Updated: 14 February 2008

Please keep the following points in mind, as you complete your research papers:

• The paper should consist of an introduction, in which you set out the question(s) that you are posing, and how you intend to answer them;
• the main body of the paper in which you make your arguments and build up your thesis;
• and a conclusion in which you summarize what your paper has achieved.
• You will probably find it helpful to divide the paper with section headings, which will force you to organize your material if you should start rambling.

2) The paper must also have a bibliography at the end, showing the books on which you have drawn in your paper.   A specimen bibliography is given in Rampolla.

3) Sources for your paper:

• PRIMARY SOURCES: there are so many original, translated, contemporary sources that I would like you to use some.   These can include documents, letters, diaries, and so on.   Interpreting original documents is what the historian’s craft is all about.  If this is a historiographical paper, then the writings of the historian(s) in question themselves become the primary sources.
• SECONDARY SOURCES: these are writings in which someone else has already interpreted the raw material.   You should refer principally to scholarly literature, and try to stick with works published in the last two decades.   Anything older than that runs the risk of being seriously dated in ways which may not be apparent to you, unless you have cleared the book with me (--I am not saying that nothing decent was written before then!  Some of my own work, for a start!).  And again, that does not apply to a historiographical survey.

And please remember that you must footnote every sentence or passage taken directly from a secondary source and not expressed in your own words, or you are committing plagiarism [see the University's guidelines on academic dishonesty].

4) Papers sometimes fall apart, if one drops a big pile of them.   For this reason, I do not like plastic covers, and would prefer you to simply staple the pages together.   In any case you must number the pages (—so many students ignore this simple instruction that I’m now going to impose penalties for violations).

5) Above all, I cannot repeat often enough that your paper must have a THESIS, that is, a coherent proposition and argument about the topic you are working with.   It is not sufficient to be merely descriptive; you must form and express opinions.

6) Pet peeves!   Please pay attention to the following grammatical and stylistic points, in order to avoid lots of red ink from me!

• Please write in complete sentences!   A sentence has a main verb.   Any arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.   Whoops!   That last phrase did not have a verb, therefore it won’t do in a formal essay, even though you may talk like that in informal conversation.   Please check your essays carefully for this, or you will find my notorious red rubber stamp, telling you: NOT A SENTENCE!

• Rubber stamp #2 says: DON’T MIX TENSES!   It’s poor style to shift indiscriminately within the same paragraph between the past and the present tense.   You are writing about the historical past, so unless there is some overwhelming reason to the contrary, you will want to use the past tense for most of your essay when you are talking about events in the past.   That sounds straightforward, but you may find yourself slipping into something like: The Prussian king  then calls Bismarck, who pushes through the army budget over the heads of parliament.   The deputies did not like this at all.   This problem can easily be corrected by proofreading your paper.

• NO APOSTROPHE! is the rubber stamp I use most of all!   Please use care in distinguishing between singular and plural usage: The ordinary Germans’ love of a parade was far outstripped by Kaiser Wilhelm’s infatuation with uniforms.   In that sentence Germans’ is plural; if I had wanted to talk about the ordinary German, it would have been German’s.   Here it does not especially matter, but consider the following: Germany and Austria entered a defensive alliance against Russia. Parliament’s participation in these negotiations was minimal.   Which single parliament is meant here?   Or does the writer mean both Germany and Austria?   It is unclear and confusing.
• The other big problem is it’s and its.   With the apostrophe this always and only means it is, so that a teacher may say of a class: its major sticking point is that it’s never clear about who the chancellor was.
• Increasingly I find that few people understand the use of the hyphen.  Please note the proper use of hyphens when using nouns as adjectives, as in the following example:

In twentieth-century Britain the working class began adopting some of the middle-class values they had rejected in the nineteenth century.
Middle-class is hyphenated as an adjective, but otherwise is the middle class.
Nineteenth-century is also the adjectival use, but there is no hyphen in the nineteenth century.

• Kings and queens sit on a throne, and sometimes rulers are thrown out of office.
• The period that a king is on the throne is known as his reign, whereas what you use to control a horse are the reins.  And sometimes wayward politicians are reined in.
• If you came with me to Stonehenge, as some students on our Cambridge program did, you caught sight of a famous historical site.
• "Motorist on I-75 wonder about the Land Bridge Trail" -- this is an actual, illiterate headline in the Gainesville Sun from February 2007! Of course it should read motorists, because the following verb is plural.  For some reason, students too are now frequently leaving off the final 's' in the plural of all words ending in '-ist'.  I can only conclude that this results from sloppy speech habits, and a tendency to mutter rather than enunciate clearly.  It simply will not work in written English.
• There is a difference between purposely and purposefully.  The latter applies more frequently to a person who shows some determination: "She set about writing a good essay purposefully."  The former just means that you are doing something deliberately: "He purposely left his cell phone switched on during class in order to irritate the professor."