Paper 3: Gender & Sexuality in the 1970s

Prof. McGerr

Spring 2019

Writing History Essays:

Eight Do’s & Six Don’ts

Nothing promotes more anxiety in a history lecture course than when the time arrives to write an

“essay,” either in or out of class: the word can strike terror. It shouldn’t. The fundamental

requirements of a successful essay are simple. There’s nothing mysterious, especially if you keep

these basics in mind.

Do:

1. Answer the question. This point seems so obvious, but it is remarkable how many students

don’t read questions carefully enough or, if they do, still don’t make sure that what they write is

really responsive to the prompt. Essay questions often have more than one part: “Based on the

history of rock ‘n’ roll in communist Europe, what role, if any, did the music play in changing

the young? What can you conclude, then, about whether music ‘matters’”? Too often,

especially during tests, students answer the first part of the prompt fully and then write little or

even nothing in response to the last part.

2. Make an Argument. Essay questions, like the one given above, require you to make an

argument. To answer a typical question, you need to take a stand about why things were they

were: “How did Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles redefine masculinity?”; “Did hip

hop change the politics of American popular music?” Make sure, then, that you state your

position clearly. Don’t simply write down what you know about Presley or Kool Herc: make an

argument. The toughest essay prompts are often the ones that ask you to compare and contrast

two phenomena, such as rock and hip hop. You can’t just write down a bunch of facts about

rock and then a bunch more about hip hop. Instead, you must make certain you are consistently

relating one set of facts to the other, ensuring the reader understands specifically what is similar

and what is different, and then stating what those similarities and differences tell us as historians.

3. Draw on the Main Themes and Arguments of the Course. “…what those similarities and

differences tell us as historians” sounds fairly high-flown and academic. You won’t go wrong if

you ground your argument in the concepts, categories, themes, and larger arguments of the

course. As you’ve seen already, a history class is concerned with: power; individual and group

identity; differences of gender, generation, race, and social class; democracy; economics and

technology; and so on. Always ask yourself how an essay question relates to any of these and

other basic ideas in the particular course.

4. Introduce Your Argument. Make sure you state your argument clearly and plainly at the

outset. An introduction not only helps the reader; it helps you to be sure you are indeed

answering the question. The length of the introduction varies with the length of the essay. For

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an in-class essay on a test or a 900-word take-home paper, a few sentences will suffice to set up

the following paragraphs. For a one-page paper, only one or two sentences are necessary to set

up what you’re about to argue.

5. Define Key Terms. If an essay question asks you whether Elvis Presley was an “outsider,”

or Madonna was a “radical,” you must be absolutely sure to explain what defines an “outsider”

or a “radical.” Don’t just assume that the reader will know what you mean when you use such

terms as authenticity, democracy, consumerism, popular, and so on. Failure to define

fundamental concepts can drag down a whole essay.

6. Use Evidence. Whatever argument you make, you must explain why you think as you do—

and the “why” means evidence—particular facts and concepts—drawn from the readings,

lectures, and other course materials.

7. Be Specific. As much as possible, make your points detailed and specific. For instance,

don’t just say, “The material conditions of teen-age life promoted a separate youth musical

culture.” Better to go farther: “The material conditions of teen-age life, including ‘segregation’

in high schools and money from allowances and jobs, promoted and paid for a separate youth

musical culture.”

8. Give Credit Where It’s Due. Whether you’ve quoted a source directly, paraphrased the

source, or borrowed a key idea from it, you need to acknowledge the source. For take-home

essays, that means using footnotes; for in-class tests, you should just mention the author of key

sources and ideas.

Don’t:

1. Don’t Use Material from Other Courses. In writing an essay, you’re expected only to draw

on the specific material of the course—the lectures, readings, and so on. There is no need

whatsoever to drag in anything else you think you know from other courses or from general

knowledge. That will only get in the way of what we are trying, in part, to discover: what you

have learned from this course.

2. Don’t Get “Literary.” To write a good essay, you don’t need to try to be dramatic or throw

in lots of adjectives and adverbs for the sake of effect. You don’t have to set the stage before

you answer the question, either: “It was a hot, August day in 1969, as Country Joe McDonald,

clad in an old Army jacket and the hopes of a generation, gazed uncertainly but hopefully out

over the enormous crowd strewn across the open fields of Bethel, New York. How could just

one man, strumming a guitar and singing into a microphone, slay the great, spectral beast that

was the war in Vietnam?” Just get to the point. A powerful, well-supported argument will be

dramatic enough.

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3. Don’t Universalize. Resist the temptation to begin your essay with some supposedly

universal truth: “All human beings are imperfect”; “Music hath charms to soothe a savage

breast”; “Mean people suck.” How do we know any of this? And, unless the questions are,

respectively, about human imperfection, savage breasts in human history, or the suck-i-ness of

the mean, what do these sweeping assertions have to do with what you’re being asked to write

about? The actual questions are hard enough; don’t dig yourself an even bigger hole with broad

claims that are probably unverifiable and certainly irrelevant to the matter at hand.

4. Don’t Moralize. Don’t substitute your own feelings for a reasoned argument, backed up by

evidence. If you’re asked how the Vietnam War shaped popular music, there’s no need to assert

that war is a good or bad thing. Your values and your politics are as irrelevant to the assignment

as mine are. Academic history is an attempt to produce reasoned, substantiated explanations of

why human phenomena occurred. Whether those phenomena were good or bad is another

matter.

5. Don’t Narrate. If you’re asked “How did Elvis Presley change the role of music in American

youth culture?” you don’t need to re-tell the story of his birth in Tupelo, his audition for Sam

Phillips, his contract with RCA, and his appearances on TV in 1956. What you need to do is to

refer to these events and explain why they mattered. For instance, you could say that Presley’s

rise from Tupelo to Sun, RCA, and TV was an example of how corporatized popular music

system harnessed outsider innovation.

6. Don’t Throw in the Kitchen Sink. Don’t use irrelevant information in a desperate attempt to

increase your word count or paper over your inability to answer the question: the reader is

always going to notice. Which takes us back to the first “Do” at the beginning of this document:

just answer the question.

So there are the key principles for writing a history essay. But remember: as in most things, the

principles are straightforward; it’s applying them that can require more care and attention than

we expect.