How to Write a Paper for This Class

I have got a handout I’ve been using for a while now. It’s your basic, How to Write a Paper for This Class. Everyone’s got one of these handouts. Pyne’s new book amounts to a handout that might be called How to Write a Book for This Profession. I’m glad he’s written it and can’t think of much he’s said, in this excerpt, that I’d disagree with, except that I happen to think that learning how to write essays is just as important as, and maybe more useful than, learning how to write books. I am not convinced that books ought to be the measure of merit in our profession. Nor am I convinced that all historians ought to write books—and, in any case, not all do. Everyone has got to know how to write an essay, though. That quibble aside, I certainly don’t dispute Pyne’s premise: historians generally don’t care much about writing, and they should, although a surprising number believe, pretty fiercely, that they shouldn’t. I teach a graduate course called The Art and Craft of Historical Writing, and nearly all of the students who show up come from departments other than my own. Sometimes I worry that the course title keeps the history graduate students away. Maybe they think we’re doing needlepoint, instead of debating ideas? But no, we don’t embroider. Mostly, we write, though we do read, too: Benjamin Franklin, “On Literary Style” (1733); Ambrose Bierce, “To Train a Writer” (1899); Mark Twain, “The Hunting of the Cow” (1907); Carl Becker, “Detachment and the Writing of History” (1910); Charles Beard, “Written History as an Act of Faith” (1933); Samuel Eliot Morison, “History as a Literary Art” (1949). Now that I look at it, we mostly read other people’s handouts.

An illustration from Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler: Or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation (London, 1875).

I don’t use my handout in that graduate class. My handout is for undergraduates. Most years, when the time comes to pass out the handout, I read it over, realize it stinks, chuck it, and write it all over again. It’s getting near the time of year I’ve got to revise that handout—this time for a course on the American Revolution—and I thought, well, here’s a good kick in the pants to get that done early, because my handout is different from Pyne’s. And so: the latest draft.

The art of writing history is making arguments by telling stories about the dead. You’ll be dead one day, too, so please play fair, and remember: never condescend. It’s probably bad enough being dead without some smart aleck using your life and times to make a specious claim. Every argument worth making begins with a question. In The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, Al Young’s question was, “Why, in the 1830s, did people start calling what happened on December 16, 1773, a ‘tea party’?” In The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Bernard Bailyn asked, “What does the Revolution look like from the losers’ point of view?” Good questions come in all shapes and sizes. Very roughly, you can sort yours into two piles. One kind is more empirical (what happened?): “Why, on the eve of the American Revolution, did the painter John Singleton Copley decide to leave Boston?” The other is historiographical (what’s at stake in the debate among historians about what happened?): “Have historians overstated the role of urban artisans in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act?” The best, most rigorous, and most interesting scholarship answers both sorts of question; it’s also much more fun to write, and to read.

Your question hasn’t been tattooed on your forehead. You can change it. Very likely, no one will even notice. If things are going well, you might decide, once you get into the research, that your question is bad, or even terrible. It might be the wrong question. It might be the...