History 261 Style Guide

1. Structure your paper with a comprehensive thesis paragraph, clear transitions, and strong topic sentences.

The first paragraph should begin with an enticing--not formulaic--introductory sentence and then proceed to outline your thesis with broad strokes. Tell the reader what you plan to argue in the paper but save the evidence and the juicy quotations and specific details for later. Each subsequent paragraph should feature a topic sentence, either at the beginning or immediately after the transition. Each topic sentence should serve to advance the main thesis and to summarize the evidence presented in the paragraph. Each sentence within a paragraph should support the topic sentence of that paragraph. Transition sentences link thoughts and arguments to one another and send a signal that you are moving on to the next point.

Writing with skill and clarity is a painstaking endeavor. Often you may not discover the full extent of your argument until after you have completed the first draft of the paper. In that case, go back to the thesis paragraph and underline your thesis statement. Then read the paper, making sure each topic sentence and each paragraph advances the main argument of the paper. A good trick is to read only the topic sentences in order, to see if the paper flows smoothly. Then reread to determine whether the evidence supports the argument. Be sure to restructure and rewrite the paper if necessary.

2. Use active voice verbs, and avoid passive voice.

Make each sentence tell who did what to whom. The passive voice obscures historical actors, fails to allocate responsibility for the actions of the past, and betrays your uncertainty as a writer. Passive voice also leads to unclear and cluttered sentences. Active voice verbs help make prose more lively and compelling, and they force you to answer instead of evade critical historical questions in the process. Read through your paper and circle every compound verb that begins with "was" or "were." These verbs almost always accompany passive voice or boring language.

A. Passive voice as a stylistic violation, reversing subject and object.

Passive Voice: "Many former slaves were denied land by Freedmen's Bureau policies during the Reconstruction period."

Active Voice: "Freedmen's Bureau policies emphasized wage labor and did not distribute land to most former slaves during the Reconstruction period."

B. Passive voice as an historical violation, obscuring responsibility and actors.

Passive Voice: "Containment of the Soviet Union was put into place after World War II."

Active Voice: "The Truman administration officially implemented the doctrine of containment in 1947, in response to the building conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union."

3. Avoid the verb "to be."

Active and lively verbs represent critical components of good writing. The various forms of the verb "to be" usually signal weak and vague sentences. The "to be" verb implies a static state of "being" rather than a dynamic state of agency and often leaves the impression that an abstract force is acting upon historical subjects.

Instead of: "The 1920s was the decade of the Scopes trial."

Write: "During the 1920s, the Scopes trial represented a symbolic clash between modernism and fundamentalism in the United States."

4. Try not to unnecessarily split infinitives.

The preceding sentence represents an example of this stylistic violation. Choose another construction that flows more smoothly: "Try not to split infinitives inappropriately."

5. Use the past tense for historical writing.

Historical writing requires use of the past tense in almost every situation, with a few conspicuous exceptions. The past tense requirement includes discussion of writers whose work appeared in the distant past:

"In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis explored the immigrant slums of New York City in an effort to inspire social reform."

The exception to this rule involves discussion of recent writers and artists and ideas, if you are using these sources in a contemporary context:

"In The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner argues that the American Creed remains a powerful ideal even though Americans have constantly disagreed about the meaning of freedom."

6. Avoid "I" and especially "we" in your arguments.

The reader will assume that the author of the paper is making the arguments contained within the narrative. You do not need to write:

"I think that John Wayne is a towering icon of frontier masculinity in Rio Grande."

Instead, write something along these lines:

"In Rio Grande, John Wayne's character taps into the frontier mythology by invading Mexico to rescue white captives."

"We" is especially problematic because of the assumptions involved in terms of who is included and excluded in the first person plural pronoun. The prohibition against first-person pronouns is not absolute. Under certain circumstances, first-person pronouns may be appropriate, notably when a passage in your paper is explicitly personal or when you find yourself using awkward and convoluted language in order to avoid personal pronouns. But these exceptions should be chosen cautiously and employed sparingly.

7. Make sure that pronouns have clear antecedents and maintain singular/plural consistency.

Avoid: "The nuclear scientists called for politicians to accept international supervision of the atomic bomb. They thought this would make the world safer." (The antecedent of "they" is unclear, and "this" is a vague pronoun as well.)

Instead: "Many nuclear scientists believed that the world would be safer if politicians accepted international supervision of the atomic bomb."

Note: As writers adopt more inclusive language, they often struggle with dilemmas in pronoun/antecedent agreement. In speech, many people now employ singular/plural disagreement: "Each student is responsible for their reading assignment." This construction avoids the gender exclusiveness of using his/her but represents a violation of singular/plural agreement. On the other hand, "Each student is responsible for his or her reading assignment" is wordy and distracting. In many cases, you can resolve this dilemma by using plural subjects. Other times, more creative writing may be necessary.

8. Capitalize and hyphenate consistently.

Write the "South" or the "North" (but for directions, use lower case, as in "heading south for the winter").

Write "middle-class family" with a hyphen when used as an adjective, but "the middle class" without a hyphen when used as a noun.

9. Use appropriate racial designations.

Most historians use "black" and "African American" interchangeably, and while "Latino" is replacing "Hispanic" in popular usage, each label remains commonly deployed. "Negro" and "mulatto" and other outdated racial designations should not be used without quotation marks and clear indication of context.

10. Qualify nouns when necessary for purposes of accuracy and complexity.

Never forget that you are writing about individuals instead of caricatures, and groups of diverse people instead of historical abstractions.

Instead of: "White people moved . . . ," write: "many working-class white families . . . " or "millions of middle-class suburbanites . . . " and so forth.

Instead of: "The black man found himself in the ghetto," write: "Many black citizens who moved to the North for better opportunities faced new forms of discrimination in the federal policies and homeowner resistance that helped shape the divisions between suburban and urban areas."

11. Have people and policies provide the action, instead of allowing abstractions to shape history.

Instead of: "Fear caused the Red Scare" or "Society enforced gender divisions," write sentences with subjects that identify clear actors: "Truman's loyalty oath program helped catalyze the Red Scare," or "Joseph McCarthy's exploitation of anticommunist sentiment shaped the early Cold War era," or "gender divisions reflected a combination of cultural values, legal discrimination, and . . . " and so forth.

**Beginning sentences with the pronouns "this" or "these" represents a related problem that often obscures the real subject of the sentence. For example, avoid transitions such as "Many young people experienced political awakenings during the 1960s. This was a very important development for the antiwar movement." Instead: "Many young people experienced political awakenings during the 1960s and joined the growing antiwar movement," or "Many young people experienced political awakenings during the 1960s. The antiwar movement grew dramatically because of this development." Never start a new paragraph with "this" or "these."

12. Numbers.

Write out numbers spelled in one or two words (forty-five). Use Arabic numbers for three words or more (143).

13. Misc. to avoid:

A. different than (always use: different from)

B. the reason is because (a redundant phrase)

C. very unique or more complete (these adjectives cannot be qualified)

D. less (when "fewer" is appropriate--use "fewer" when referring to numbers that can be quantified. "Less milk," but "fewer votes")

E. center around (use "revolve around," or "center on")

F. "impact" as a verb (the trend these days is toward "verbing" nouns. Resist this)

G. fragments and run-on sentences

H. omitting commas after dates and places

14. Quotations.

Use quotations sparingly, when the quoted material provides evidence or flavor that a paraphrase cannot convey adequately. Do not use quotations to drive the narrative forward as a substitute for your own arguments. Use an ellipsis (. . .) whenever you omit material from a quoted passage, although this is not necessary at the beginning or the end of a selected quotation. You may alter capitalization and punctuation without using the awkward [brackets] as long as it does not change the meaning of the quotation. Quotations should not be set aside in a separate indented paragraph unless they exceed five lines, and you should rarely if ever need to quote such a lengthy passage in a short paper. You also should identify the source of the quotation in the text if you are using the quotation for analytical purposes ("Patricia Limerick argues . . . " or "Do the Right Thing portrays . . ."). A quotation intended to provide analysis, but hanging all alone in the middle of a paragraph without the context of the source, is more likely to confuse than to edify.

15. Citations.

Historians use footnotes or endnotes rather than the parenthetical citations common in the social sciences. Footnotes are more readable, while endnotes allow you to save more space for the main paper. Different acceptable styles exist for footnotes; the most important points are to maintain consistency and provide the full citation the first time that you refer to a source. On subsequent occasions, you should use a short citation. Titles should be italicized or underlined. Consult a style manual for proper citation techniques. Footnote citations and bibliographic entries use different styles. In this course, you do not have to include a bibliography providing that your footnotes/endnotes are comprehensive. If you consult a source that does not appear in any of your notes, however, it must be included in a bibliography.

Some examples of standard citations, followed by acceptable short citations for subsequent footnotes or endnotes:

Book

Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Sage of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 45-46.

Subsequent citation: Boyle, Arc of Justice, 78-80.

Edited collection

Elaine Tyler May, "Cold War, Warm Heart: Politics and the Family in Postwar America," The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 153-181.

Subsequent Citation: May, "Cold War," 175.

Journal article

Thomas J. Sugrue, "Crab-grass Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-64," Journal of American History (Sept. 1995), 551-78.

Subsequent Citation: Sugrue, "Crab-grass Roots Politics," 570.

Magazine article

David J. Dent, "The New Black Suburbs," New York Times Magazine (June 14, 1992), 18-25.

Subsequent Citation: Dent, "New Black Suburbs," 22-23.

Newspaper

New York Times, Jan. 1, 1960.

**You do not need to cite author, title, and page number for a newspaper article, although you should for a journal or magazine article.

For general information from a website: "United States Census 2000," <http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html (consulted Jan. 20, 2007).

For a specific article at a website: Ben Wallace-Wells, "How America Lost the War on Drugs," Rolling Stone (Nov. 27, 2007) <http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs>

[The date should be either the listed date of publication for a newspaper or magazine article or a policy report available on-line, or the date of your consultation for an information-based website, whichever is more appropriate.]

16. Plagiarism

Direct quotations must be footnoted as well as enclosed in quotation marks. You also must footnote any source that influences your thinking on a subject, or any source from which you draw specific information, whether or not you quote from it directly. Documentation of such sources includes facts, paraphrased material, and also cases in which the connection may be less direct. For example, if you read a book review before you write a paper on the same book, then you must reveal that in the notes or in a bibliography. If you read a film review before writing a discussion project analyzing the film, you must cite the source. If another scholar's conclusions helped shape your own, then you must provide credit.

There should be no confusion: plagiarism in any form is a serious offense. Academic dishonesty includes all forms of unattributed borrowing, from another student's paper, to material found on a website, to copying passages from books without proper citation, to turning in the same research paper you also turned in for another class. Please don't put yourself or your instructors in any of these situations. Academic dishonesty also encompasses situations of deliberate fabrication, such as claiming that the "GSI must have lost the paper you turned in" or the "computer crashed and you lost your only copy" when such stories are not true.  The penalty for plagiarism and/or academic dishonesty in History 261 is an automatic failing grade and submission of the case to the dean's office.

For additional information about plagiarism, please consult these two links:

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/plagNote.asp

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/international/handbook/conduct.html