Instructions for the Analysis of Primaries

What Is the Rubric Used to Measure Your Content and Your Following the 5 Good Habits for Evidence. 1

What Is an Analysis?. 1

What Is the Safe Subject and What Are Your Other Choices?. 1

What’s the Order of What You Do If You Are Writing on the Safe Subject?. 1

Requirements for Teaching the Best Truth You Can Understand and Using Sources That Help You Catch On. 2

Requirements for Reading, Length, and Language in Your Analysis. 2

Requirements for Shortened Citations for Your Analysis. 3

If You Want to Know Why We Use These Shortened Citations. 3

Requirements for the Shortened Citations, But the Option of Using Endnotes. 4

What Is an Analysis in This History Class?. 4

Brain Trick for Quoting and Avoiding Quotation Humiliation. 4

 

What Is the Rubric Used to Measure Your Content and Your Following the 5 Good Habits for Evidence

Click here for more on the rubric and how to use it as a grader or as someone graded. (This opens in a New Window.) You can also look at the link immediately under Evidence Quiz 1 in Evidence Requirements.

What Is an Analysis?

This is an Analysis of Primaries for a history class. Don’t assume a prior writing assignment for an English class is what is needed since the goal is reading and writing that help you learn history.

Click here for what does your history teacher means by the word analysis. (This link stays on this webpage.)

What Is the Safe Subject and What Are Your Other Choices?

Because some students had difficulties in looking at all of the primaries provided for this course and deciding what to do, this course includes a proposal for a Safe Subject. It has 3 pre-chosen primaries, with one from Unit 1, one from Unit 2, and one from Unit 3. Using these primaries means you are looking at how things occurred across about 100 years.

If you look at the list of all of the primaries in US History II (provided at the top of Required Primaries) and you want to choose 3 other primaries, tell me. I will provide the proposal file for that and answer any questions you have.

What’s the Order of What You Do If You Are Writing on the Safe Subject?

Look at the things below this webpage in this folder. Then review these steps.

1.       Below this webpage, download the Proposal file by clicking on:  
File to Download to Submit the Proposal for the Safe Subject.

2.       Follow the instructions in the Proposal file.
Tip: When you are completing this file, also plan exactly how you will write this analysis.

3.       If you do not know how to use Turnitin, look at instructions by clicking on:
Turnitin Instructions on How Students Submit Papers Using Turnitin in Blackboard

4.       After you complete the file, submit the file to Turnitin by clicking on:
Proposal for the Safe Subject - Turnitin Assignment Tool to Submit Your Proposal

5.       When your instructor confirms that your Proposal is OK, download the preformatted file for your Analysis by clicking on:
Preformatted File to Download and Complete for the Analysis of Primaries

6.       Type your Analysis and its citations in the preformatted file, proof it and the citations carefully, and submit your file to Turnitin by clicking on:
Analysis of Primaries - Turnitin Assignment Tool to Submit Your Paper

Tip: Look at Turnitin’s feedback on language and more important for your history grade on similarity—on plagiarism. If your text is marked as similar, notice what Turnitin says is the source. If you should have placed “” around words or other problems, fix it. In your course, you can fix and resubmit until the last day the assignment is open.

Requirements for Teaching the Best Truth You Can Understand and Using Sources That Help You Catch On

You must use and cite in your writing:

a)      Each of the 3 primaries listed in Safe Subject for the Proposal

b)      The pages of the Essentials text that you identified for each primary and listed in your proposal.

Requirements for Reading, Length, and Language in Your Analysis

Reading

The 3 primaries listed in the Safe Subject for the Proposal

The textbook pages that you identify for each of the 3 primaries using the instructions in the file for the Safe Subject for the Proposal.

Caution: Do not begin writing the actual Analysis until your proposal is approved. FYI: After I have checked it (or in some cases given you a way to check it for yourself), then I’ll email you and enter the points that will make visible the Turnitin Assignment for the actual Analysis.

Length

330 words maximum – Less is better.

It cannot be more than one (1) printed page. If you use endnotes (not footnotes), a few of the endnotes can roll to a second page.

Format

You used a pre-formatted file provided at the bottom of the Analysis of Primaries folder. Do not change the font size (10 points), the font (Ariel), the margins (1” on the left and .5” on the right) and the paragraph setting (double space).

The pre-formatted file is an .rtf file (Rich Text Format). You may work in that file or you may save it to another file type that Turnitin accepts. Turnitin accepts these types of files:

·         A Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx)

·         An Adobe file (.pdf)

·         An Open Office document (.odt)

Punctuation

Make sure it is accurate, especially if you are quoting something. Keep it simple by using this Brain Trick (goes to the bottom of this webpage).

General clarity

Read and plan carefully, being sure to record the exact page numbers as you work. Type in a word processor and run spell and grammar checking. Print it and proof it. (To proof = to compare side by side paper and source to be sure page numbers and facts and names and quotations and everything is correct.)

 

Requirements for Shortened Citations for Your Analysis

Do not use lengthy citation statements within parentheses () as is done with MLA. You are trying to teach history accurately to someone like yourself. You are not collecting research and quoting from it. You all have the same sources and so you do not want to get a lot of words get between you and your fellow students. Do these things for this writing assignment:

What You Want to Cite

Example of How You Would Cite

If the fact is from a primary for the Safe Subject for the Proposal 

The file for Safe Subject that you submit lists the 3 primaries and lists beside each one a short phrase that you use when citing that primary.

Example: the primary “1896: Plessy-Harlan” has beside it the short phrase Plessy-Harlan.
If your fact is from page 1 of that primary, then immediately after your fact you’d write: (Plessy-Harlan, p. 1)

If the fact is from the textbook, the Essentials edition

If your fact is from page 75 of the textbook, then immediately after your fact you’d write: (Essentials, p. 75)

 

If You Want to Know Why We Use These Shortened Citations

The reasons are:

1.       All of your written assignments are brief. If you used traditional MLA citation which is written inline (within your lines of text), you would use up your word count much faster.

2.       History’s standard, the Chicago Manual of Style, provides rigorous citation, but not inline. Instead, it uses endnotes[i] or footnotes[1] to provide citation.

In other words, citation is there but it is not in the way of communication of the history. The citation is not written within your lines of text because of how historians write about history.

·         They are helping people understand the past.

·         That is your job as well. Why? When you try to help someone understand history, you start to understand it yourself. If you want to understand something, try to teach it. (If you want to know more, click here for why trying to teach someone like yourself is the goal of writing.)

3.       In this class, you may place your citation in either endnotes or inline, but we make that citation as unobtrusive as possible.

 

Requirements for the Shortened Citations, But the Option of Using Endnotes

You may use the shortened citations (covered above) after a fact:

·         Either in parentheses

·         Or as endnotes (not footnotes) – If you want to use endnotes, let me talk to you about why you can’t use footnotes.

Learning to use endnotes is useful:

·         If you write for professors who don’t require citations but do require you be able to say your proof

·         If you realize you will have to write memos and other documents to or for your boss

·         If you need to figure something out that is complex and you need to be able to follow your own “evidence trail”

Why are endnotes so useful for these situations:

·         You can write the document with endnotes and keep it carefully for yourself.

·         Copy it for your professor or your boss and, using a few keystrokes, delete the endnotes in the file, and have a short paper for the professor or a one-page memo for the boss

What Is an Analysis in This History Class?

Sometimes it is clearest start with what an Analysis is not. An Analysis in this class is:

 

This is a history class and the goal to help you learn history. One of the hardest things for students to understand about history is that it what was true at the beginning of a time period can be amazingly different at the end of it—sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. History changes! If it didn’t, humans could never have a consequence on the present and future. What makes history change is something worth noticing if you want to survive your present and, perhaps what is more important, if you want to try to maintain what is good in your present.

 

What do you do when you write an Analysis for this history class? You:

1.     Use the Safe Subject proposal or choose a subject you want to examine. (Ask if you want to know about that.)

2.     Read the primaries and the textbook pages about the time periods of those primaries.

3.     Work until you figure the subject out well enough that could explain it—for example—to your smart cousin who wants to understand.

 

Brain Trick for Quoting and Avoiding Quotation Humiliation

Click here for additional tips.

The rules for showing what you have taken out (…) of the author’s words or put in ([ ]) are complex and for most of us they are not worth learning.

 

This brain trick lets you be accurate but avoid learning those rules:

  1. Choose 3 to 6 words to quote and change nothing (not an ing or an ed, not a comma, nothing) between the first and the last word.

  2. Put abefore the first word and a after the last word.

  3. Place those words with the “ ”within your sentence.

 

  1. If something sounds awkward about your sentences, then change your own words—the only words you have a right to change.

 

  1. Look at all of the words in the source. Be sure the meaning of the source remains in your quotation.

 

 

 

Copyright C. J. Bibus, Ed.D. 2003-2016

 

WCJC Department:

History – Dr. Bibus

Contact Information:

281.239.1577 or bibusc@wcjc.edu

Last Updated:

2016

WCJC Home:

http://www.wcjc.edu/

 

 



[1] This is an example of a footnote. It appears at the bottom of the page.



[i] This is an example of an endnote. It appears after the last word in the document.