Some Writing Pointers in Response to Response Paper #1

History 266

February 23, 2002

1. Long quotations (certainly anything over 50 words, and others approaching that length) should be indented and single spaced. Do not use quotation marks around these long, indented quotations.

2. Make sure that you use ellipses (those … constructions) only when necessary, and always correctly. When you begin a sentence and then insert a quotation, you don’t need to use them; it’s understood that there are preceding words—as in:

i. As Kathryn Sklar notes, in the winter of 1827, Sarah Grimke formed “an intensely personal relationship” with her Presbyterian minister.

3. A well-structured paper is built from a series of paragraphs that have topic sentences introducing the content for the paragraph. Try to develop only a single idea in each paragraph. Generally, this will result in paragraphs that are between 150 and 200 words in length. Anything longer is suspect.

4. Be careful to guard against run-on sentences, or sentences that are too long and too complex.

5. When writing a history paper, be careful about tenses. Although you can write about historians in the present tense, you will probably want to use the past tense for the actions in the past.

6. Avoid the passive voice whenever possible. Instead of saying “It was said by…” tell me who said it. Instead of saying “women were condemned to narrow domesticity,” tell me who condemned them.

7. Generally, use double quotation marks in a paper (except as in #1 above, when the quotation is long and indented); if there is a quotation within a quotation, set it off with single quotation marks.

8. Spell out centuries, as in nineteenth century, twentieth century.

9. In this paper, many of you used the words “reformist” instead of “reformer.” Be careful here; usually, the word “reformist” is used by the left and various progressives to denote an inadequate response to social and political situations—that is, “reformist” is a negative term. If you use “reformist” be sure you mean it. In the nineteenth-century, they called themselves moral reformers.

10. Note that compound nouns appearing as adjectives become hyphenated, as in “the working class” becomes “working-class women;” or “the nineteenth-century” becomes “nineteenth-century society.”

11. In the style used by historians, the names of authors do not appear inverted in footnotes, although they do in bibliography. So the footnote begins: “Lori D. Ginzberg,” but the bibliographic citation appears “Ginzberg, Lori D.”

Finally: my questions to you:

1. Do you want me to supply some possible writing prompts for Response Paper #2?

2. If I am permitted to do so by the paper writers, would you like me to post examples of what seemed to me successful response papers?