In some cases, your professor will have assigned you a question or questions to consider. If you are writing an essay based on numerous primary sources, consider a theme that unites the documents. Your thesis is like a coat tree upon which you will hang your supporting evidence. Accordingly, your thesis should be argumentative, not descriptive. A primary source essay should not be a restatement or summary of the document s content.
Essays typically call for a close analysis or dissection of the texts meanings.
Refer to the first section of this handout for examples of analytical questions that you can pose of any source. The first sentence in the paragraph the topic sentence should announce not only the subject of the paragraph but also the significance of the information that follows it. The topic sentence is essentially the thesis of an individual paragraph. If your quote is longer than four lines, then you should use a block quotation. Be sure that you provide citations and that your quotations do not take the words, phrases, or sentences out of context.