The following document was prepared by Professors Matt Matsuda and John Gillis . The purpose of this guide is to provide you with the basics for writing undergraduate history essays and papers. Writing is a craft.
All serious writing is done in drafts with many hesitations, revisions, and new inspirations.
You may already write well. In what follows we will briefly discuss the nature of historical writing, lay out a step by step model for constructing an essay, and provide a set of useful observations from our experience as instructors regarding problems that most frequently crop up in student writing. All scholarly writing, from the most concise paper to the longest book, follows these basic guidlines. Historical essay writing is based upon the thesis. A thesis is a statement, an argument which will be presented by the writer.