The reports should be 3 to 4 pages, typed, double-spaced.  Writing to a word limit (and deadline) is a useful skill to acquire.  However, as people write with different degrees of conciseness—and concise is better than wordy—length is not the main consideration.  Content is.  This means responding to the question in a comprehensive, accurate, and balanced fashion.  This requires a close reading of the text in question, followed by reflection, analysis, and organization of a coherent response supported by evidence.  This takes time.  Dashing off something that fills up three pages will not get you a good grade.

Remember you are anwering a question.  These short reports should focus on substance not packaging.  They can have brief descriptive introductions and conclusions but there needs to be much more meat than bread in the sandwich.  General observations on history and life are rarely appropriate.  Every sentence should count, and counting means answering the specific question.  Don’t be content with repeating the same few points.  Try and cover all the angles, and use all the evidence to hand.  That is what makes a comprehensive answer.

Deploying evidence may involve citing page references but there is no need to give long, or indeed any, quotations from the texts.  This should be your writing not someone else’s.  Summarize material and give a page reference, if you think it useful.

Each of the three reports requires a somewhat different approach.  Each has its own difficulty.

1. The first one tests your ability to handle historiography.  You are comparing two historians’ explanations of one of the seminal events in slavery history.  Parts of the argument are technical.
2. The second reading requires you to act like a historian dealing with a primary source.  You are looking for patterns in the evidence that support an argument.  This demands coping with the unfamiliarity of an eighteenth-century text and trying to think your way back into a different world, accompanied by some data-gathering and analysis. (click diary).
3. The third project is based on the comparison of two texts and calls for thinking about history and fiction as alternative means for evoking the past.

At a university, nobody should be making mistakes of spelling, grammar, word usage, or punctuation.  Writing one’s own language in a competent manner should be a prequisite for going to university, not something you learn there.  Unhappily, this is nowadays more an ideal than a reality.  Yet, from job applications to love letters, how you present yourself on paper matters; it remains one of the most important attributes you will take away from your years in college.  What hope of learning a second language is there for someone who cannot write their own correctly?  Writing assignments should be treated as an opportunity to hone an essential skill.  Time spent on improving your writing will be time well spent.

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