Editor’s note: This is the second of two Contingent reviews of The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays. The first review, by a recently-graduated history major, is available here. The author of this piece has chosen to donate her fee back to the magazine.
Katherine Pickering Antonova. The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays. Oxford University Press, 2020. xii+315pp. Paperback $24.95.
As a history professor at a medium-sized, public, historically black college, I spend a lot of time teaching writing. I probably spend as much time teaching students how to write a paper in my four courses a semester as I do teaching them the other skills of historians. As I tell my students, you cannot do history without writing. Writing is how historians process our understanding of the past and how we communicate it to others. Because history is such a writing intensive discipline, there are a plethora of books aimed at teaching historical writing and research. As I have worked with colleagues in my department to revise our historical skills sequence, we have pored over a dozen or so of the more popular writing guides, searching for one that is accessible, clear, and reasonably priced. We have yet to find one that does everything we need, but Katherine Anatonova’s guide comes close.
The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays has three major sections: the basics, the types of writing assignments commonly required in history classes, and research skills. The first three chapters of the book explain how to use the book, what academic writing is, and what history is and why it is important. The second section gives the basic structure, expectations, steps and outcomes of five different types of essay students might encounter in a history class: identifications, response essays, analytical essays, imaginative projects and historiography. The first two of those chapters are really aimed at exam preparation. The last three formats make up the general types of formal writing assignments given in history classes at the undergraduate level. The final two chapters cover how to analyze primary sources and how to conduct a history research project and write a research-based essay. This is not a book students (or faculty) should read from cover to cover, but it is one they should refer back to when starting paper assignments or crafting them.
For students of history, this book will provide careful directions on how to interpret professors’ assignments and the process they should follow to complete those assignments. Students of any major in any history course will find the first three chapters very useful for understanding the different expectations of college-level history courses and the way academic history is researched and written. The first chapter in particular offers significant advice not just on success in history courses, but in college in general, and explains the reasoning behind many of the things students struggle to understand: why the assigned readings are important, how to use office hours, why your professor is often grumpy when you ask questions about things that are easily looked up in the syllabus or textbook.
Schreibender Knabe (Writing Boy) by Albert Anker, c. 1908
The chapters on how to tackle the different kinds of essays students might be assigned may be very helpful, but I am concerned that many students will have difficulty identifying the type of essay they are being asked to write. Instructors will need to either direct students to a particular chapter or name their assignments in such a way as to indicate the style they expect. This book will be very useful to students entering college for the first time as it will explain the expectations and rules for participation in a college history class in a clear and straightforward manner. Many of today’s eighteen to twenty two year olds have grown up being told in public schools exactly what is expected of them and how they should accomplish it. This has left them struggling, when they arrive in college, to adjust to the unspoken rules of college classrooms. This book will help (if you can get them to read it) and will provide a common set of terms and expectations for all of the students in a class.
For faculty members, the book offers some clear language and structure that will be useful for creating assignments. Most faculty members now were taught to write formal papers before they attended college and had much more practice with writing before arriving in the college classroom than the current generation of students. We often assume that students have already developed a writing process and understand how to gather information, organize and revise various kinds of writing assignments. Instead, many of today’s students have been taught more about standardized testing, creative writing and creating presentations and slideshows than about formal writing assignments. Using this text will give faculty a set of styles and language that students can reference when not in the classroom, and hopefully will help students adjust to college-level writing more easily and reduce the amount of class time spent on going over directions and expectations.
There are some things that could be done better in the Essential Guide. The book is very densely written, an impression that is not helped by the small font and formatting. Nonmajors and freshmen may be intimidated by the sheer number of words on each page. Although the chapters have subheadings and some sections are broken down into bullet points, navigating the pages is difficult if you have any visual impairment (or just tired eyes). This is a very different layout than a traditional writing manual, many of which use multiple colors, larger font, and graphics to convey structure. While the examples provided are excellent, the images are small and the fonts chosen are so similar to that of the same text that it is sometimes hard to distinguish what is an example and what is not. This may pose a real problem for students who may be reading the book on their phones as well as students with visual or processing difficulties.
Schreibender Knabe mit Schwesterchen I (Writing Boy With His Little Sister I) by Albert Anker, 1875
The other piece that is buried in the book is the formatting and importance of citations, which is discussed in a variety of places and then has a short section in the last chapter of the book. Having one chapter on the politics and practices of citing sources in the first section of the book would likely be more useful for students (and faculty who assign the text). Although a variety of citation styles are discussed, a page or two on formatting Chicago-style citations would also be helpful.
Overall this is a useful book for teaching historical writing to undergraduates, although faculty will have to provide some guidelines for how to use the book in their particular course. The organization of the book into sections by type of essay makes this text different than many others on the market, and it provides practical and straightforward advice for students to improve their writing. Undergraduates will likely find this book more useful than older texts or those focused more on citations than structure and types of arguments.
