By separating them, I hope to give students a clearer objective and to allow you to learn these methods a bit at a time. In that same light, any instructor or I can lecture endlessly on what professional historians do, and I probably will, but I sincerely believe that students will best learn these tasks by doing them. Only then can students learn to perform these tasks themselves. As a result, I stress concepts such as historiography, and other steps that historians wrestle with constantly. By grappling with these issues, and with your topics, sources and organization and writing of a paper, students will get a feeling of what it is historians do, and students will contribute to historical knowledge while they do it.
Writing is the task of putting the right words next to each other.
No one does it right the first time. Further, I cannot hope to catch every miscue or always point students in the best direction when writing. Students will write consistently about your projects during the semester, and will offer up a draft of their paper to another student of my choice to offer constructive yet critical commentary. As important as the work is to, we must learn to let others read it critically. The method employed in this class will break down what appears to be an enormous project into a series of steps that can be completed in a timely manner.