Editor’s note: This is the first of two Contingent reviews of The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays. This review, by a recently-graduated history major, will be followed next week by a review by someone who teaches undergraduate history.
Katherine Pickering Antonova. The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays. Oxford University Press, 2020. xii+315pp. Paperback $24.95.
I was a history major before I went to college. This means I knew what I would be studying before I ever applied, a luxury many students do not have. I tailored my high school electives and AP courses with this in mind. With her latest book, Katherine Pickering Antonova considered a variety of potential readers: history majors like me, graduate students seeking teaching aids, and even casual readers interested in just what exactly academic historians do on the daily. But she wrote The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays with a different audience in mind. Helpful as it is for those other audiences, it may be most helpful for the students who aren’t history majors, the ones who want to get the paper done, earn a better grade on an exam, or just figure out what on Earth their history professor is talking about.
At first glance, the guide is reminiscent of the Chicago Manual of Style, the historian’s big ol’ citation and style manual, and the Turabian handbook, the historian’s more portable citation and style handbook. The table of contents even has the same numbering scheme as these other two history reference books. But instead of providing help with citation dilemmas or the minutiae of grammar, the book explains the expectations for the most common kinds of written assignment students are likely to encounter in undergraduate history courses, from informal responses and exam questions to research papers and historiographical essays. In order to provide “goal-oriented writing skills,” Antonova focuses on the specific goals of each form, things like analysis, explanation, and contextualization, and how students can accomplish them (p. 1).
Antonova’s writing is clear, so that students will understand with no questions; full of examples, so that students have access to details when their real-world instructions are vague or confusing; and direct, to the extent that some students may be pleasantly surprised by the author’s bluntness. If I had used this book as a student, even as someone who already knew they wanted to be a historian, I am sure that I would have benefited from its direct language and abundant examples.
The Essential Guide is laid out in a way that felt intuitive to me as a college student. The content is organized by assignment, and progresses in order of increasing complexity, more or less. Each section begins with a brief explanation and breakdown of the writing goals of the assignment in question. Not understanding what you needed to do in order to get a good grade was one of the hardest parts of being a student, and these sections felt like insights into the minds of college instructors.
For the purposes of this review, I read like I did when I was in school. I dissected the introduction and then focused on the first assignment chapter: “The Short-Answer Identification Essay.” IDs, as they’re more commonly known, are short answer exam questions that require students to concisely define a term and explain its (course-related) historical significance. As a veteran of a ridiculous number of these (I heart you, Dr. Manoutin!),1 I can assure you that IDs are challenging writing assignments, as they force students to quickly get to the heart of the content and demonstrate true learning. Nothing is ever a substitute for practice, but the book’s method of simply and directly explaining a concept and then providing clear and concrete examples will help students speed up their own learning as they tackle each form of history writing.
Schreibunterricht (Writing Lesson) by Albert Anker, 1865.
Antonova also includes specific reading and writing skills with the assignments where they would be most helpful. For example, she places tips on note-taking skills in section 4.2, where they are meant to help students strengthen their learning during lectures and thus streamline their studying later—especially for IDs. The appearance of these subheadings throughout the chapters was useful for identifying the specific skills needed for each assignment, things like reading, brainstorming, drafting, revising, and proofreading. Savvy students will use these sections to practice specific skills as they learn to spot weak areas in their writing process.
Most of the book’s organization made sense, and I would have been able to use it easily as a student, whether it had been assigned to me or I had found it in the library. I did wonder why “The Historiographical Essay” was placed before “Primary Source Interpretation” and “Historical Research.” In my coursework, intensive historiographical work was done almost exclusively in upper level courses, while all students in history courses of all levels learned how to work with primary sources and conduct historical research to some degree.
To her credit, though, Antonova told her readers how to use the book with a piece of advice many of us perpetual students know by heart: “reading in sequence is not necessarily the most efficient way to use the book” (p. 3). I remember watching my classmates’ shocked faces when my instructors told them this in first-year courses.
This advice is an example of what makes the book so accessible for students. Antonova assumes the reader knows nothing about writing history. Assuming this blank slate throughout the book allows her to explain the most basic of concepts—how to interpret historical documents, how to take a test, and even how to use the different parts of a book—without any language that shamed the reader for not already knowing such things. I am a first-gen student who had a leg up because of my high school’s intensive academic program; the idea of using the “ToC” or index to skip straight to what I needed in a book was familiar to me when I went to college. Some of my classmates were thrilled to learn that these approaches were encouraged, and weren’t “cheating” at all, while others did not know the purpose of the index to begin with. The best instructors simply explained how to work; others made a whole thing of it, making students visibly uncomfortable on occasion.
These experiences are why I was excited to see such explicit instructions that brazenly assumed level 0 skills. As a student, feeling like you are being judged by your instructor for not knowing something already can instantly create feelings of shame and mistrust, and foster reluctance to learn the lesson at hand (an experience hopefully no one reading this review understands). This book did not give me those feelings. Instead, it truly approaches writing instruction from the ground up, including foundational skills like brainstorming, note-taking, and something even experienced historians have trouble with—developing research questions. The Essential Guide breaks down concepts and writing goals so effectively that I found myself wishing it had gone full Chicago style with the table of contents and listed the 3-digit sub-subheadings as well, just to make it even easier for students to find specific ideas and instructions.
There were a few spots that tarnished this otherwise shining book, things that stood out precisely because the book is generally so effective at providing instruction without expectation or condescension. As a personal example, I felt disappointed to see a metaphor comparing attending and participating in class to going to a gym: the student must “work out” in order to “get in shape” (p. 9). Some disabled students may get the impression that they are not wanted in class because they feel like this metaphor singles them out as unable to participate consistently/at all. I can not and do not speak for all students, let alone all disabled students, but that was my own reaction. Despite this, reading the writing instruction itself rarely elicited reactions other interest or excitement.
Das Schulexamen (The School Examination) by Albert Anker, 1862.
The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays would have been a unique book to use as a student: not my quick reference book, Turabian; not my treasured citation question baby, Chicago Manual of Style; not an imaginatively thoroughly introduction to professional historical writing, Marius. Antonova meant to craft a writing guide for students in history courses who are simply in history courses, and she succeeded. It would have been excellent for my first semester of school when I was in my first survey course; I also could have used it later down the line when I was in advanced courses and tried to get fancy with my writing from the get-go instead of building from the ground up to get to the fancy. As a result, history instructors may want to see if this fits their needs and the needs of their students, especially for their introductory courses.
But all students in history—and all people teaching it—should take to heart what I found to be Antonova’s most important lesson: “Every choice you make as a writer should serve the goal of what you are trying to communicate” (p. 3). What is your goal? What are you communicating? I have no idea if I am going back to school yet, but if I do, I know I will be hearing those questions in my head.
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