Writing Resources

University of Arizona Resources

Research

• UofA Library History Subject Guides and Librarian Specialists – Utilize these resources!
  
• UofA Library Historical Indexes by Date of Coverage
  
• Scholarly or Popular Article? Try this Tutorial to Find out!

Writing

• University of Arizona Writing Center – Including weekly tutorials and writing improvement sessions for undergrads
• University of Arizona Writing Skills Improvement Program for Minority and Economically Disadvantaged Students

Miscellaneous Sites

• Writing History Papers - An effective and snappy guide from the University of North Carolina on what historians do and how you can do it too.
• Handouts on effective writing - A good selection of brief and to-the-point handouts from the Hamilton College writing center on developing thesis statements, revising essays, avoiding wordiness etc.
Kimberly Chapman's essay writing guide - a comprehensive and highly recommended guide from a fiction author. Includes many well analyzed examples of good and bad writing.
• Virgil: the Interactive Online Advice Guru - from the University of Texas at Austin. Go to Virgil with your essay-writing ills and see if he helps. You might be surprised.
• http://academic.bowdoin.edu/WritingGuides/ - Comprehensive guide from which many of the links below are taken.
• How to Prepare for a Meeting with a Tutor/TA
• The Historian's Toolbox - Help on writing history: finding, interpreting, writing about and documenting sources.

Reading Historical Sources

• How to read sources well enough to write about them later
• Finding, Evaluating, and Using Primary Sources on the Internet
• Predatory Reading: How to read scholarly material in college
• How to read a Primary Source
• How to read a Secondary Source
• How to identify and navigate a scholarly monograph - Learn to tell the difference between textbooks, popular nonfiction, and scholarly works. What's more, get tips on how to approach those scholarly tomes!

Aides on Various Types of Assignments

• Contrasting two interpretations - A brief sample essay on two different interpretations of the Spanish conquest of Peru
• What is an annotated bibliography?
• How to successfully answer a "Compare and Contrast" question
• How to prepare for and take an essay exam
• Historiographies - What is a historiographical essay and how do you write one? (Mainly intended for sizable graduate student essays, but contains good tips for thinking about smaller historiographical assignments as well.)

Essays - Researching, Organizing, Arguing, Writing

• Guide to Beginning Historical Research
• The Three Parts of a History Paper
• Writing History Papers - from the Dartmouth Writing Program
• What is...the Thesis??
• What is an Argument, and how do I make a good one?
• Finding Your Best Point (and making sure others can, too)
• Summary: When to use it, and when to skip it
• Make sure your evidence fits your claims!!
• Understanding "Audience" In Your Writing
• How do I write a great paragraph?
• Which words can help me make transitions within my paper?
• Writing Effective Conclusions
• 15 Things to Avoid Like the Plague in Your Papers - Common logical fallacies, aka how not to argue

Evidence – How, When, and Where to Use It

• Presenting Primary Sources In Your Paper (PDF) (Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College, 2004)
• Integrating Quotations into Your Essay
• How to quote and paraphrase

Grammatical Problems

• Top Ten College Grammar Mistakes
• Grammar handbook: verbs, adverbs, commas, dashes, and more!
• Purdue's OWL Punctuation Handouts
• Sentence fragments bad. Please click here to correct them.
• Help with overall sentence construction
• Pronoun Pitfalls
• Trouble with commas? Click here.

Writing with style

• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White - This is an older edition of the famous little book, available online. You can buy a newer edition at the university bookstore for a few dollars. The sections on 'Elementary Principles of Composition' and 'An Approach to Style' are especially worthy of recommendation.
• George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (1946) - This is a classic, and deservedly so.
• Avoiding wordiness in your essays
• Passive versus active voice – Passive voice should NOT be overused by writers! Cringing will be done by your professors if your paper is disfigured by passive constructions! If this link is clicked by you, the mysteries of making the passive active will be revealed by the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Documentation I: Do document, don't plagiarize!

• Plagiarism as defined by the American Historical Association
• How to avoid plagiarizing (from the University of Chicago)
• UofA Library Guide on Avoiding Plagiarism
• How to recognize and avoid plagiarism

Documentation II: The nitty-gritty

• Citing sources in your history paper
• UofA Library Chicago Style Citation Guide - A good overview of the basics of the list of citations.
• Finding and documenting historical sources - Contains tips on useful databases as well as an overview and samples of documenting with the Chicago style.
• The Chicago manual of style website - with plenty of good examples on the Chicago style.
• The Journal of American History stylesheet - Basic Chicago style, including information on how to footnote unpublished primary sources.
• Advanced citations for your papers - The tricky stuff: what to do with archival sources, laws, electronic resources and the like.