably emerge upon which you can take a “side,” or argue a position in your paper. For example, as you read general sources on the American Civil War, you can begin gathering information to make an argument about how the agricultural economy of the South affected the Confederates’ military campaign. This narrows your topic down from the more general focus on the whole Civil War. You will come to a specific and debatable question that you can appropriately argue and defend in a short research paper.

As you begin formulating the argument for your essay, the confusion of the pre-focus exploration phase gives way to a sense of clarity and confidence. This is a result of:

Identifying pertinent ideas . From the lists you composed during your exploratory reading, certain themes, issues or elements of the topic will begin to stand out. Your understanding increases and you can start to focus on those ideas that will inform your further research.

Predicting outcomes . Measuring possible foci for your research against the criteria of task, time, interest and information available, you will see which ones might be suitable to choose.

Experiencing the 'aha' moment.  Some students report that they experience a sudden understanding or a moment of insight where the focus of their research becomes obvious.

Making a decision . After all the muddling about of the exploration phase, the Focus Formulation phase requires a decision. This will set you off in a particular direction and is the stage at which students feel they can really start to make progress.

Now write Quiz 3 on Blackboard!

Focused Research

Although you have been gathering information up to this point, once you have clearly defined the focus of your topic by developing your thesis statement you are best able to conduct a literature search for information that defines, extends, and supports it. Now you should be ready to really dive in to the research databases and dig out the research and sources to support your arguement.

This is the phase where you'll really get to know your subject-specific research databases. You'll search them, along with consulting other resources such as the library catalogue for books (also known as monographs) and subject experts, to pull together the information required to support your thesis.

The purpose of this phase is to actually find the scholarly articles and books (monographs) and/or primary sources that will enable you to complete your research.  The best way to do this is to refer to your thesis statement, take it apart to its basic components.  Based on what you learned in your initial research what now do you need to know to make an effective argument to support your thesis?  At this you will either start to find what you need or realize you need to reconsider your thesis and try again.

To do this, you will want to do two things (in addition to the techniques used earlier) citation mining and database searching. Citation mining This might the single most important technique you will use in your research, and you have already started using it in your initial searches.  Citation mining means going into the citations, the bibliographies and footnotes or endnotes of every relevant source you find to identify further research materials.  It is not too difficult to do, but it is often forgotten. Citation mining only really works well when you are using a scholarly or academic source.  Popular histories general do not have the level of citation necessary to make this effective.  This is also one of the most effective ways to identify relevant primary sources.

For every book you find that is on your topic look through the endnotes or footnotes, particularly for those areas that relate directly to your thesis.  Note down any source used by the author that looks relevant or useful.  Take the full information, because depending on what the source is you will need different parts of it to find the citation.  Here are some examples of citations with comments on what you would do with them to track down both the source itself and other possibly relevant sources.

Assisted Citation Mining Some technical assistance is available at this step, or at least as you move forward in to the next step.  When you are searching databases, whether Historical Abstracts or Google Scholar, watch for links on record descriptions such as as "cites" or "cited by".  These will either directly you to sources used in the writing of the article you are looking at, or better still "cited by" links you to other articles that used your current article in their research.  Often those items found with a "cited by" link are also relevant to what you are doing.  Basic citation mining lets you know everything that came before a relevant article.  Assisted Citation Mining with the "cited by" link helps you identify things on the same topic that came after!

Digital Sources   The two digital sources you are likely to be using most are Historical Abstracts or Ebrary.  Historical Abstracts is used to find scholarly articles and Ebrary is used to find the digital version of books.  In addition to these two tools there are a host of databases that have the digital versions of primary sources ranging from government documents to newspaper articles.  Please note though, if your topic is set prior to 1450 Historical Abstracts will not be helpful and instead you will use International Medieval Bibliography and ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Identify the most appropriate databases for your topic . This is one of the most important things you can do. Many hours have been misspent searching Historical Abstracts for a Medieval topic, or searching the catalogue for an article. All of the library research databases are arranged by subject, and have brief descriptions of the content covered. Be sure to read these descriptions (including the dates of coverage) before entering a given database to ensure you're starting in the right place.  The history databases are listed under Social Sciences as History AND History - Primary .Sources.  History Primary Sources pulls out those databases are you are most likely to use when looking for primary sources.  Many primary sources are also kept on microfiche. For these you will have to search the library catalogue.

Brainstorm the terminology you'll use to describe your topic to the research database (or person you're talking to). In the research world this terminology is variously described as descriptors, subject headings, and key words. This is part of the reason for the Pre-Focus Research, as it will have provided you with a list of terms ready to be worked with.  You will also be using information that you mined from the citations of other relevant works.

Combining Search Terms . Library research databases make use of something called Boolean operators to combine different search terms. While it may sound foreign, it simply means the use of the word AND to combine unrelated terms, OR to combine synonyms, and NOT to exclude certain terminology. Here's another example of how Boolean operators work . Truncation is a useful search tool as well. You use a special symbols such as * ? (which differ from database to database) to compensate for variant spellings or plurals, so a search on multipl* would automatically search multiple, multiples, multiply, multiplication, multipliers ... Here's a good example that may help you visualize truncation.

Methodically search relevant databases . You'll discover some overlap in the various databases you search, but no single database (and that includes Google when searching the web) covers all literature. This means you'll need to repeat your search several times using the same or similar terminology in several different databases.  Click here for an example of what you might find and miss using four popular search engines (click the name of each search engine once you get there). Results highlighted in yellow are content that is unique to that particular search engine, and represents results you would not have found had you only searched one of the other two in this example. You will find similar results using library databases!   Searches in Historical Abstracts can be complimented by searches in other databases such J-Store, Project Muse, Google Scholar, and Web of Science (despite its name it does have some historical data).

Request assistance from experts: Database searching is technically simple but that does not mean it is easy to do effectively!

• Make an appointment with the history librarian or drop in at his office hours for help in searching databases and retrieving results.
• Meet with your professor for guidance on the most important authors and researchers in your topic area

Take good notes and save documents / citations as you go! There are few things worse than knowing you found a really good article two days ago, but not being able to find it again today.

At this state you are thinking about your outline and thesis and trying to find relevant information, and taking a large amounts of notes.

There is more than one way to take notes and different tools to use depending on how you do it (you may use a combination of methods).  You can use whatever method you like, but you should do it intentionally so that it is effective and gives you what you need in order to write.

Most importantly, you must always record citation information, the author, title, publisher, place of publication and date of publication for books.  For articles be sure to record the author, title of the article, title of the journal, page numbers, issue and volume numbers and publication date.  This information is necessary for your own bibliography and notes, and it is vital if you need to try to find the source again.

These notes will be what you use to write, they are in addition to notes you have been keeping on the research process itself (whether in digital format or on paper).

Two popular methods of taking notes are as follows: 1. Post-it Notes  or Cards:  Some people like to take notes sparingly and carefully, use post-it notes or recipe cards either inserted in the source itself or stacked together.  You don't have a lot of space to write in this method so you end up only recording what is most important, and often summarizing ideas.  This can make writing simpler latter and help prevent unintentional plagiarism.

2. Notepad, Word Processor etc.:  Some people prefer to take copious amounts of notes, either typing them into their computer while looking at sources or cutting and pasting from electronic sources.  If you take this approach you are likely to have plenty of notes to work with when you start writing your first draft.  On the other hand you might have too many.  You may find yourself trying to utilize all the information, cramming it in even when it doesn't support your thesis or when it is only marginally relevant.  This can weaken your argument.  You may also find yourself using too many block quotes: long quoted sections of the original works. Even with proper attribution, it is better to provide the original author's argument in your own words than just using theirs. So while you will have plenty of notes this approach may make the writing more challenging.

No matter how you take notes though, take the notes with your thesis in mind,  think about how the notes you are taking support your thesis.  When you look over your notes and start building your outline, think of each idea in your outline or each point in your argument as a short-answer question that needs to be answered with research. Then make sure the notes you take from your sources are answering those questions.

You should start to feel a sense of accomplishment during this phase, though you may encounter setbacks as well.

During this phase you will have a better realization of the extent of work to be done and the extent of time commitment to complete the assignment.

You will feel a greater level of confidence in your ability to successfully complete your research, and an increased interest in your topic as you continue to uncover "the good stuff".

Now write Quiz 4 on Blackboard!

Refining an Argument

What follows is one way to approach the final stages of completing a history essay.  It focuses on refining an argument through creating an outline

Outlining your information before you write is crucial to constructing a coherent, organized argument. Not only does an outline aid in the writing process (you will never wonder what you are going to write next), it ensures that your essay is complete. By reviewing your outline, you can see immediately what points are irrelevant and what is missing from your argument. An outline will also help you determine whether you have too much or too little information and whether you might need to modify your argument accordingly. Most importantly, you should use your outline as a way of considering whether your essay will have a logical structure and flow.

There are many ways of organizing historical essays, though they tend to proceed chronologically or thematically depending on the topic. If you choose a thematic approach, you must still pay attention to the chronological order in which events occurred. Going backwards in time will confuse your reader

There are four basic steps to compiling an outline: preparation of notes, brainstorming, categorizing, and ordering. You do not necessarily have to do things in this precise order. But each step is important.  You may also find as you go through these steps that you may need additional information from your sources.  Don't be afraid to take the time to get the information you need. In fact as you will now be addressing very specific questions as determined by your outline it shouldn't take very long.  This step is about directly applying your research to your thesis.

Preparing your notes. First compile a complete bibliography to make sure that you will not lose or confuse any citations. Now divide up your notes into discrete bits of evidence. How you physically do this will depend upon how you took your notes (i.e. handwritten, on computer, or perhaps even into a database). To simplify the explanation, think about these discrete bits of evidence as separate note cards. Each note card should have a short descriptive heading and a brief citation to the source at the top (you could, for instance, just temporarily number the sources in your bibliography), followed by the actual evidence/notes with page numbers from the source. If you have handwritten your notes, you might need to cut them apart or use a system of colour-coding with highlighters or sticky-note tabs. Dividing up your notes in this way may seem tedious, but it will pay off quickly in speeding up the organization and writing process. Set any note cards aside that you already think will not be useful, but do not throw them away. You might change your mind later.

Brainstorming. Now that you have headings for your note cards, it is a simple matter to make a point-form list of the subjects that you would like to address in your essay. You might make a simple list, or you might use a flow-chart style map to do this, drawing connecting lines between related ideas. There are various software programs (such as the shareware program FreeMind) that might help with this stage.

Categorizing. Relying on your brainstorming, sift through your notes and group together related pieces of evidence. Physically organize your notes cards into these new piles (or word processed sections). If you have used colour-coding or tabs, you will need to write in new headings. At this point, you should also be cutting down on the number of separate sub-headings, and you should be deciding where an analysis of your primary source and/or your most important secondary sources will work best.

Ordering. Now the real outlining can begin. Take a look at the sub-categories of evidence that you have wound up with. Group these together into an even smaller number of headings. There is no rule on how many you will need, but it should be a number that is not too large to easily describe in your introduction. Your outline will now look something like this:

            i) a one-sentence version of your provisional thesis (you can change it later)

            ii) a brief description of the outline of your essay (a list of the sub-arguments below)

A. First Sub-argument

            a) topic of first paragraph to include:

                        i) evidence

                        ii) analysis

                        iii) link to thesis

            b) same structure as above…

                        iv) transition to next sub-argument

B. Second Sub-argument

   … paragraphs structured as above

C. Third Sub-argument

  …. paragraphs structured as above

            i) wrap up, restating argument with reference to evidence in the essay             ii) perhaps a reference to wider context or future research

Note on the importance of paragraph structure . Paragraphs are not simply a stylistic feature. They are units of argument. The more attention you pay to structuring coherent paragraphs, the easier it will be for your reader to follow your logic. All paragraphs should make a specific point (usually described in an opening topic sentence) and contain specific evidence. Most should also make an obvious link to your thesis. Making sure that all these elements are present is easiest if you actually outline your paragraphs in advance.

Assess your outline. While you were compiling your outline, repetitions in argument or conflicting viewpoints might have appeared. In a history essay, it is also important to make sure that you have not confused the chronology of events. Reviewing your outline before writing should also reveal if you have omitted important points or if many of your notes are now irrelevant because of the direction your paper took. You might also need to do more research. If you have started your paper early enough, filling in the gaps in your notes should not be a problem. Keep all your notes just in case you may need them later.

Compiling an outline as we have described will make the writing process much easier. But as you write you must pay even closer attention to matters of argument, evidence, logic and structure. Try thinking of your essay as a journey. You want your reader to come along for the ride and to arrive with you at the destination that you have chosen. To make sure this happens, you have to make the trip comfortable by ensuring that there are not too many bumps on the road (grammatical or stylistic problems), distractions (extraneous bits of evidence), wrong turns (illogical statements), or road-side bandits (misleading uses of evidence or plagiarized wordings or arguments).

The actual writing process is quite personal and can be accomplished by using various strategies. You can write a rough draft in any order. You may want to start with the body of the work or even the conclusion, if you have a good idea for how to end your essay. Whichever order you write, it is always a good idea to go back to the introduction once you are done and make sure that you have actually proven what you said you were going to. The most important thing is to give yourself enough time so that you can write a rough draft, be able to set it aside for at least a day or two, and then edit it carefully before turning in your essay. See the section on time management (in "Topic Selection" - "Writing Strategies").

The introduction is the most significant part of your essay. It must introduce the general topic area, concisely outline the argument you will be making, and provide the reader with a map to how your essay will proceed. You must explain where your reader is going and how he/she will be getting there. At the undergraduate level, it is also recommended that your introduction include your thesis statement. Given the length of papers that are generally assigned at the undergraduate level, this almost always means that your thesis should be in your first paragraph.

You must begin by clarifying the who, what, where, and when of your topic. Who is involved? What is the issue? Where and when did this historical event take place? You must then concisely state your argument. And, finally, you must describe how the essay will proceed. Providing your readers with a brief description of your outline (i.e. describing the headings of your sub-arguments) will make it much easier for them to follow your logic as they proceed into the body of your paper. It is also a good way of double-checking that your argument makes sense. If you cannot construct a concise description of how the various parts of your essay fit together, you probably have not thought hard enough about whether all your evidence is related to your thesis. If there is no logical flow between your sub-arguments, some sections of your essay will seem irrelevant, and your writing will seem choppy.

Evaluate your introduction before you begin writing the rest of your paper. Try giving your introduction to friends or family members to read and ask them to explain to you what they think your essay is about. If they cannot do this or if they do not know what you plan to argue, then your professor will also likely be confused. An adequate introduction should be roughly ten percent of the overall paper, but it can be shorter.

The body of your essay answers “How?” and “Why?” How and why did things come to be? How did change occur over time? If you thought carefully about your outline, writing the body of your work should be relatively straightforward. The paragraphs will flow logically, one idea or argument to the next, building your case in answer to the original question set out. In each paragraph, you present evidence, either through the research of other historians and/or through primary sources, and argue what that evidence means and what can be concluded from it. In other words, you should regularly make some kind of explicit reference to the central thesis of the paper. This is analysis. If you have found evidence counter to your main argument or if one of the historians you cite has a different interpretation, include that information and provide a reasoned argument about why your interpretation is more appropriate. Including the other side lets the reader know that this subject is debatable. A successful counter-argument will also strengthen your paper.

Between themes , or at the end and beginning of paragraphs, you should always have a transitional sentence or two that tells the reader where you are going to go next with your overall argument. If you cannot think of a way to tie parts of your essay together, they may need reordering. Transitional sentences are often called signposts because they give direction to the reader about where you are going. An example of a weak signpost might sound like this: “I first discussed the economy and now I will discuss politics.” Instead, explain why you are going from one theme to the next: “An analysis of the economic climate allows us to better understand why politicians reacted the way they did. The stable economy permitted political leaders to spend time and money on external affairs.” That next paragraph would then be about foreign policy.

The conclusion is not merely a regurgitation of the introduction. Avoid repeating point for point what you just wrote in your essay. Briefly summarize the overall argument of your essay and reveal how the subject and your arguments about it are significant. This might include setting the subject in a wider context or indicating what further research could be done. One way to evaluate your conclusion is to read it immediately after the introduction. They should flow together.

Quotations serve to prove to the reader that what you are arguing is indeed true. But quotations, especially longer ones, should be used carefully and sparingly. Limit direct quotations to poignant, strong and well-worded passages. The most useful quotations come from primary sources, because they present the moment or idea as it was originally recorded. Limit quotations from secondary sources to those that present strong arguments or particularly well-worded descriptions. An essay challenges you to synthesize the ideas of others to form your own argument. You cannot simply copy out what others have written. For information on the mechanics of inserting quotations into your essay refer to Formatting Essentials .

Proper citation allows the reader to reconstruct the argument from the sources used. To be convincing in a scholarly way it must be possible for your reader to use your footnotes to easily find the exact source that you used. This is the reason that all disciplines have developed detailed rules for citing sources. (The citation formats used in the History Department are described in Presenting an Argument - Research Strategies .) Proper citation is also the only way to avoid plagiarism .

Definition of Plagiarism:

Plagiarism includes:

• copying phrases or sentences from another source, including Internet sources. (This means that using someone else's words without quotation marks is plagiarism whether or not a footnote to the source is provided.)
• using someone else's argument or analytical reasoning without footnoting the author. (Depending upon the specific assignment, an in-text reference might suffice. Follow assignment directions.)
• sustained paraphrasing of someone else's argument without proper footnoting.
• turning in work that was originally written for a different course.
• turning in someone else's work as your own (including purchased or ghost-written papers).

Plagiarized papers automatically receive a failing grade (possibly resulting in a failing grade for the entire course). The Faculty of Social Sciences might also apply more severe academic penalties as outlined in the University of Calgary Calendar.

What to cite. It should be clear that you must cite your sources for direct quotations. But it is just as important that you provide proper documentation when you paraphrase what others have said in both primary and secondary sources. There is only one exception. You do not need to document your source of information if it is considered general knowledge. While you might have read in Historian A’s book that Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, you do not need to cite Historian A for that information. Historian A did not uncover the discovery through her own research; it is common knowledge available in an encyclopedia or textbook. However, if Historian A has developed an argument about the significance of Fleming’s discovery or researched the scientific community’s reaction to the discovery and you want to paraphrase this information, you must present your source, including page numbers, in a footnote or endnote. Specific information and arguments stemming from a historian’s labours must be attributed to that historian. Otherwise, it appears as though you are presenting that information as your own research, which is plagiarism. The same argument goes for primary sources. If you describe the contents of someone’s diary to illustrate your point, you must cite the diary in a note.

Upon reviewing the content of your rough draft , ask yourself several specific questions beyond “Is this good?” For instance: do you make a compelling case? Are your arguments clear and do they flow logically? Are your quotations interesting and insightful? Have you used too many quotations? If so, remove or paraphrase some of them. Are your quotations seamlessly woven into your essay, so that the reader sees the relationship between them and your argument? If not, link them more explicitly to your central thesis or the sub-argument. Have you been sloppy about citation or paraphrasing anywhere in the essay? Above all, did you stay on topic and answer the question?

If you have identified gaps in your essay or perhaps quotations that do not quite work, return to your notes to fill in the gaps. Hopefully in the main research stage, you read enough from a diversity of sources and took clear enough notes so that you do not have to return to the library or electronic databases. (This is also the reason why it is vital to take down the bibliographic information and page numbers in the early stage of your research, and even some notes on the search process. You might end up having to repeat some of this process. If you find you relied heavily on one or two authors, try at this stage to interchange them with other sources. Your argument will seem more thorough if you present the views of many historians.

At this stage, you should begin to feel confident and your anxiety should be relieved somewhat. This is a result of:

Staying on track . If you have managed to stay focused on your topic, keeping course guidelines and criteria in mind, as well as time constraints, your anxiety about completing the paper should be relieved.

Close to completion .  You should now be in a very good situation to wind down searching for information and really concentrate on finishing writing your paper/assignment. At this point you should feel confident that you have successfully gathered all the relevant information that you need.

Still anxious . If you find that you have not been able to find all the relevant information, or that you have very limited time left in order to finish the assignment, your anxiety level might increase. Rethink what you can finish in the time allotted, what information is still required, and perhaps return to the focus formulation phase to revise your topic into something that you can complete with the given information and time constraints.

Now write Quiz 5 on Blackboard!

Presenting an Argument

The final stage of Presenting an Argument  focuses on the final draft of essay.

The language you use and the format of your essay might seem less important than the ideas you express and the evidence you provide to support them, but appropriate language and, to a lesser extent, appropriate formatting are essential if you are to score highly. As regards language, following grammatical and spelling rules enables us to understand each other, assisted by clear formatting. As in any discipline, historians abide by standards so that others can easily understand their work. Improper formatting, footnoting, style, spelling and syntax inhibit the clear expression of your argument and bring down your grade.

Title page should include an original title for your paper, your name and student number, the professor’s name, possibly the teaching assistant’s name, the course name and date.

Font should be 12-point and Times New Roman for the body of the essay. Footnotes should be 10-point (standard in MS Word).

Margins should be one inch on the top and bottom and left and right.

Page numbers should be on every page, excluding the title page, which is not included in the page count.

Double-space your essay with no extra spaces between paragraphs. Single space block quotations and footnotes.

There are essentially two ways to quote. The first is the shorter blended quotation. If a quotation is less than three lines, it is ‘blended’ together with your own words. Together, your words and the quotation should form a grammatical sentence. In other words, the sentence would be grammatically correct even if you removed the quotation marks. For example:

According to local newspapers, gangs of women took to the streets “bearing torches and setting fire to the homes of prominent merchants.” 27

Shorter quotations never stand as sentences of their own, but are blended into your own words. Only use an ellipsis, three periods spaced out ( . . . ), if you omit words from the middle of a quotation. Commas and periods go inside quotation marks; semi-colons and colons go outside. Question marks only go inside the quotation marks if the original quotation was a question.

Quotations longer than three lines are block quotes. This means that they are a separate, indented, and single-spaced paragraph.

Block Quotes

Indent the first line of each paragraph. Block quotes should have a space on the top and bottom. Example:

A block quote is single-spaced and indented on both sides so that it is set off from the main body of the work and the reader can easily identify it. A block quote should only be used for particularly poignant quotations, usually from primary sources. DO NOT insert quotation marks around a block quote. 12

The line immediately following a block quote is left-aligned with no indent on either side, as it is a continuation of the paragraph preceding it.

Not only should you get the format of footnotes right, but you should be using them appropriately to add weight to your arguments.

It should be obvious whether ideas and arguments are your own or those of someone else—if they are your own then it is particularly important that you back them up with specific evidence (footnoted if it is more than accepted factual information such as the date of a well-known event), and if those of someone else they should be attributed to them either by both mentioning the author in the text and the source in a footnote or simply the latter. Since you are footnoting the exact source, you should not use the title of the book or article that you are citing in the text of your essay, unless you are purposely distinguishing between several works by the same author.

If a paragraph contains more than one piece of information from consecutive pages of a single source then do not provide a footnote for each piece of information—use a footnote for a page range, e.g. 31–34, at the end of a paragraph.

Footnote, Endnote and Bibliography Formatting

You must have a notation system, either footnotes or endnotes, and a bibliography. Historians prefer The Chicago Manual of Style ’s documentation style. The manual can be bought or borrowed from the library. Footnotes and endnotes document where you found information or a quotation in the text. They provide the exact page number, so that the reader can track down where you found your information. A footnote appears at the bottom of the page, while endnotes appear after the body of your essay, before the bibliography. Some professors have a preference for one of the other, while others do not. If you choose to use footnotes, make sure they are numbered sequentially from the first to the last page. Do not begin each new page’s footnotes with 1. Refer to your word processing software’s guide to learn how to insert either style of notation. (Be careful when switching between footnotes and endnotes. MS Word will sometimes change the numbering to Roman numerals, and you will have to figure out how to change back to digits or risk frustrating your professor.) Do not indent any line of a note. Notes are left-aligned.

The bibliography should contain every source you cited in your notes as well as other works you may have consulted for your essay, excluding textbooks and encyclopaedias. (If you picked up a book but immediately put it down -- in other words if it did not influence your argument at all -- then do not include it in your bibliography. Just adding titles to your bibliography is known as "bibliography padding" and is not an acceptable research practice.) Unlike your essay, the bibliography is single-spaced. The entries are alphabetized by the first word, usually the author’s or editor’s last name, and the second line is indented. Do not number the entries.

The examples here follow the Chicago Manual . B = Bibliographic entry. N = Note entry , either footnote or endnote. Upon second and subsequent reference, you can shorten the note entry. In a note, the page(s) where you found the information go(es) last. If you are noting the same source as the one directly preceding it, you may insert: Ibid. or Ibid., 117 (if it is the same source but a different page number). If you are citing the same page(s) as the preceding note, you do not need to include the page number(s) again. You cannot use ibid if the preceding note contains more than one source.

Single-author book

Donnelly, James. The Great Irish Potato Famine . Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001.

James Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Gloucestershire, Sutton Publishing, 2001), 126.

N Second and subsequent reference

Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine , 211.

Multi-edition book

Roy, Tirthankar. The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 . 2nd ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 , 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95.

Multi-author/editor book – two or three authors

Bay, Edna, and Donald Donham, eds. States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Contemporary Africa . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Edna Bay, and Donald Donham, eds. States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Contemporary Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 9-10.

Bay and Donham, eds. States of Violence , 15.

Multi-author/editor book – four or more authors

–Because only one name is used, use the first name listed on the title page of the book.

Prentice, Alison, et al. Canadian Women: A History . 2nd ed. Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada, 1996.

Alison Prentice, et al., Canadian Women: A History , 2nd ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada, 1996), 298.

Chapter or contribution to a multi-author book

–General format:

Contribution author’s last name, first name. “Title of Contribution.” In Title of Book . Edited by editor’s name(s), page numbers of contribution. City of publication: Publisher, year of publication.

Harrison, Dick. “Structures and Resources of Power in Early Medieval Europe.” In Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources and Artefacts . Edited by Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger, and Heimut Reimitz, 17–37. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003.

Dick Harrison, “Structures and Resources of Power in Early Medieval Europe,” in Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources and Artefacts , ed. Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger, and Heimut Reimitz (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 25–26.

Article in a scholarly (peer-reviewed) journal

Author’s last name, first name. “Title of Article.” Title of Journal volume number, issue number (date of publication): page numbers.

Combs-Schilling, M. Elaine. “Etching Patriarchal Rule: Ritual Dye, Erotic Potency, and the Moroccan Monarchy.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 4 (April 1991): 658–681.

M. Elaine Combs-Schilling, “Etching Patriarchal Rule: Ritual Dye, Erotic Potency, and the Moroccan Monarchy,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 4 (April 1991): 672.

Combs-Schilling, “Etching Patriarchal Rule,” 673.

Book review in a scholarly journal

Duncanson, Dennis. Review of Orientalism , by Edward Said. Asian Affairs 11, no. 2 (June 1980): 200-201.

Dennis Duncanson, review of Orientalism , by Edward Said, Asian Affairs 11, no. 2 (June 1980): 201.

Your writing style is crucial in convincing the reader of the validity of your argument.

Verb tense should be in the past for a research essay.

Passive voice should typically be avoided. “The government’s distribution policies were claimed to be responsible for the food shortages according to the farmers” should be reworked into the active voice , so there is a doer of the action: “The farmers blamed the government’s distribution policies for the food shortages.” Similarly, avoid beginning sentences with “It was.” Rather than “It was the farmers who blamed the government,” write “The farmers blamed the government.” Active voice essentially follows the format—subject–verb–object. Active sentences are clearer, because there is no mistaking who did what to whom , and they make a stronger statement.

The passive voice should be avoided when asserting an argument so that it is obvious whose argument is being expressed!

Word choice can either weaken or strengthen your arguments. While you should try to avoid repeating the same words in your paper, do not merely grab a word from a thesaurus that “sounds clever.” Check the exact definition and make sure you know how to use it. The more precise your word choice, the better.

For example: “Residential school officials denied Aboriginal children their heritage.” “Heritage” here is vague. Were the children brainwashed into thinking they were no longer Aboriginal? Instead, “Residential school officials denied Aboriginal children from practicing their traditional customs” is clear and indicates to the reader you are about to discuss some of the forbidden customs.

Also, never write about “the people.” “The people” is vague and indefinite. Instead, be precise and say who exactly was doing what, such as the protesters, the villagers, the majority of the upper class, etc.

Use upper case for proper nouns and titles only. Do not capitalize words like “the third world” and “the law” to stress their importance. Names of acts and treaties should be capitalized when using their formal titles. So, capitalize Act of Union, but lowercase it when you refer to it simply as “the union.”

Upper case personal titles that go before a name, but the title should be in lower case if it stands alone. For example: "Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the order," but "the kaiser gave the order." "The Archbishop of Canterbury signed the document," but "the archbishop signed the document." Always use upper case for ethnic and racial groups, i.e. First Nations, Natives and Native art, African American literature, Asian trade routes, Caucasian etc.

When referring to people by their skin colour, e.g., black and white, you do not need to use upper case. However, if you prefer to, be consistent. If you want to upper case black, then upper case white, and do so throughout your paper.

Titles in the text are treated the same way as titles in bibliographic entries. The rule of thumb is: if the work—book, treatise, painting, report, etc.—was published on its own, the title is italicized. For example, The Last Supper , The Making of the English Working Class , The World Health Report 1995 . Religious texts like the Torah and the Kuran are not italicized. Set the title in quotation marks, no italics, if the work was published as part of something else; e.g., an article in a journal or magazine, a chapter of a book, a short poem.

Contractions should never enter formal written work, unless as part of a quotation from a primary source. Contractions are two words spliced together. They include, but are not limited to: wouldn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t, weren’t, they’d. Always write out the spliced words: would not, could not, was not, were not, they would. Essentially, you should never use an apostrophe in your formal writing unless you are showing possession, as in “the labourers’ rights,” or within a direct quotation.

Possession and plural If one person or thing possesses something, you add an ’s: the artist’s work, the country’s laws. The exception is “it.” Its = possessive. It’s = contraction of “it is.” To show plural possession, add s’: the farmers’ fields, the soldiers’ morale. Do not use an apostrophe if you are simply making a noun plural.

Idiomatic expressions , like contractions, should not enter formal written work. Idioms, or expressions, tend to be metaphors that stray from their dictionary meaning. We might be “at our wit’s end” or not wanting to “rock the boat” at work. However, in your paper, do not say that two politicians “locked horns” or that a party “ran away with” the election. Be precise by saying exactly what you mean without resorting to slang or idioms: the two politicians disagreed and the party won a significant majority of the votes.

Proofreading and copy-editing are the last steps in the completion of your essay. Comb your essay for areas where formatting and style can be improved. You should have already edited for content after finishing your rough draft. Performing a spell-check is the first and easiest part of this process. Most find it helpful to then mark up a print-out of their essay, as this is how your instructor will encounter your work. Look over your essay methodically, looking at one element at a time, such as proper indentation, spacing, footnotes and bibliography, formatting, etc. Next, read your paper for things like voice, word choice, contractions, proper use of quotation marks, etc. A spell-check will not catch the improper use of homonyms, so manually check to make sure you have used the right ones, such as “their” (possessive) and “there” (place); affect (to change) and effect (the result); than (contrast) and then (time). Once you have looked over every element of your paper carefully, enter the corrections into the computer.

Finally, print off and staple your final copy to be submitted, ensuring all pages are there and in order!

The Search Closure phase is often characterized by a sense of relief. Now you can quit looking for more information put the information you found into action! Depending on how the search process went for you, you may feel satisfied with what you've accomplished or disappointed with the results (we hope it's satisfaction you're experiencing!)

Some reasons for bringing your search to a close include:

Diminishing value of results: if you've done a fairly comprehensive search, you will find that the information you continue to find is either less relevant to your needs or that it is becoming redundant. The effort of continuing to search is greater than the worth of the information you may find.

Enough: sometimes you know there's more out there, but feel that what you've collected is adequate to meet the requirements of the assignment. If you have got everything you need (and you are quite sure that nothing more is required), there's not much point in continuing to search.

Out of Time: one of the huge challenges of being a student in the 21st century is scheduling your time so that you fit in everything that needs to be done. Often the decision to stop searching for information is driven by the assignment deadline or by the need to meet other deadlines in your life. You need to fit time into your schedule to synthesize and organize the information you've found and to prepare the final 'product'.

Now write Quiz 6 on Blackboard!

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Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

Articles by Joseph Epstein

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Is a robot writing your kids’ essays? We asked educators to weigh in on the growing role of AI in classrooms.

Educators weigh in on the growing role of ai and chatgpt in classrooms..

Remember writing essays in high school? Chances are you had to look up stuff in an encyclopedia — an actual one, not Wikipedia — or else connect to AOL via a modem bigger than your parents’ Taurus station wagon.

Now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence. According to new research from Pew, about 1 in 5 US teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Kids in upper grades are more apt to have used the chatbot: About a quarter of 11th- and 12th-graders who know about ChatGPT have tried it.

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, and educators continue to grapple with the ethics surrounding its growing popularity. Essentially, it generates free, human-like responses based on commands. (I’m sure this sentence will look antiquated in about six months, like when people described the internet as the “information superhighway.”)

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I used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: “Write an essay on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Within moments, ChatGPT created an essay as thorough as anything I’d labored over in AP English.

Is this cheating? Is it just part of our strange new world? I talked to several educators about what they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it. Before you berate your child over how you wrote essays with a No. 2 pencil, here are some things to consider.

Adapting to new technology isn’t immoral. “We have to recalibrate our sense of what’s acceptable. There was a time when every teacher said: ‘Oh, it’s cheating to use Wikipedia.’ And guess what? We got used to it, we decided it’s reputable enough, and we cite Wikipedia all the time,” says Noah Giansiracusa, an associate math professor at Bentley University who hosts the podcast “ AI in Academia: Navigating the Future .”

“There’s a calibration period where a technology is new and untested. It’s good to be cautious and to treat it with trepidation. Then, over time, the norms kind of adapt,” he says — just like new-fangled graphing calculators or the internet in days of yore.

“I think the current conversation around AI should not be centered on an issue with plagiarism. It should be centered on how AI will alter methods for learning and expressing oneself. ‘Catching’ students who use fully AI-generated products ... implies a ‘gotcha’ atmosphere,” says Jim Nagle, a history teacher at Bedford High School. “Since AI is already a huge part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise our students are making it a part of their academic tool kit. Teachers and students should be at the forefront of discussions about responsible and ethical use.”

Teachers and parents could use AI to think about education at a higher level. Really, learning is about more than regurgitating information — or it should be, anyway. But regurgitation is what AI does best.

“If our system is just for students to write a bunch of essays and then grade the results? Something’s missing. We need to really talk about their purpose and what they’re getting out of this, and maybe think about different forms of assignments and grading,” Giansiracusa says.

After all, while AI aggregates and organizes ideas, the quality of its responses depends on the users’ prompts. Instead of recoiling from it, use it as a conversation-starter.

“What parents and teachers can do is to start the conversation with kids: ‘What are we trying to learn here? Is it even something that ChatGPT could answer? Why did your assignment not convince you that you need to do this thinking on your own when a tool can do it for you?’” says Houman Harouni , a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harouni urges parents to read an essay written by ChatGPT alongside their student. Was it good? What could be done better? Did it feel like a short cut?

“What they’re going to remember is that you had that conversation with them; that someone thought, at some point in their lives, that taking a shortcut is not the best way ... especially if you do it with the tool right in front of you, because you have something real to talk about,” he says.

Harouni hopes teachers think about its implications, too. Consider math: So much grunt work has been eliminated by calculators and computers. Yet kids are still tested as in days of old, when perhaps they could expand their learning to be assessed in ways that are more personal and human-centric, leaving the rote stuff to AI.

“We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration. Five years from now, you and I might be talking about schools wherein teaching and learning is happening in a very self-directed way, in a way that’s more based on … igniting the kid’s interest and seeing where they go and supporting them to go deeper and to go wider,” Harouni says.

Teachers have the chance to offer assignments with more intentionality.

“Really think about the purpose of the assignments. Don’t just think of the outcome and the deliverable: ‘I need a student to produce a document.’ Why are we getting students to write? Why are we doing all these things in the first place? If teachers are more mindful, and maybe parents can also be more mindful, I think it pushes us away from this dangerous trap of thinking about in terms of ‘cheating,’ which, to me, is a really slippery path,” Giansiracusa says.

AI can boost confidence and reduce procrastination. Sometimes, a robot can do something better than a human, such as writing a dreaded resume and cover letter. And that’s OK; it’s useful, even.

“Often, students avoid applying to internships because they’re just overwhelmed at the thought of writing a cover letter, or they’re afraid their resume isn’t good enough. I think that tools like this can help them feel more confident. They may be more likely to do it sooner and have more organized and better applications,” says Kristin Casasanto, director of post-graduate planning at Olin College of Engineering.

Casasanto says that AI is also useful for de-stressing during interview prep.

“Students can use generative AI to plug in a job description and say, ‘Come up with a list of interview questions based on the job description,’ which will give them an idea of what may be asked, and they can even then say, ‘Here’s my resume. Give me answers to these questions based on my skills and experience.’ They’re going to really build their confidence around that,” Casasanto says.

Plus, when students use AI for basics, it frees up more time to meet with career counselors about substantive issues.

“It will help us as far as scalability. … Career services staff can then utilize our personal time in much more meaningful ways with students,” Casasanto says.

We need to remember: These kids grew up during a pandemic. We can’t expect kids to resist technology when they’ve been forced to learn in new ways since COVID hit.

“Now we’re seeing pandemic-era high school students come into college. They’ve been channeled through Google Classroom their whole career,” says Katherine Jewell, a history professor at Fitchburg State University.

“They need to have technology management and information literacy built into the curriculum,” Jewell says.

Jewell recently graded a paper on the history of college sports. It was obvious which papers were written by AI: They didn’t address the question. In her syllabus, Jewell defines plagiarism as “any attempt by a student to represent the work of another, including computers, as their own.”

This means that AI qualifies, but she also has an open mind, given students’ circumstances.

“My students want to do the right thing, for the most part. They don’t want to get away with stuff. I understand why they turned to these tools; I really do. I try to reassure them that I’m here to help them learn systems. I’m focusing much more on the learning process. I incentivize them to improve, and I acknowledge: ‘You don’t know how to do this the first time out of the gate,’” Jewell says. “I try to incentivize them so that they’re improving their confidence in their abilities, so they don’t feel the need to turn to these tools.”

Understand the forces that make kids resort to AI in the first place . Clubs, sports, homework: Kids are busy and under pressure. Why not do what’s easy?

“Kids are so overscheduled in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s so much enormous pressure on these kids, whether it’s self-inflicted, parent-inflicted, or school-culture inflicted. It’s on them to maximize their schedule. They’ve learned that AI can be a way to take an assignment that would take five hours and cut it down to one,” says a teacher at a competitive high school outside Boston who asked to remain anonymous.

Recently, this teacher says, “I got papers back that were just so robotic and so cold. I had to tell [students]: ‘I understand that you tried to use a tool to help you. I’m not going to penalize you, but what I am going to penalize you for is that you didn’t actually answer the prompt.”

Afterward, more students felt safe to come forward to say they’d used AI. This teacher hopes that age restrictions become implemented for these programs, similar to apps such as Snapchat. Educationally and developmentally, they say, high-schoolers are still finding their voice — a voice that could be easily thwarted by a robot.

“Part of high school writing is to figure out who you are, and what is your voice as a writer. And I think, developmentally, that takes all of high school to figure out,” they say.

And AI can’t replicate voice and personality — for now, at least.

Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @kcbaskin .

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Sob stories? Trauma dumps? Black kids worry about writing college essays after affirmative action ban

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions.

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CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education , it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Wondering if schools ‘expect a sob story’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. … I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A ruling prompts pivots on essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

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“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process. They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Spelling out the impact of race

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black.

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University , and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Will schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

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