how to start history essay

how to start history essay

Effective Strategies for Starting a History Essay

1. Introduction: The Importance of a Strong Start

Importance of Introductions: The introduction is the first paragraph of your essay, and it serves several purposes. This paragraph gets your reader’s attention, develops the basic ideas of what you will cover, and provides the thesis statement for the essay. It is not only the variety and length but also the material that is selected to make for a strong opening. You have to think about your personality and the spirit of your scholarship as you decide how to express yourself. You have to utilize the language that you feel comfortable using and let compassion prevail. In a history essay, your intro should not be long. Good writing, like winning a game or burglarizing a church, starts with risking failure. What a good intro has in my mind is length proportionate to the essay in general and an interesting and original first line.

The introduction is the first paragraph of your essay, and it serves several purposes. This paragraph gets your reader’s attention, develops the basic ideas of what you will cover, and provides the thesis statement for the essay. It is not only the variety and length of the introduction that makes for good writing. You have to think about your personality and the spirit of your scholarship as you decide how to express yourself. You have to utilize the language that you feel comfortable using and let compassion prevail. In a history essay, your intro should not be long. A good introduction should provide the information the reader needs to understand the topic and objectives of your piece of writing. In asking the reader, you will want to tell the reader the topic of the essay. You can typically say the war began and say between what sides. Such a statement of introduction and/or identification can be regarded as the main argument.

Introductions: What constitutes a good first paragraph?

2. Choosing a Compelling Topic

The next page will introduce and illustrate the most important features of historical writing. When you have chosen your topic, ask yourself why or how questions about it. No matter what kind of paper you are to write, you’ve got to ask why or how things happened or are the way they are. As a good scholar, you are uniquely qualified to help readers understand events, quite obviously because you have every advantage that the writer of an essay does. You know generally what is going on out there, sword and shield in appropriate hand. You trust yourself to turn words into swords in a predictable slash and place, landing them an inch or two in their opposing sides. You just do it. More importantly, you almost always can. If your optics are no more brilliant than those of your colleagues, though, why bother to write at all? Combine firmness of application with an ability to lend a sharp point to your prose, and you will achieve splendid distinction.

Making your historical writing interesting is definitely important, but adding vivid details simply for the sake of making your work more interesting or exciting will too quickly lead to clutter. There are basically four ways to do that. You can ask a “how” question about a specific, complex phenomenon that has intrigued you, consider the larger, even more fascinating subject matter of your course, or compare a concept that intrigues you today to its historical antecedent. No matter what kind of topic you choose, assure yourself of repeatedly being able to ask why or how. Chances are your historical essay will be driven by the why and how questions just as much as the what questions. Just as different industries and different scholarly journals possess unique writing conventions for the genres they publish, different academic disciplines feature unique styles. In scholarship, as in all fields of endeavor, style matters.

3. Crafting a Thought-Provoking Thesis Statement

When it is said that the thesis statement is thought-provoking, it doesn’t mean that this phrase should be repeating this intricate rhetorical mind amino itself, only in the context of the paper. Much rather, a good thesis statement is that piece of the puzzle – one paragraph which might be small when compared to other parts of the paper – that commands much of the audience’s attention who reads the work, presenting a question in such a manner that it can or even should be explored. That which can be simply researched and then worked into is not thought-provoking. In this article, we will focus discuss the major ways of how to do that.

Although shying away from writing the thesis statement even in unusually late periods of the work is a thing that comes from an understandable fear of getting something wrong, the fear of contributing nothing of importance is usually an even bigger bother. If it is so hard to craft a thesis statement, then what’s the sense in it when one already knows the main ideas to be highlighted in a paper? This is a good question because it explains the infamous conundrum why people used to get to learn to write problems in third grade and how making these problems has always been that simple. It’s just, when a research paper is concerned, the good thesis that is anything of assistance through the process is a kind which requires a lot more attention.

In the previous parts of this guide, we discussed the role of the thesis statement in terms of its position and the benefits it brings, strategies to determine when exactly a thesis statement should be written, and elements that can distinguish a good thesis statement when compared to other options for my papers. In the next parts, we will deal with crafting effective thesis statements and tips to successfully accomplish this challenging task. For now, let’s focus on the maneuver that will make your thesis statement both deep and thought-provoking.

4. Engaging Opening Hooks and Strategies

History essay openings can be more challenging than you might think. The excitement gets put on hold as readers read one “imposing juggernaut of a sentence” after another. Don’t try so hard to show the smooth feel of polished marble or the markers of learnedness like Latin quotations or the seven melodious parts of the historian’s craft. Why not strive for a contemporary look, one that shows how history teaches us about timeless issues and weaves its way through modern dilemmas and debates to bring the reader straight from the past into the tale…

Please make the opening of your essay so interesting that a reader would not stop reading your piece of good work. Start with a very interesting question or a puzzling image. Bring a layer of mystery – a question or an investigatory approach that feels tailor-made for both writers and readers. And if you are a historian and you are not excited, why should they be?

5. Establishing Historical Context

The chapter provides readers with an in-depth breakdown of the information provided in the title. Titles are required to directly point to the type of history essay students are writing. This chapter is designed to give readers a stronger historical understanding of their topic by establishing historical context. The chapter explains how to construct a simple and specific research question. The four goals of history essays include establishing a historical context, explaining an event’s causes, describing its course, and analyzing its effects. Each of the four goals is clearly stated in the chapter. Practical tips that students will find useful in developing their skills in writing history papers are also discussed. The chapter appeals granting approval. Readers will gain an awareness of how challenging the process of writing a school history essay can be.

When you begin to write an essay, you must assign your essay a strong title. Any reader’s first port of call as they begin to read your history essay will be in its title. Your title should clearly inform the reader about the historical event you are writing about. It should also inform the reader in a direct manner with the type of history essay you are writing. A strong title will make your history essay stand head and shoulders above the crowd and draw attention to your essay as soon as it is given to the teacher. This entire chapter focuses on establishing what the history of the history essay accomplishes. Readers are also given a concise summary of the four primary goals of the history paper.