writting tips
Some Writing Tips
History 101, Western Civilization since 1648
John Abbott, Instructor
Your response papers are, as the phrase suggests, individual affairs. What I want, above all, is your personal response to the readings, and to the questions I’ve posed in the accompanying guidelines. In evaluating your papers, above all we consider their content: how well you address the thoughts and arguments presented by these documents, and the quality of ideas you express.
That said, please consider these papers exercises in formal writing. That means you need to adhere to the principles and rules of American English grammar and spelling. Yes, we will hold your feet to the fire on these matters.
A few tips follow, addressing problems that arose in the first batch of papers:
1) Keep your tenses straight. Few trials in life are so agonizing as working through a paragraph in which tenses shift, like a wayward eye, from present to past and back again. When you are writing about the past, stay in past tense. The exception to this comes when you find yourself interpreting historical texts (as you will do in these papers); in this case it is perfectly fine, indeed desirable, to write in the present. Think of it this way: use present tense when dealing with text, past tense when dealing with historical context. For example: “In this passage, Thucydides argues that history is not simply the stories people tell. His approach contrasted sharply with that of Herodotus, who in his account of the Persian Wars mainly collected and retold stories already in circulation.”
2) Avoid unnecessary capitalization. High-flying concepts, such as State, Religion, or Monarchy, need not – should not! – be capitalized. They did that sort of thing back in the seventeenth century, but nowadays we use lower case for just about everything save proper nouns and titles. By the way, “Bible” should be capitalized, as it is the title of a work; “God” is likewise capitalized when used in a
History 101, Western Civilization since 1648
John Abbott, Instructor
Your response papers are, as the phrase suggests, individual affairs. What I want, above all, is your personal response to the readings, and to the questions I’ve posed in the accompanying guidelines. In evaluating your papers, above all we consider their content: how well you address the thoughts and arguments presented by these documents, and the quality of ideas you express.
That said, please consider these papers exercises in formal writing. That means you need to adhere to the principles and rules of American English grammar and spelling. Yes, we will hold your feet to the fire on these matters.
A few tips follow, addressing problems that arose in the first batch of papers:
1) Keep your tenses straight. Few trials in life are so agonizing as working through a paragraph in which tenses shift, like a wayward eye, from present to past and back again. When you are writing about the past, stay in past tense. The exception to this comes when you find yourself interpreting historical texts (as you will do in these papers); in this case it is perfectly fine, indeed desirable, to write in the present. Think of it this way: use present tense when dealing with text, past tense when dealing with historical context. For example: “In this passage, Thucydides argues that history is not simply the stories people tell. His approach contrasted sharply with that of Herodotus, who in his account of the Persian Wars mainly collected and retold stories already in circulation.”
2) Avoid unnecessary capitalization. High-flying concepts, such as State, Religion, or Monarchy, need not – should not! – be capitalized. They did that sort of thing back in the seventeenth century, but nowadays we use lower case for just about everything save proper nouns and titles. By the way, “Bible” should be capitalized, as it is the title of a work; “God” is likewise capitalized when used in a