SELECTING A TOPIC

SELECTING A TOPIC • In selecting a topic, choose one: • That is not merely descriptive • That is narrow enough to allow you to do a decent job researching it • For which you know that sources are readily available

PRELIMINARY WORK • Perform preliminary work to make sure your topic is practical • Go to library • Check to see available sources on online catalog • Check bibliographies of selected books

PLAGIARISM • Worst sin a student can commit • Occurs when you take someone else’s words and try to pass them off as your own • When you copy someone else’s written work and then take credit for it as your own work • Avoid plagiarism by simply never copying anything down word-for-word when you do your research • Put what the author said in your own words when you take notes

FINDING SOURCES I • Don’t use encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) • And even if you use them to get started, never ever cite them • Use online library catalog to make list of possible books • Determine research value of books before checking them out • Books published by university presses are generally pretty good • Books should have scholarly apparatus • Footnotes, bibliography, good index • Stay away from self-published and vanity press books • Make sure book says something important on the specific topic you are researching

FINDING SOURCES II • Check bibliographies to find other useful sources • Other books that did not show up on online catalog search • Articles • Primary sources • Order appropriate other sources from Inter-Library Loan

THE INTERNET • Use it but be very careful • Use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Lycos • Use keywords or keyphrases to find potentially useful websites • Remember that anybody with a computer can set up a web-page and put anything they want on it • Nobody edits or checks the accuracy of web-pages

DISSERTATIONS • Mostly unpublished but they often contain tremendous quantities of useful information • Go to “Digital Dissertations” database from Library • Contains bibliographic citations for every dissertation ever written in the United States • Also contains 350-word abstracts of all dissertations written after 1980 • Has full text of 1.7 million dissertations that can be ordered from website or borrowed through Inter-Library Loan • Avoid Masters theses • Mostly horrible

PRIMARY SOURCES • Primary sources that can be found in most libraries include newspapers, bound editions of the papers and writings of historical characters, and microfilm and microfiche copies of historical documents • Other primary sources can only be found in archives • Centralized depositories for documents from a certain source

ARCHIVES • EXAMPLES • Tarleton archives in basement of Library • Contains documents, yearbooks, and newspapers on the history of the school as well as papers of several former professors • Stephenville Historical Museum • National Archives (Washington D.C.) • Has regional branch in Fort Worth • State of Texas Archives (Austin, near UT) • Church of Latter Day Saints Archive (Salt Lake City) • Contains genealogical records

THE INTRODUCTION • First paragraph • Description of the problem you are addressing and an explanation of why it is significant • Objective is to inform, rather than attract, the reader • Historiography • Set forth what other writers have said about your topic and specify where your own work is located within this historical tradition • Space devoted to this depends of the nature of your topic and the amount of previous work produced on it • Foreshadowing (optional) • Give your readers a taste of what is to come • Discussion of Methodology • Either explicitly describe your methodology here or describe your methodology as you go along in the body of your paper

BODY • Should be the longest part of your paper, the fullest in its presentation of evidence, and elaboration of argument • Do not lose sight of the forest for the trees • Do not let supporting and subsidiary material overshadow the main points of your argument • Always keep your main points to the forefront, backed up by evidence • Don’t let the evidence, no matter how colorful or interesting, take over the paper and cause you to lose sight of your main points

CONCLUSION I • Synthetic conclusion • Draw together all the threads of arguments into a coherent whole and state clearly and forcefully the conclusions you have reached after studying and analyzing the evidence, making causal explanations, and evaluating historical scholarship on your topic • Do not simply summarize what you did in the body of the paper

CONCLUSION II • Broader Implications and Further Research • If you work suggests a new way to view the past, state how your new perspective on the topic might change the views of historians on your topic • Optional—only do if appropriate

REFERENTIAL FOOTNOTES • Identification of quotations • Every direct quotation must have a footnote • Identification of ideas and information • Identification of other scholarly works • Often used to convince readers that the historian has done his or her homework and to anticipate the question of “I wonder if the author has considered the work of Historian X?”

SUBSTANTIVE FOOTNOTES I • Occasional presentation of evidence • Author may want to present a chart, table, or full text of document in a footnote • Brief discussion of methodological issues • To avoid disruption of the flow of the main text of a paper, the writer may delegate brief discussions of methodological issue to footnotes • Further explanation of ideas or arguments • Used to elaborate on ideas or arguments when further discussion of them in the body of the paper would detract from the flow or focus of paper

SUBSTANTIVE FOOTNOTES II • Historical controversies • These are relegated to footnotes if their discussion is not central to the author’s argument or if they would substantially detract from the flow of the text • Technical matter • Material that is too cumbersome or arcane to be included in the text • Identifying remarks • To identify an individual or event mentioned in the text • Digression • Insights or information unrelated to the main argument presented in the ext

BIBLIOGRAPHY • Primary function is to inform the reader of the sources that the author used to prepare his or her work • Some historians think that no item should appear in a bibliography that has not appeared in a footnote. Others argue that everything the author consulted, even if it was not included in a footnote, should be listed • Usually divided into two fundamental categories • Primary Sources • Secondary Sources • Further subdivided into “Books” and “Articles”

VERBS • Verbs form the heart of every sentence because they convey the action • Every writer should select precise verbs and avoid vague ones • What is a vague verb? • Verbs of being (“is” or “was”) • Although it is sometimes difficult to avoid them

PASSIVE VOICE • Avoid whenever possible • They often create silence and confusion about the past by obliterating historical actors altogether • They often indicate weak reasoning • They confuse the order of ideas • Although there may be cases when passive verbs are appropriate, they should be used sparingly

PAST TENSE • Historians generally write in the past tense • Helps the historian to place people and events in an intelligible chronological order • Historians only write in the present tense when they are discussing recent works or living scholars

SPLIT INFINITIVES • Infinitives are formed by adding the preposition “to” directly in front of the verb • As in “to be or not to be” • In general, it is a bad idea to place words between “to” and the verb because it throws off the logical order of ideas in a sentence • As in “to bravely be or not to be” • It is sometimes appropriate to split an infinitive • When it simply sounds better or when not doing so would place an adverb in an unnatural location

VERBLESS SENTENCES • Theoretically, a sentence can only be a sentence if it has a verb • Although it is possible to use a verbless sentence as an interjection or to add punch and color to your writing, they do not have a place in a research paper

WORD ORDER • You must unravel complexity and place your ideas in sequences of words • In each sentence, you must imagine what your reader needs to know first, second, and third • Keep related words together • And you will lead your reader seamlessly through your sentences • If you keep unrelated words together, your readers will have to pause and sort out the jumble for themselves

PRONOUNS • Pronouns substitute for nouns • But your reader must know which noun is being substituted • Always place the pronoun close to the noun • Instead of writing “Benjamin West’s painting of the death of General Wolfe demonstrates his original American style” (whose “American style?”) • Write “Benjamin West demonstrated his original American style in the painting of the death of General Wolfe”

SENTENCE STRUCTURE • Principal relationship in a sentence is between the subject and the verb • Do not put too many words in between them • It is generally acceptable to place a short statement between the subject and verb • Just don’t put too much between them

SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION • A sentence is also a place to develop an ideas • Give the reader a sense of direction • Start by summarizing the previous sentence or by mentioning an ideas that you and your reader hold in common • And then build towards your original points • Sentences must have a smooth connection • End of the sentence should be interesting and emphatic

PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION • A kind of repetition in which related ideas are expressed in a rigorously similar grammatical form • Parallel ideas are expressed by using a parallel grammatical structure • EXAMPLE • “Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment, constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible.”

APOSTROPHE “S” • Form the possessive of a singular noun by adding ‘s • Even when the noun ends in the letter s • EXAMPLE:“Cecil Rhodes’s diamond mines” • Form the possessive of a plural noun by just adding an apostrophe • EXAMPLE:“the Wright brothers’ airplane” • Don’t bother using an apostrophe to form the plural of abbreviations and numbers • EXAMPLE:“PCs” or “1980s” • Don’t use an apostrophe to form the plural • EXAMPLE: do not write “Columbus discovered the America’s”

THIS ISN’T TCU!!!! • Every once in a while you will find that strictly obeying these rules will force you to perform some unnecessary writing gymnastics • May force you to write ugly, unnatural sentences • Good historical writers understand the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law • Your first job is to get your meaning across, and to do it persuasively

WORD CHOICE • Choose words precisely • Check your writing for word choice (diction) • Avoid writing sentences that are bursting with unnecessary words • Make every word count in order to give your reader the clearest possible picture of your ideas • If you can say something in seven words, why use sixteen? • Sentences do not need to be short and choppy (once again, this will make you sound as though you are from TCU) but you should not try your reader’s patience with extra and unnecessary verbiage

LITERARY JARGON • Avoid idiocies used by literary critics in their writing • People who are different become the “subjectivized Other” • People who like to read good history “valorize the narrativization of the Subject” • While it may be fun to commit random acts of capitalization, and it is often convenient to stick an “ize” on a noun in order to create a verb, you must write in a language that your audience can understand

SOCIAL SCIENCE JARGON • Many social scientists prefer tortured jargon to ordinary words • Talking becomes “interpersonal communication” • A different way of looking a something becomes “another axis of differentiation” • This may be ok when you are writing for other social scientists, but not for a general audience

LEGAL JARGON • There are important differences between legal writing and historical writing • Lawyers write for the court and go through great lengths to make sure their clients will not get into trouble • They therefore use archaic terms, repetition, and formal words like “the party of the first part” • Ugly, ugly writing—do not use

GOVERNMENTAL JARGON • Close cousin of legal jargon • Both have the same purpose: to cover the writer’s ass • Bureaucrats, college administrators, and politicians use jargon mainly to protect themselves • Either they want to make themselves seem important or they are trying to avoid precise commitments • They take concrete examples and beautiful rhythm and turn them into abstract language and meaningless words

WORDS • Avoid complicated words, which will only confuse your reader • Avoid slang, contractions, and an overly casual tone • Known as colloquial language

INTOLERANT LANGUAGE • Avoid intolerant language • Be alert to what your audience thinks is appropriate • Some racial designations have changed over the years • Be sensitive to this because people ought to be allowed to come up with a name for themselves

GENDER • The masculine pronoun with the antecedent of indeterminate gender was appropriate at one time • But such a construction today is deemed inaccurate and biased (because it is) • But don’t’ correct this problem with such things as slashed pronouns (he/she) or use of the third person singular pronoun (“one”) • Use neutral pronouns (like “everybody”) • Or change sentence from singular to plural

EUPHEMISMS • Avoid stupid euphemisms • Such as calling stupid people “intellectually challenged” or massacred civilians “collateral damage”

METAPHORS AND SIMILES • Making an imaginative comparison with something the reader does know in order to make an unfamiliar subject understandable • Metaphors and similes add color to historical writing but it takes practice to use them well

WORDS AGAIN • Colorful expressions that have been overused are called clichés • Replace them with plain language or less predictable metaphors • When employing foreign words, use terms that your readers will understand

GOOD WRITING • GOOD WRITING IS NOT EASY • IT REQUIRES A LOT OF THOUGHT AND A LOT OF WORK • BUT IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SOUND LIKE A MORON AND IF YOU WANT TO CLEARLY CONVEY YOUR IDEAS TO YOUR READERS, IT IS DEFINITELY WORTH THE EFFORT

SELECTING A TOPIC