History 467 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 details for later. Each subsequent paragraph should feature a topic sentence, generally 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 force you to answer
instead of evade critical historical questions in the process. Read through
your paper and circle every 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: "Violence was used
by some white neighborhood groups to prevent racial integration in Detroit."
Active Voice: "Some white neighborhood
groups in Detroit employed violence to prevent racial integration."
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 1950s was the
decade when televisions appeared."
Write: "During the 1950s, the new
technology of television reached most American homes and transformed the
popular culture and political culture of the United States."
4. Try not to inappropriately 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, but use the present tense for discussions of historical arguments.
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 or directors whose work
appeared in the distant past:
"In
Rebel without a Cause, Nicholas
Ray addressed the controversy over juvenile delinquency during the
1950s."
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 End of Victory Culture, Tom
Engelhardt explores the political trajectory of the Baby Boom generation
in Cold War America."
"Cultural
history provides a window of analysis into the early Cold War period in
the United States."
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 Natural Born Killers is brilliant and provocative."
Instead, write something along these lines:
"Natural Born Killers provides a disturbing portrait of the American
fascination with violence and celebrity culture."
The prohibition of 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 it 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 common in current usage. "Negro"
and "mulatto" and "colored" are outdated terms and 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 opposed civil rights,"
write: "many middle-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 in your accounts.
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 ("Ruth
Rosen argues . . . " or "Berkeley in the Sixties 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. Citation of sources.
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 to 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 need to
include a bibliography for your written assignments, providing that your
footnotes/endnotes are comprehensive. If you consult a source that does not
appear in any of your footnotes, however, it must be included in a
bibliography.
Some examples of standard
citations, followed by acceptable short citations for subsequent footnotes or
endnotes:
For books: Tom Engelhardt, The End
of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: Univ. Of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 45-49.
Subsequent citation: Engelhardt, End of
Victory Culture, 78-80.
For edited collections: James Fallows,
"What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" in The Wounded
Generation: America after Vietnam,
ed. A. D. Horne (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 15-29.
Subsequent Citation: Fallows, "What Did
You Do," 22-23.
For journal/periodical articles:
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Coolhunt," New Yorker (March 17, 1997), 78-88.
Subsequent Citation: Gladwell, "Coolhunt,"
82.
For newspapers: 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 an op-ed
piece.
For personal interview that you conduct:
Interview, Matt Lassiter, Jan. 15, 2007 (Ann Arbor, MI).
Subsequent Citation: Lassiter interview.
For films: Oliver Stone, Natural
Born Killers (Burbank: Warner Home
Video, 1995).
Note: If you are unsure of the full citation
for a film, then consult MIRLYN.
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:
Michael Ignatieff, "The Burden," New York Times Magazine (Jan. 5, 2003) <http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidinthenews/articles/nyt-010503.html>.
[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, to turning in the same
research paper you also turned in for another class. 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 467 is an automatic failing grade and submission
of the case to the dean's office.
For additional information about
plagiarism policies at the University of Michigan, please consult these two
links:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/plagNote.asp
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/international/handbook/conduct.html