Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?

Jonathan Rees

My 11th grade English teacher was named Joan Goodman, and she was very particular about how she wanted us to write our essays. The first sentence was where the thesis went. I’m sure she didn’t put it this way, but the second sentence was where you would repeat the thesis in different words in case the person grading it was too stupid to get it the first time you wrote it. The rest of the first paragraph was for elaborating on your thesis as you began to foreshadow what would appear in the body of the essay.
Ms. Goodman told us that her method was the same method they used to teach writing to the cadets at West Point. I’ve never checked into that, but I believe it because she was equally regimented in the way she drilled her model into our heads. Ours was not to ask why. Ours was just to do or . . . Well, maybe not die, but at least get a grade too low for us to get into the Ivy League schools to which we all aspired. I internalized her methods well and it served me well for a very long time, especially in history classes by substituting facts for quotes from the novel at hand.

As I don’t write college essays anymore, this structure no longer has a great impact on my own writing. It takes pages not sentences for me to get most of my arguments out, and thankfully the blog posts that I write, which are the length of some college essays, usually have no theses in them. (Otherwise, I doubt that I’d enjoy writing them so much.)

I do, however, subject my own students to the Joan Goodman/West Point writing model even if I pride myself in being a little less martial about it than she was. If you’re writing a paper that’s longer than eight pages, there’s no reason you can’t have one of those flowery introductions that most English teachers seem to love. You’ve got a lot of space to fill. The same thing goes for people who like to put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph. If it’s going to be a long paper, there’s no reason that you can’t elaborate on what the thesis means as well as the rest of the paper in paragraph number two.

However, when it comes to the four to six page papers that are the bread and butter of the upper-level undergraduate history course, I might as well be a drill sergeant. Even though I don’t remember Ms. Goodman ever explaining it this way, I have come to see the first sentence as the prime real estate in any college essay. It is not just the only sentence where a student can be assured of their professor’s undivided attention, it is the perfect place to set up for an explanation of what the student is thinking (which has always been my main criterion for grading).

A few weeks ago in my labor history class, I got the worst pushback I’ve ever experienced on this from one of my students. “I’ll give you your first sentence thesis, but next semester I’m going back to writing it the way I like it,” she told me. While I wish I had the quick thinking skills to compliment her on her newfound flexibility, my response was slightly different. “I don’t want you to write this way because I tell you so,” I explained. “I want you to write this way because you think it’s the best way to write.”

It’s at that point when I started singing. I don’t sing well, so I don’t do it often, but I do think it illustrates my reasoning (not to mention Joan Goodman’s) here well. Imagine an opera singer doing scales. They begin low, gradually get higher and end with a note that catches your attention. The problem with that in a writing context is that every note in a first paragraph should catch your attention. That’s the only way that anyone can make a complex argument well. A good first paragraph, in other words, should be all high notes.

In my experience, students who put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph think their heavy lifting is then over. Without explanation and elaboration, the thesis falls to the wayside for the rest of the paper and I’m left reading mostly book summary. Using the end of the paragraph thesis model is too often an excuse to stop thinking. Putting the thesis at the beginning forces them to explain what they mean in some detail before they ever get to the details of the history at hand.

I teach writing not just because I have to, but because I get better papers that way. This, in turn, makes my job more fun. So thank you Joan Goodman (as well as a few other excellent English teachers from the Princeton, New Jersey public schools). You’re why I take my students’ complaints that I secretly wanted to be an English teacher as the highest form of compliment.

Writing that Book After Work Hours: Why and How

Philip White

In a perfect world, each historian with a worthy book proposal would earn an advance large enough to enable him or her to focus solely on crafting a top notch manuscript. In reality, for those of us who write history in addition to working outside the academy, we work to convince university presses that our ideas are “academic” enough and trade presses that our book will be “marketable.” Once we get a deal it barely allows us to get enough Starbucks coffee to fuel late-night writing sessions after our “real” jobs are done for the day. After the tax collector has taken a cut and we’ve plumped down the cash for research trips, bought enough books to buckle already-burdened shelves, and purchased enough aspirin to kill a small horse, we’re typically left with a pittance. So why do we put ourselves through this?

It can’t just be because we’re suckers, or so I keep telling myself as my bloodshot eyes struggle to comprehend the horror of reading “2:00” again—and I’m not talking p.m.—on my bedside clock as I stumble into my bed, fearing the alarm that will blare in not even five hours.

Well, one reason is a cliché, but true nonetheless—love. Love of the subject matter, the new angle we’ve come up with, the historical characters we’re impatient for our potential readers to meet on the page. For me, it is all of these, plus the thrill of finding a detail that I’ve never seen before, something I’ve just discovered in a dusty archive file after a day of previously fruitless searching.

Another bonus is mastery, relative though that is, of our subject matter. Often, this involves the painful recognition that presuppositions we formed years ago are wildly inaccurate—a revelation that only comes from digesting a broad range of scholarly works to get as close to the “truth” as we can. We then do our own primary and secondary source work, which takes apart yet more generic or personal misconceptions, while supplying new facts to take their place. Supplement that with oral history, archival work and such and you can get dangerously close to (gulp!) writing a book with something new and important to say.

So now I’ve covered the “why,” at least in part, onto the “how.” Yes, the aforementioned caffeine, applied in careful doses that don’t cumulatively turn you into a jabbering, twitchy wreck that can’t sleep, is certainly needed. Beyond that there are the principles of organization and prioritization. The fact that you have might have a main job in which you must give your best effort, maybe a family and possibly, you slacker, some other, non-work interests, means you are dealing with very limited time. The first step in getting organized is working with your family to set up a realistic schedule that won’t push you over the edge or deny them the time they need. Then, you must find a suitable workspace in which distractions are minimal, a desk uncluttered and all the resources you need at your disposal. If this sounds elementary, forgive me, but it’s amazing how many wasted hours result from trying to eke out a first draft in a noisy, crowded, disorganized workspace. Next, you need to set yourself some deadlines, even if they’re “soft,” with your manuscript submission date in mind.

Once you’ve got these basics down, got all your research materials together and are ready to jump in, you need to prioritize. What are you going to tackle first, and why? List making may seem like a chore, but well ordered to-dos for each aspect of your project are useful: “Things to Ask My Advisor,” “Interviews to Conduct,” “Archives to Visit,” and so on. Then you must decide how much time to give to each list, and then each item on your list, in order to meet those established deadlines. It’s satisfying to get out the red pen and cross off items, one by one.

The third stage of getting a well-written book completed on time is execution. All the organization and prioritization in the world is useless if you’re not going to actually hunker down and get the thing written. This is tied to the umbrella over the three components—discipline. It takes discipline to clear your workspace, organize your folders so they’re easy to navigate, apportion your time adequately, and then to execute. Discipline is needed to say “no” when your buddies invite you out for a few cold ones or when you want to watch your favorite team lose again. It also takes discipline to listen to your body’s warning signals and take a night off when you need it.

If you can combine organization, prioritization, discipline, and execution you will be able to have fun with your research and writing processes, to eliminate wasted time and to create a finished product you can be proud of. And that, ultimately, makes the crappy advance, the sleep deprivation, and the raging caffeine addiction more than worth it!

The Historical Society's 2012 Conference

Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils

Columbia, SC, Thursday May 24 - Saturday May 26, 2012

Professional historians in the United States are increasingly being called upon to produce more “popular,” more accessible history. How do and how should academic historians reach popular audiences? How and to what extent is “popular” history written around the world? Does the meaning of and audience for “popular history” vary from place to place? Along with professional historians, states, elites, and a variety of interest groups have long had an interest in sponsoring, supporting, and generating historical knowledge for popular and other audiences. We seek paper and panel proposals that will consider “popular” history in its various guises and locales. How and to what extent is the interest in “popular” history genuinely new or does it have a deeper genealogy? How do and how should historians interact with television and movie production or write op-ed pieces or blogs or serve as expert witnesses? Is there such a thing as a truly “popular” history? Do we need a distinctive “popular history” and are historians
properly equipped to write it?

We especially encourage panel proposals, though individual paper proposals are welcome as well. And our interpretation of “panel” is broad: 2 or more presenters constitute a panel—chairs and commentators are optional. As at past conferences, we hope for bold yet informal presentations that will provoke lots of questions and discussion from the audience, not presenters reading papers word-for-word from a podium followed by a commentator doing the same.

Please submit proposals (brief abstract and brief CV) by December 1, 2011 to Mark Smith and Dean Kinzley, 2012 Program Chairs, at jslucas@bu.edu.

Editors . . . Editing?

Randall Stephens

Last week Alex Clark wrote of the "Lost Art of Editing" in the Guardian. Presses have been cutting back for some time now. "Many speak of the trimming of budgets," notes Clark, "the increasingly regimented nature of book production and of the pressure on their time, which means they have to undertake detailed and labour-intensive editing work in the margins of their daily schedule rather than at its centre." A freelancer Clark consulted told him: "'big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint.'"

Clark's mostly talking about literary fiction here. But the cutting back on editing--line, copy, content--is something I've heard about repeatedly from historians and editors at university and trade presses.

You can do a thing or two to counter the trend. Have multiple historians, experts in your field, read your work. Getting far more than your two MS reviewers to take a look at your work will be a big plus. And, readers will probably be happy to have you return the favor for them at a later date.

See if you can get a second copy editor to go over your manuscript. I was able to work this out with Harvard Univ. Press for my first book, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. It helped. The two copy editors caught loads of grammatical infelicities, leaps in logic, spelling mistakes, etc. that I didn't have eyes to see. (It's even worth shelling out the money for an extra copy editor, if you can afford the $500 or so.)

And, finally, ask those at the press that you are speaking to if editors do much "editing." How will your editor help you shape your MS? Talk to authors who have worked with that editor in the past to see what goes into the process. Does she have a hands-off approach? Will she help you craft your argument and ask for important revisions?

More on Our Virginia: Past and Present

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Harper's Magazine includes some of the findings of a "Report on the Review of Virginia’s Textbook Adoption Process, the Virginia Studies Textbook Our Virginia: Past and Present, and Other Selected United States History Textbooks." Heather blogged about the controversy surrounding the adoption of the textbook and some of its pseudohistory here. Now we return to it with more on the text's creative or unknowing anachronisms . . . I didn't see anything in the report about John Quincy Adams being a founding father.

The reviewers of the text included: Christopher Einolf (DePaul University); Mary Miley Theobald (Retired: Virginia Commonwealth University); Brent Tarter (Retired: Library of Virginia); Ronald Heinemann (Retired: Hampden-Sydney College); Lauranett L. Lee (Curator of African American History, Virginia Historical Society).

A note to any future textbook writers out there: Check your sources and then check them again. Or, at least have sources. Don't make things up.

I include below a sampling of the official critique. The items in quotes are from Our Virginia:

“In 1607 Queen Elizabeth sent three ships to found Jamestown, Virginia.” That would have been difficult, since Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and neither she nor her successor, King James, “sent” any ships. They approved when a private company, the Virginia Company, sent ships to Jamestown, and no doubt King James approved when the colonists astutely named the town after him.

“They had been terribly persecuted and had seen friends killed.” I would like to know the source for this statement. I’ve never heard of Pilgrims being killed in England. Mostly they left England because they wanted to get away from the bad influences of the established Anglican Church. The statement seems over-the-top, but I can’t prove or disprove.

“Very few people in colonial America could read . . .” This is a myth. The overwhelming majority of white colonists were literate. In New England, literacy rates were higher than elsewhere because there were more schools and there was an emphasis on learning to read the Bible, but even in Virginia and other Southern colonies, almost all white men and even most white women could read in the eighteenth century. Percentages change over time, always growing larger, but even in the seventeenth century, about 60% of men in Virginia could read and about a quarter of the women. Figures are higher for the northern colonies. At no time in American history did “very few people” know how to read (unless one is talking about African Americans or Native Americans).

“. . . until you realize that it hurt America’s tea makers, whose tea already had a heavy tax.” America didn’t have any tea makers; the climate isn’t suited to growing tea. American had merchants who sold smuggled tea, avoiding the tax. Again, I understand it is hard to explain a complicated issue in simplistic terms, but this treatment of the Tea Act isn’t accurate.

“Washington and French General Lafayette inspect troops before the Battle of Morristown in New Jersey.” First of all, there was no Battle of Morristown. Morristown was where Washington and his troops wintered in 1777 (January 6- May 28). Second, Lafayette was not a general until July 31, 1777 and didn’t even meet George Washington until August 10, 1777, long after Morristown, so they wouldn’t have been reviewing any troops.

“Cyrus McCormick’s young grandson was there on the day the reaper was tested.” (then the book quotes the grandson’s “eyewitness ” account). Since Cyrus McCormick was 22 in 1831 when he first tested his reaper, it is unlikely his grandson was present. The reason this grandson’s account is quoted is to “prove” that a black slave, Jo Anderson, helped invent the reaper. While the slave helped with all the farm work, including building a reaper, he should not be credited as a co-inventor, as some Politically Correct people would like. It is a serious mistake to title this section “Anderson and McCormick’s Reaper.” It was Cyrus McCormick’s reaper. http://www.virginialiving.com/articles/lion-of-the- hour/index.html

“The Quakers, a religious group, believed that all people were created by God.” A rather unnecessary sentence, don’t you think? What religious group does not believe that all people were created by God? It doesn’t say anything about the Quakers’ beliefs. It might be better to note that they were Christian pacifists who believed all people were equal, even women, Indians, and blacks.

“Evenings were spent playing cards or checkers, writing letters to loved ones, reading old worn newspapers, and playing baseball by torchlight.” That would be some trick, playing baseball by torchlight, since you couldn’t see to catch a ball. Torches give off almost no light beyond a few feet from the flame. I have never seen any mention of playing baseball by torchlight.

“Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the South’s largest cities. It was an important railroad hub . . .” Yes, Atlanta was a railroad hub, but it was one of the smaller cities in the South. In the 1860 census, Atlanta ranks 99th among American cities, with a population of 9,000. The South had many, many cities larger than Atlanta, including Baltimore at 212,000, New Orleans at 169,000, Louisville at 68,000, Richmond at 38,000 (25th), etc. Georgia alone had three cities larger than little Atlanta: Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt

Map showing Fort Necessity (which is spelled wrong as Neccesity) locates the fort in the wrong state. Fort Necessity is in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. Fort Duquesne is also in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. (The text accurately states that Fort Duquesne is near Pittsburgh, but the map positions it in Ohio.)

St. Louis is always written as St., not Saint.>>>

Historians Teaching Grammar

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I’ve experimented a lot with how to teach writing. Increasingly, I get a significant number of students who don’t even know what a sentence is. Of course this means I spend most of my time on the larger picture of writing: thesis statements, structure, supporting evidence and so on.

But at some point, I got tired of correcting the same grammatical errors for the thousandth time. That frustration made me play around with some new approaches. One of the ones that seems to work is to treat the mechanics of writing like mathematical principle. Rather than repeatedly marking certain grammatical errors that come up again and again, and reminding the students to pay attention to them, I have taught the rule AS A RULE and told the students that this is the way things are, just as 2 + 2 + 4. Always. Period. I told them I would not accept any more mistakes on that particular rule. I’m still experimenting with how frequently I can introduce a new no-break rule, but one a week seems an acceptable pace for now.

Far from resenting this rote method—which conjures for me that dreadful orange grammar text we dragged ourselves through in eighth grade—the students seem thrilled to have found something they can hang on to with certainty in their writing. Yes, they still mess the rules up, but far less frequently. And when they do, I can just mark the error without explaining the rule in my comments.

I recently put to paper my four favorite rules for high school students. These are the ones that if violated immediately marks an essay as grammatically problematic (although they are only the top four). I’d like to keep building this list, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know.

Four crucial rules for ratcheting up your writing:

1. Make sure your subject and verb agree. For example: "Bats in the tent behind the tree were (not was) black."

2. Get your verb tenses correct. (This one is the hardest one on the list. Let me give you some tricks to get it right. First of all, put everything in past tense. English teachers sometimes get upset at that advice because they argue that literature is alive, and thus should be discussed in present tense. Yep. Okay. Got it. Now ignore that instruction unless you have a teacher that absolutely insists on it. Most readers are quite content to have everything in a single tense, and the past is a zillion times easier to manage in an essay than the present. Second, everyone—absolutely everyone—screws up the past and the past perfect. Don’t worry about the names of the tenses. Figure it out this way: imagine your action on a timeline. The majority of what’s happening in your essay will be in past tense. IF SOMETHING HAPPENS BEFORE THE MAJORITY OF THE ACTION, slip in a verb that indicates an earlier time. Usually, this will be the word “had.” For example: “He hoped that the ship would arrive that day, but he HAD heard the day before that it would be late.” This won’t always work, but it will work often enough that it’s worth doing. Just as if you were speaking, by the way.

3. An introductory clause always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, (get the picture?) always, always, always, ALWAYS modifies the noun that comes immediately after it. ALWAYS. So:

“Running down the alley, he dropped the knife,” is correct.

“Running down the alley, the knife dropped from his hand,” is wrong, wrong, wrong, because the knife is not running down the alley.

4. Keep your writing in active voice. Avoid passives whenever possible (which is about 98.5% of the time). This is a very hard thing for students to manage, for two reasons. First of all, for some reason we have this weird idea that it sounds smart to write prose that has no action, as if somehow it makes us sound learned and above the fray to write as if events just occur. Second, using passive voice makes it possible to refrain from taking any sort of position on your topic. In passive voice, things just happen; you don’t have to explain why or how they happened. Passive voice is disastrous for both writers and thinkers. Take a look at this example: Here are two ways to write about a horrific massacre of more than 250 people, shot and knifed as they surrendered to soldiers. So which is more honest? “Two hundred and fifty people were shot,” or “Angry soldiers murdered two hundred and fifty women and children”? In the first, the deaths just happen; no one is at fault. In the second, I have squarely blamed the murders on the people who committed them. In the second version I’ve tried to explain an event, the actors, and the action. I’ve had to figure out exactly what happened, I’ve thought about the action, and I’ve taken a stand. And that’s why we write, isn’t it? To tell someone about the world. Active voice makes you stick your neck out, and it will make people angry at times. But it enables you to contribute your own ideas and vision to the world. Plus it’s a zillion times more fun to read than passive voice!

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching? Part III

Randall Stephens

Guess what? Many college students do not learn analytical and writing skills during the four years they spend in college. Students don't study. Courses are not demanding. Collaborative learning does not work like professors think or hope it does. . .

Or, so argues a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. More and more students--more likely parents--are throwing down the cash for college. But the authors ask: "are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?"

Last week the Chronicle highlighted Academically Adrift and the authors' controversial findings. (David Glenn, "New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps," Chronicle, January 18, 2011.) Arum and Roksa tracked 2,000 students at 24 four-year colleges. Thirty-six percent of these students who took the Collegiate Learning Assessment essay test showed no significant improvement from their freshman to senior year.

Arum and Roksa certainly have their critics. The study asked too few questions about collaborative learning, say some. Others say that the study, limited in scope, should not challenge the whole undergraduate enterprise.

But, overall, the findings should give us pause. "Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa don't see any simple remedies for the problems they have identified," writes David Glenn in the Chronicle. "They discovered more variation in CLA-score gains within institutions than across institutions, and they say there are no simple lessons to draw about effective and ineffective colleges." Still, Glenn points out that business and education programs in Texas colleges require that students "take only a small number of writing-intensive courses." The path of least resistance.

Are students today less likely to major in history when the workload is high and the perceived payoff is so low? ("So I'm going to spend all this time reading primary and secondary works just so I can be unemployed after four years of reading, writing, and reading some more?") Five years ago Robert Townsend noted in Perspectives that: "Information from the latest Department of Education (DoE) report (pertaining to the years 1997–98 to 2001–02) suggests that in the competition for students, history lost ground while the total number of undergraduate students at colleges and universities grew quite quickly." I haven't see more recent data, but I can't help but think that there are fewer majors today then there were 20 years ago.

Perhaps history departments could do a better job of emphasizing the portable skills students learn in the major. Why not stress in clear terms that history trains students to think critically and to write clearly? I have my students read Peter Stearns excellent essay, "Why Study History," for this very reason. They learn that history students gain: "The Ability to Assess Evidence. . . . The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations. . . . Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change." Stearns ably shows that "Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential." I've also had students read Heather's excellent post on this subject from our blog. She noted: "History is the study of how and why things happen. What creates change in human society? What stops it? Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? . . . . When you study history, you’re not just studying the history of, for example, colonial America. You’ll learn a great deal about the specifics of colonial America in such a class, of course, but you’ll also learn about the role of economics in the establishment of human societies and about how class and racial divisions can either weaken the stability of a government or be used to shore it up."

Sounds like a cure for the "I-learned-little-in-four-years-of-college" blues.

Writing History and the Crisis in Punditry

Heather Cox Richardson

Participating in the discussion over the media’s role in the tragedy in Tucson, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi makes the point that media figures get their market share by offering their audience a certain kind of emotional charge, reassuring them that they are better than “the other.”

Where entertainers will go for inspiration now that that dog-whistle kind of performance is suspect, he doesn’t have a firm idea.

It seems to me that historians have, at this point, a great opening to jump into the public conversation. My friend and literary agent, Lisa Adams, is always reminding me that readers want to feel smarter after they invest time reading something. If, indeed, there is a market for making people feel superior, why can’t we invest our energies in making people feel smarter with good facts and argument, presented accessibly?

There is an unfortunate tendency among academics to suggest that anything written for a popular audience must be “dumbed down.” This is wrong. On the contrary, pieces written for non-academics must be smarter than anything we consume within the academy. Untrained historians will not accept a book that uses theory as shorthand in place of an explanation for how something actually happened (but they will happily accept theoretical constructs if they are proven). They will not endure poor writing, or incomplete explanations. Indeed, rather than dumbing down our arguments, it seems to me that writing for a non-academic audience often forces academic historians to give up the jargon and shortcuts that allow them to advance arguments their facts don’t prove.

At a time when there is a vacuum in the public arena waiting to be filled by writers who can offer a new kind of intellectual rush, historians have a unique opportunity to step up to the plate.

And it might just be good for us.

Bad Company and Good Prose

Heather Cox Richardson

Once again, I have been keeping bad company. This time my unsavory companion is Thurlow Weed, master wire-puller of nineteenth-century New York politics, and the mastermind of much that I find troubling in the deeply troubled years of the Civil War era.

Fortunately, Weed kept quite good company himself. . . at least after he died. Historian Glyndon Van Deusen produced a biography of Weed in 1947 from which I have learned more than I wanted to know about New York politics, but from which I have also gotten new ideas about the importance of engaging prose. Van Deusen’s book is remarkably readable. Here he is, for example, on the industrial world of the late nineteenth century:

The Civil War and the ensuing years saw the opening of a new era in American life. In the North, a great migration of farmers swept into the lands west of the Mississippi, transforming that region into the granary of the world. Industry assumed gigantic proportions. The smoke that belched from thousands of chimney stacks, the fires that glowed at night in the steel towns, symbolized opportunities that drew a motley crowd of dreamers and spoilers, builders and wreckers, into the industrial cockpit. Chambers of commerce increased and multiplied, side by side with Murderers’ Alleys and Poverty Lanes. Sleek dwellers in brownstone fronts and gimcrack chateaux looked down their noses at their country cousins, and shuddered with distaste as they saw trade-unions take root and grow in the darkness and squalor of the tenement districts. The age of Big Business had arrived, with all its glory and all its shame. (317)

This paragraph carries the weight of setting up the postwar world in which Weed operated, and it does so pretty thoroughly, it seems to me. Van Deusen creates a memorable paragraph primarily through his use of striking nouns—granary, dreamers, spoilers, builders, wreckers, cockpit, Murderers’ Alleys, and so on—an unusual technique compared to the more common reliance on strong verbs. He uses strong verbs, too, of course. The sentence: “Sleek dwellers in brownstone fronts and gimcrack chateaux looked down their noses at their country cousins, and shuddered with distaste as they saw trade-unions take root and grow in the darkness and squalor of the tenement districts” uses both nouns and verbs effectively to create a portrait of the era.

Surprisingly, Van Deusen does not use color, smell, or specific images to convey his point. Perhaps those are techniques of a later generation of writers, but color, at least, would have fit well here.

This sort of sweeping paragraph is less popular nowadays than it was in 1947. Today’s editors seem to prefer an individual point of view rather than the sort of omniscience Van Deusen uses. Today’s cry is for “boots on the ground,” an individual set of eyes through which a reader can see.

While I’m all for the idea of carefully constructed individual points of view, abandoning this older style entirely seems to me a loss. For me, these bird’s-eye snapshots provide the backdrop in front of which the action takes place, kind of a scan of the area before focusing on the figures in the foreground.

Am I the only one who likes these old-fashioned broad-brush descriptions?

The Journal Standard

Chris Beneke

Historians are people of the book. We write piles of them—monographs, textbooks, and edited books, strictly academic books and books intended (usually with no foundation in reality) for the bestseller list. Some of our better books are histories of the book; some of our better historians are historians of the book. We cherish books dearly, not least for their narrative artistry. But we also value their utility within the academic world. At research universities and colleges with research aspirations, after all, the scholarly book serves as the elusive ticket to the vastly overrated world of the tenured, Associate Professor, and later to invitations to speak, comment, and publish still more books.

It’s probably safe to say that, as a profession, we are agreed that a series of significant journal articles or book chapters may substitute for “the Book” when it comes to things like tenure and promotion. Harvard probably won’t grant you tenure for such an achievement—to be honest, Harvard won’t grant you tenure under any circumstances—but other research-oriented institutions probably will. Still, “the Book” rules in nearly every history department at every institution that aspires to climb the U.S. News rankings. “How’s your book coming along?” is the haunting refrain that echoes in the corridors of the Marriotts and Grand Hyatts at convention time.

It’s no revelation that different criteria prevail in disciplines such as medicine, engineering, business mathematics, and the natural sciences. For scholars in these fields, books often connote “textbooks” and are therefore of little interest to serious scholars. What matters is journal publication—and not just in any old venue. Hits in so-called A-list journals are coveted. Even in the social sciences and some of the humanities, junior faculty are expected to produce journal articles and book chapters, but nothing in codex with a single author’s name on it.

In short, historians are producing, recognizing, and even celebrating work that runs sharply against the grain of research in other disciplines. To put it in the bluntest terms, we have a Book Standard; they have a Journal Standard. It’s not that we don’t value that other form of scholarly currency. We just don’t value it quite as much.

Nonetheless, the advantages of the Journal Standard to university administrators and trustees who are seeking both transparency and higher, measurable rates of faculty research production is almost self-evident. Journals are ranked according to clear-cut categories, typically from A to C. An article in an A-list journal can be treated like another A-list journal. That isn’t the case with books. To this point, blessedly, we haven’t had to bother with such lists. The unfortunate consequence is that a book’s “impact” may now be more difficult to demonstrate.

Of course, we know that Harvard, Yale, Chicago University Press, etc. are selective and prestigious publishers. But do we know anything more than that? And, if we don’t, aren’t we, the authors of such books, liable to inflate their value? That is certainly the conclusion that an administrator or trustee, especially one trained outside the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, might draw. Even humanists could be tempted by such heretical logic.

We might look upon the situation as analogous to that faced by the United States in the late nineteenth century. To pay for the massive buildup of forces in the Civil War, the federal government issued paper “greenbacks,” which were not directly convertible to specie (gold or silver, etc.). The unsurprising result was inflation. In an attempt to limit price increases, currency fluctuations, and speculation, the United States, along with much of the industrializing West, moved to a Gold Standard.

It’s not hard to see the current evaluation regime in universities as equivalent to a return to the Gold Standard following a massive expansion in scholarly output (we could likewise imagine our books as the equivalent of silver coinage and our relatively balanced treatment of both books and journal articles as something akin to of bimetallism). To historians, of course, books are golden. But that’s not necessarily how the rest of the university will see them in the future, or even now. Moreover, if administrators and scholars in other fields have clear metrics for gauging the impact of non-historical work and ranking their non-historical outlets and we do not, we may find ourselves at a severe disadvantage in the quest for scarce research resources. We may also hurt the very scholarly form that we claim to prize too much to defend in instrumental terms.

Here’s the payoff: To save scholarly historical books and the sustained research efforts that they represent, we may need to think hard about the impact (I won’t quibble now about the use of that term) of such books. That might mean doing things that are unpalatable to humanists, like going beyond the perennial questions asked by promotion and tenure committees (e.g. How many journal articles does it take to equal one scholarly monograph?) and consider ranking book publishers across all fields of history and within them. We might need to find some weighted measure of reviews (determined partially by the journals in which they appear), as well as working to track and recognize citations made many years after publication. We could also tighten up the peer review process, attempt to account for the influence of subventions, and properly credit books that only appear online. In other words, to ensure that our work is fairly judged and equally valued, and to save these often beautiful, extended works of scholarship that we call “books” (whose covers are still adorned with old paintings and sharp modern designs) we may have to set aside our reservations and occasionally treat them as nothing more than well recognized and secure mediums of scholarly exchange.

On Writing and Editing

Randall Stephens

I took some time out of my large lecture course this week to talk to students about writing. Fresh on my mind was Rachel Toor's essay.

I always enjoy reading Toor "on writing" in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This week's piece was especially interesting. Toor muses on the question: "So how do you learn to edit yourself?" True enough, seeing faults in your own work is sometimes harder than seeing them in the work of others. It's the splinter in his/her eye vs. the plank in yours.

Rachel Toor, "How Do You Learn to Edit Yourself?" Chronicle of Higher Education, September 27, 2010.

"Where do you go for help? The obvious first step is, of course, to acknowledge that you need help. Then go buy one of the zillions of books on writing well. They all say basically the same things. Find one that speaks to you in a way that you can hear.

Call me fusty and old-fashioned, but I heart Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, now in its 956th edition. My students receive it like a gift and tend to have two reactions: "How come no one ever told me to read this book?" And "OMG, I'm so embarrassed—I'm a terrible writer and make tons of mistakes." As Dorothy Parker said, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.">>>

See also,

Lewis Thomas, "Notes on Punctuation."

William Zinsser, "Writing English as a Second Language," American Scholar (Winter 2010).

Michael C. Munger, "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 6, 2010.

Heather Cox Richardson, "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VId: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course," THS Blog, July 27, 2009.

Index cards are so 1985

Jonathan Rees

Today's guest post comes from Jonathan Rees, professor of history at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He's the author of Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942 (University Press of Colorado, 2010). He also blogs about historical matters at More or Less Bunk.

I’ve never taken a poll on the subject, but I strongly suspect that many of my fellow historians first encountered a college library the same way I did: as a member of their high school debating team. If by chance you weren’t a debate geek like me, let me briefly explain the way the system worked (and still does). The National Forensics League, the big national high school debate group, would give all students in the country a big, broad topic. The one I remember most fondly from my years in high school was court reform. You would research a more specific reform to propose when you were taking the affirmative. My partner Ahmed and I proposed a federal reporter shield law that year. You had to have a case for reform with plenty of specific factual evidence ready before the summer was even over if you were going to compete successfully on a national level. That’s why you had to go to a college library, to find lots of relevant information fast.

The harder side to argue was always the negative. While you could prepare your affirmative case in advance, you never knew what reform the other team would propose until their first speaker started talking. That’s when you had to make a mad dash to your file box of index cards to prepare a crash course on just about anything so that you could convince the judge to shoot their case down. Speed was of the essence. If you couldn’t gather your evidence before it was your turn to speak, you might very well stand up there with no experts to cite, and who’d believe you then?

When I went to graduate school, I took my debate-ready research habits with me. My dissertation was like a big affirmative case with loads of index cards covering every aspect of my subject and huge piles of copies replacing the debate briefs that some firms sold in order to make arguing anything easier. Lucky for me, there was no time limit. I’m not talking about the overall project (which I got done in what was a very reasonable time for a history PhD, if I say so myself). I’m talking about finding individual quotations from sources that I’d copied or transferred to index cards. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent digging through cards and papers looking for something I knew I had read, but couldn’t exactly remember where.

When I started my second book in 1999, the one after my dissertation, I decided to rectify this problem. I bought an early-computerized notes program. After writing a different book in the interim, I just finished almost all of the manuscript from that earlier project in a major writing tear over this last summer. As a result of my delay, it took me ten years to realize how great computerized notes programs really are. It was hard enough back in graduate school to find things that I’d read only a month or a year before. Try finding things that you wrote down over a decade ago! Even the program I bought way back in 1999 allowed me to search my notes by individual words. This not only saved me time, it made it possible for me to quickly regain intellectual control over a huge amount of information.

Recently, I asked two separate historians whose work I greatly admire what notes program they used. In each instance, they looked at me like I was speaking Greek. I tried to explain to them the advantages that I’ve described here, but they were both of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of research. Certainly using pen and paper for notes won’t prevent them from doing more great work in the future (albeit slower than it would otherwise have to be), but I figure my students might as well keep up with the times. I’m teaching both the undergraduate and graduate history research classes this semester, so I’ve required them to use the newest generation in notes programs: Zotero.

Unlike the hundred dollars I plopped down in 1999, Zotero is free. It was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and it’s really quite an incredible program. It not only allows you to search through your notes by word or by category the same way my decade-old notes program did, it allows you to pull in PDFs or screenshots from the web and search through those too. Suppose you find a full-view book on Google Books that you like (a common occurrence for those of us who work on American history before 1923). Zotero will record the entire lengthy, complicated URL automatically so that you can get back to it easily. Furthermore, you don’t need a web connection to use Zotero, so you can enter information manually and search through that the same way that you find material in these easy-to-record web items.

Until very recently, I would have said the one pitfall of using Zotero is that it only worked through the Firefox browser, a browser that has looked less and less useful to me the more I experiment with other choices. It turns out they just took care of that problem. Indeed, you can now get Zotero as a stand alone program so that you don’t even need to use a browser at all.

With the introduction of Google Books, newspaper databases like Chronicling America from the Library of Congress and comprehensive journal databases like Jstor, history research has changed forever. You don’t need to be near a great library to have access to scads of excellent primary sources. The main problem that students and historians alike now face, if they want to write about the last two or three hundred years, is not too little information, but too much. In the future, the quantity of sources will tell us little about research, it’s the ability to find the right information for any given point that will matter the most. You can still write history using methods that stood in good stead back in 1985, but if there’s a new way to manage gobs of information faster, why wouldn’t you want to try it?

James McPherson and Gordon Wood on Writing History

Randall Stephens

I've been looking here and there for good material to use in a Senior Thesis course I'm teaching this fall. I wanted to find ways for students to better understand the writing process. We have days set aside in the syllabus--which I borrowed shamelessly from my colleague Don Yerxa--for discussing research topics; history-writing standards; taking notes; proper citation; style; building an argument; etc.

But from the outset, I figured it would be useful to introduce them to some heavyweights in the field who have good advice to dispense. Lucky for me that Book TV includes many of its clips on YouTube. (Others streamed on the Book TV site haven't worked quite as well for me. Plus, the great thing about YouTube is that you can load the complete video before heading off to class, and still show it even if you don't have an internet connection.)

In the embedded and linked clips below, which I'll be showing in class tomorrow, Gordon Wood and James McPherson talk about the writing process, organizing research, and more. I would embed the Wood clip here also, but looks like that feature has been disabled. (Will like to see what my students think about McPherson's use of an electric typewriter.)



Book TV: Gordon Wood on Writing and Research, September 2010.

See also: John Fea's great live-blogging coverage of Wood's recent appearance on Book TV; Timothy L. Schroer, "Placing the Senior Capstone Course within the History Program," Perspectives on History, April 2009; and Heather Cox Richardson's series of posts on this blog concerning "Richardson's Rules of Order: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College Course."

June Issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The June issue of Historically Speaking is now up at Project Muse. (We couldn't be more pleased with the terrific work the Muse people are doing. Readers can finally consistently read HS on-line. Scanning back issues is now in the works.)

The June issue includes a lively forum on Charles Joyner's classic Down by the Riverside. It also contains interviews and the usual fare of insightful essays.

In "The Art of History" popular historian Ian Mortimer throws down the gauntlet. Academic historians, in his estimation, don't care all that much about writing, narrating, and dramatic story telling. "Most professional historians do not understand the art of history," he asserts. "Quite what constitutes the 'art' seems to be the problem. Is it originality of thought, a distinct literary voice, innovative writing, sensitivity to public perceptions and assumptions about the past, or clarity of expression? Or something else entirely? Whatever the answer, these suggestions by themselves indicate that some of the activities associated with the 'art' do not figure prominently in university departments. Literary skill is almost always downgraded by academics to a supplementary role—supporting an analytical process but always subordinate to it. Originality is surprisingly rarely valued in academic circles: when it is most clearly displayed, it often proves to be the catalyst for its protagonist to be declared a 'maverick.' No historical departments (as far as I know) encourage their members to be sensitive to public perceptions and assumptions. Few historians have actively explored what drama, suspense, and literary conceits can add to a narrative. Creative writing is never discussed in historical journals, even though it is implicit in the very act of writing something new. All in all, historians seem generally oblivious to the basic fact that when expressing ideas about the past, the way one writes is as important as what one writes."

I disagree with Mortimer about some of these assumptions. Seems too broad a generalization, I think. Still I find it an interesting, provocative take. See Donald A. Yerxa's interview with Mortimer in the June issue for more on the subject.

Historically Speaking (June 2010)

"Two Historians on Defeat in War and Its Causes"
Peter Paret

"U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929"
Allison Sneider

"Ian Mortimer: Making History More Meaningful to Society"

"The Art of History"
Ian Mortimer

"In Search of New Narrative Frameworks: An Interview with Ian Mortimer"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community A Panel Discussion"

"Introduction"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Learning from Charles Joyner"
David Hackett Fischer

"The Influence of Down by the Riverside"
Sylvia R. Frey

"Two Journeys: Honoring Charles Joyner"
James Peacock

"Creolization, Decreolization, and Being 'at Home' in the Diaspora"
Stephanie J. Shaw

"Response"
Charles Joyner

"Writing Historical Crime Novels: An Interview with Jenny White"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India"
Anthony Disney

"Faith and the Founding of Virginia"
Lorri Glover

"Letters"
Stanley Sandlar
Vivian R. Gruder

"In Grateful Memory of Max Palevsky, 1924-2010"

Interview with George Huppert, Editor of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Earlier in the month I spoke to George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) about editing the Journal of the Historical Society. Huppert and associate

editor Scott Hovey aim to reach specialists and nonspecialists alike. The journal "presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research."

In the video embedded here I ask Huppert about the kinds of articles he seeks out and the models he looks to for the journal. He describes the ways in which the historian Lucien Febvre has informed his work and he notes the influence of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.

Huppert is a social historian of early modern Europe. He has written extensively on the Renaissance, humanism, the history of philosophy, and the annales school. He is the author of a variety of articles and books, including The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Roundup: More on Writing in the Humanities

~
Gordon Wood, "In Defense of Academic History Writing," Perspectives on History (April 2010)
Instead of writing . . . narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, have chosen to write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. . . . [A]cademics have generally left narrative history writing to the nonacademic historians who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists. >>>

Rachel Toor, "Bad Writing and Bad Thinking," Chronicle, April 15, 2010.
Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we're in a sorry state, and most would say there isn't much to do about it. >>>

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946. Posted on Mount Holyoke's website.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. >>>

John L. Jackson Jr., "Just Bad Writing," Chronicle, April 13, 2010.
I actually enjoy reading certain kinds of "bad writing," at least some of the time, especially from the scholars who often get hammered for their impenetrable prose. That's usually anybody who invokes the notion of "performativity" or cites the work of Michel Foucault or gets described as a disciple of Cultural Studies. >>>

Keith Hopper, "Aidan Higgins, The Writer's Writer," TLS, March 31, 2010.
Aidan Higgins is often regarded as a “writer’s writer”, which is usually code for contrary, experimental and out-of-print. Derek Mahon, writing in the TLS in 2007, called him “an austere and often difficult writer, more than a touch old-fashioned, with an astringency that can stir the bile of whippersnappers.” >>>

“I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad"

Randall Stephens

What's not to like a about collections of private letters? (Well lots, if you think they are boring, tedious, self-serving, etc.) I almost always enjoy reading the letters of novelists, historians, critics. Collections of letters, like memoirs, make for good reading. You can tell a great deal about an author’s opinions by reading his/her intimate thoughts on all manner of subjects. Often, the more unrestrained the letter writer is, the more interesting the letter.

I recently came across passages on history in the collected letters of two of the most famous authors of the 20th century. Flannery O’Connor makes a passing reference to C. Vann Woodward, while disparaging much of southern historical writing. High praise, indeed, to have O’Connor’s stamp of approval.

Flannery O’Connor to "A," May 25, 1963, Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, pp. 521-22.

I have taken up with reading C. Vann Woodward. Have you ever read this gentleman—Burden of Southern History is what I have but I intend to order off after more. Southern history usually gives me pain, but this man knows how to write English.

C. S. Lewis is far more pessimistic about the history trade. A young fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis, at least in this 1927 letter to his brother, has little patience for historians. Historians, he laments, typically fail to capture the truth of experience. Lewis’s meditation on “fact” sounds a little like E. H. Carr on the same. Though Lewis is here writing more than three decades before Carr.

Letters like this, though, often reflect the thoughts of a writer in the moment. They are like a snapshot, not a meticulously painted landscape.

C. S. Lewis to his brother, December 12, 1927, in Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905-1931, 741.

I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with there is always such a difference. What is in my mind at present is (on the one hand) Beowulf and Alfred and the Sagas, and (on the other) Gibbon and Oman about 'the barbarians'. What common measure is there between 'Odoacer had alienated the sympathies of his Italian subjects by seizing a third of the land to reward his veterans' and 'Oft Scyld Scefing overthrew the mead benches of many a kindred. The dwellers round had to obey him across the whale's way. That was a good king . . . So shall a young hero do good and give lordly gifts, that his retainers may repay him when war comes.’ The implication (always present) in the first version that Odoacer oughtn't to have given the land to his men, or that any choice in the matter could have occurred to him, as against the perfectly untroubled sincerity with which the other describes the hero as 'doing good' in scattering the 'lordly gifts' (acquired no doubt at the cost of 'alienating the sympathy' of someone) makes one despair. Then 'his veterans’—memories of Chelsea Hospital! Of course one can see in some sense that the two passages refer to the same sort of fact. But what is left of the 'fact' if you take away both its two 'appearances'? And if you plump for one of them, is that historical truth?

See also these collections in full at Google Books:

The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters (1921)

Letters of Thomas Carlyle to His Youngest Sister (1899)

The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, Volume 2 (1908)

The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898)

Letters of Jane Austin (1905)

The Autobiography and Correspondence of Edward Gibbon, the Historian (1869)

Mark Twain's Letters (1917)

Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, with Portraits and Facsimile Letters (1902)

A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, vol. 1 (1920)

William Zinsser on Writing

Randall Stephens

A couple weeks ago, I posted selections from a Historically Speaking roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History." The roundtable included insightful essays by Stephen Pyne, Jill Lepore, Michael Kammen, and John Demos.

I was reminded of the roundtable as I read William Zinsser’s wonderful American Scholar essay, “Writing English as a Second Language.” (The piece was originally a talk he gave at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.) It might seem unrelated, based on the title. But, Zinsser offers up a wealth of wisdom on how to write clearly and effectively. History majors and even well-established historians should heed it.

An editor, writer, and teacher Zinsser has much experience teaching foreign students the craft of writing. “What is good writing?” he asks. What counts as good writing in one language may be bad writing in another. So what is good English? he wonders. “It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong.”

Zinsser cautions readers against “pompous” Latin “nouns that end in -ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in -ent—like development and fulfillment.” Instead, he advises, use plain, direct “infinitely old Anglo-Saxon nouns that express the fundamentals of everyday life: house, home, child, chair, bread, milk, sea, sky, earth, field, grass, road . . .” Simplicity is his motto.

He also warns against the pitfalls of passive voice. This is a real problem for history majors, who, I suppose, assume that passive voice and complex, tangled sentences lend their writing an air of authority or intelligence. Zinsser produces a great example to make his case. He highlights the clear specific prose of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He then revises the passage with passive voice. “A decision was made to go to the woods because of a desire for a deliberate existence . . .” Ugh. Most will get the point.

Finally, and I think this is a terrific observation, Zinsser notes that good writers need good examples. It’s unlikely that a student will learn much if he or she doesn’t read much. “We all need models,” Zinsser writes. “Bach needed a model; Picasso needed a model. Make a point of reading writers who are doing the kind of writing you want to do. (Many of them write for The New Yorker.) Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course.”

History majors who want to learn how to write well should read those historians whose writing they admire. (Michael Kammen made this point in his contribution to the roundtable in Historically Speaking.) Read those historians whose work has stood the test of time. Why do so many still read the work of Francis Parkman, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter, or Barbara Tuchman? I also tell students to take cues from essays in the TLS, Harpers, the Atlantic, or the New York Review of Books. Observe how a reviewer or essayist sets up a piece. How does a writer vary his or her sentences? How does the writer craft an argument? Come to think of it, a set of questions for students to mull over would be useful.

Know Your Editor: Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, American and World History, Oxford University Press

Randall Stephens

[Cross posted at Religion in American History.]

I liked it when the AHA met in NYC last year. Better yet, this year it’s in sunny San Diego, a nice break from the cold, snow, slush, and raging swine flu of New England. (And I forgot to bring my wetsuit.)

I spent part of Thursday reconnoitering the area and meeting with various friends in the profession. I also

had a chance to sit down with Susan Ferber, executive editor, Oxford University Press, and pose a few questions about publishing.

In the video embedded here I ask her about what she looks for in a proposal and what she thinks about the recent boom in religious history. I also ask her about the matter of converting a dissertation into a book. I was reminded of a piece that appeared in the Chronicle nearly two years ago: “Goodbye to All That” by Rachel Toor. A former editor, Toor summed up a meeting she had with a friend who wondered how her dissertation would fare when submitted to a press:

Wanting to be helpful, and, since I was no longer an editor constantly on the prowl for potentially promising manuscripts, I gave her my honest opinion: Who would be interested in a book like this?

I pointed out that, even in the way she described it to me, she was using coded language, jargon that would be a big flashing red light to warn off anyone outside of her particular academic discipline. What publisher, I asked, was going to want a book on a topic unknown to most people, especially if there was no underlying argument or theoretical framework?

Ultimately, what I wondered was whether anything in the dissertation was worth turning into a book.

I'm not always the most fun lunch date.

True enough. Ferber’s remarks, by contrast, are positively cheerful. So take heart, your dissertation may have a ready audience as a book. Just think carefully about readership and how best to frame your argument.

Teaching the Writing of History Roundtable in January Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall J. Stephens

Graduate students know the drill well. Bulking up on historiography for qualification exams is a time-honored tradition. Who argued what, when, where, and why? What are the contours of the field or subfield? What did the transition from the orthodox position to the revisionist and then post-revisionist schools look like? Graduate students pore over books in dusty libraries and stare, red-eyed, at digitized articles.

Those who train historians pay a great deal of attention to arguments and counterarguments, theses and antitheses. In graduate and undergraduate research seminars professors also stress the importance of analyzing evidence, applying theoretical models, and making a plausible case. But is the same amount of energy and study devoted to the writing of history? “Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature,” wrote English historian C.V. Wedgwood, “history cannot be intelligibly written.”

In the lead piece of a roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History" (Historically Speaking [January 2009]), Stephen Pyne discusses the importance of train historians how to write and offers useful examples of pedagogy. His remarks are followed by reflections from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos. I post excerpts from each here.

[The full forum will be available at Project Muse. Subscribe to HS to read more.]

HOW TO TEACH THE WRITING OF HISTORY: A ROUNDTABLE, Historically Speaking (January 2009)

Riding the Melt*
Stephen J. Pyne

History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline. But we don’t teach how to write them. It’s an odd omission. We accept statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography, and other instruments as legitimate methodologies; we don’t accept serious writing. Good writing seems to mean using the active voice, not confusing “it’s” with “its,” and where possible, shunning split infinitives. We obsess over historiography, note the distorting power of literary tropes, and list the fallacies of historical arguments, but don’t understand the medium that carries our message. Literary craft remains a black box, like the software running our laptops. Yet we cannot avoid words, and careers rise and fall on the basis of what we publish; we just don’t explain how to transmute research into texts. The kind of writing we do doesn’t even have a name. So while many practitioners seem keen to unpack texts, few seem eager to teach how to pack them in the first place.

Why? It may be that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. . . .

A few years ago, on a stint as a visiting professor, I was asked to lead a morning seminar on writing. That sparked my amorphous concerns into a desire to offer a graduate course that would address the theory and practice of making texts do what their writers wished. It would be English for historians, as we might offer statistics for ecologists or physics for geologists. It’s been the best teaching experience in my career. . . .

* An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Chronicle Review, July 12, 2009.

Historians on Writing
Michael Kammen

Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.” . . . .

. . . Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader. . . .

How to Write a Paper for This Class
Jill Lepore

I have got a handout I’ve been using for a while now. It’s your basic, How to Write a Paper for This Class. Everyone’s got one of these handouts. Pyne’s new book amounts to a handout that might be called How to Write a Book for This Profession. I’m glad he’s written it and can’t think of much he’s said, in this excerpt, that I’d disagree with, except that I happen to think that learning how to write essays is just as important as, and maybe more useful than, learning how to write books. I am not convinced that books ought to be the measure of merit in our profession. Nor am I convinced that all historians ought to write books— and, in any case, not all do. Everyone has got to know how to write an essay, though. That quibble aside, I certainly don’t dispute Pyne’s premise: historians generally don’t care much about writing, and they should, although a surprising number believe, pretty fiercely, that they shouldn’t. . . .

Response to Stephen Pyne
John Demos

My first reaction on reading Stephen Pyne’s essay was “hooray!” And so was
my second. And my third. Without much recognizing it, historians have—for several generations now—downgraded the writing part of their task. Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down. What “good writing” has come to mean, in the minds of most historians, is clear and effective communication: getting your point across.

It ought to mean so much more. Pyne is absolutely right to spotlight the importance of evocation alongside exposition, and voice as much as thesis. . . .

I believe, however, that Pyne is mistaken in one respect: his insistence that history be sharply distinguished from fiction. No boundary line divides the two; at most there is a wide and nebulous borderland. Open any work of history, even the most conventional sort, and you will find statements that involve a degree of “making it up.” We are always filling little holes in our evidence with bits of inference or outright invention—whether we acknowledge this or not. (And better, for sure, if we do.) . . . .

P.S.: Robert Townsend has alerted me to an interesting piece he wrote at the AHA blog back in 2008: "From the Archives: Why Can’t Historians Write?" He discusses the perennial conversation about bad writing within the profession. A 1926 AHA report, linked to the post, reveals similar concerns from yesteryear. "Instead of the current bugaboo of postmodernism," writes Townsend, "the authors blame the scientific pretensions of their day for elevating 'Facts' over a more 'humanized' form of writing. And where errant politics is blamed, they cite the excesses of commercialism and the nationalistic sentiments marked by First World War."