How to Do the 1st Choice for Writing

What Do You Read Carefully and Write About?. 1

What Are Requirements for Citation for Your Paper?. 2

What Is Essential Background for Success with These Primaries?. 3

What Is the Rubric Used to Measure Your Content and Your Following the 5 Good Habits for Evidence and How Does It Work?. 3

How Does Grading on the Paper Work?. 3

If You Want to Know Why We Use Endnotes. 3

If You Quote (and You Do Not Have to) - Brain Trick for Quoting and Avoiding Quotation Humiliation. 4

 

What Do You Read Carefully and Write About?

Caution: You are trying to teach history accurately to someone like yourself. You are not collecting stuff and quoting from it. You are figuring this out in a simple way, explaining it briefly, and citing so anyone can see your proof for what you say.

What are the parts of what you write?

1.       1st page: Your paper and its endnotes (Use Microsoft Word or another program that can neatly do endnotes for you.)
Tip: The next heading provides the shortened citation for the primaries. You must have a correct bibliography to use the short form of citation.

2.       2nd page: Your Bibliography listing in correct format the textbook and each of the 3 primaries.
Tip: The Chicago Manual of Style Cheatsheet shows you the format for the textbook and tells you how to do the format for each of the primaries.

What do you read?

In the textbook, use these pages:

·         23 on servitude in Virginia in the 1st half of the 1600s when Anthony Johnson came to Virginia and when there were few Africans there (Called the beginning of the seventeen century.)

·         53 on Virginia’s slave codes beginning in the 1660s and the “iron conditions of bondage” and on the changing conditions for and numbers of Africans (Called the end of the seventeen century.)

·         130 on the clause in the Constitution increasing white Southerners’ number of representatives in Congress by counting the slave population

·         131 on the clause in the Constitution on the slave trade

·         285 about the 1793 law about  the clause in the Constitution saying a slave fleeing to a free area was still a slave and had to be returned to the master

Caution in Reading:  It is not until the 1700s that Virginia turned from mainly white indentured servants to slavery of Africans and slavery.

In the folder below this link, read, use, and cite each of the 3 primary sources in the folder under the next heading. Each primary has search words to help you focus. Caution: Click on the document and use those search words.

Use no other pages or sources–and certainly not your memory.

What do you write about?

Your Question: Examine how law (or the absence of it) determines whether slave owners can keep other people in bondage.

Do you provide a heading?

No. Use the file provided as is so that your paper will not exceed 1 page. You do not add a heading. You do type your first and last name on your paper and the CRN number.

Citation?

Covered under the next heading.

Length?

With the format below, the paper and the endnotes must be less than 1 page. Do not have your paper go over 1 printed page. Caution: do not change the font, margins, or double spacing.

Format?

Use the preformatted file. Do not change any of the settings:

·         Double-spaced.

·         11 point Calibri font.

·         Margins -1” on the left and .5” on the right

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)

General requirements?

1.       Type in a word processor that automatically does endnotes for you and that can run spell and grammar checking.

2.       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.)

Where do you submit it?

In Blackboard, in the Turnitin Assignment at the bottom of this folder. You will not be able to see that Turnitin Assignment until you have a grade of 2 for the Evidence Prerequisites to Submit the Paper. If you have done both Evidence Quiz 1 and Evidence Quiz 2 and do not have that grade of 2, please email me at bibusc@wcjc.edu.

What is the rubric used to grade this and all writing?

Click here for more on the rubric and how to use it to plan your work and when your work is graded.

 

What Are Requirements for Citation for Your Paper?

To use the shorten citations provided below, you must provide a Bibliography listing the 3 primaries and the textbook. Caution: Use Microsoft Word to do endnotes automatically.

What You Want to Cite

How You Would Cite Each Source in Your Shortened Citations as Endnote

If the fact is from the textbook The Brief American Pageant

If your fact is from page 23 of the textbook, use this in your endnote.

Kennedy, Cohen, and Piehl, American Pageant, 23.

If the fact is the introduction to Anthony Johnson’s life beginning in 1620

If your fact is from the 1-page introduction to his life, use this in your endnote.

Anthony Johnson, People & Events, 1.

If the fact is background on Anthony Johnson’s 1670 Court Document

If your fact is from the 1-page background on the 1670 court document, use this in your endnote.

Court document regarding Anthony Johnson, 1.

If the fact is the transcript of the Anthony Johnson’s 1670 Court Document

If your fact is from the 1-page text of the 1670 court document, use this in your endnote.

Text of Court document regarding Anthony Johnson, 1.

If the fact is from the Library of Congress collection including the 1660 Virginia slave code

If your fact is from this multi-page webpage, click Print or Print Preview to estimate the page number of the information you are using. If the fact you are using is on page 1, use this in your endnote.

Library of Congress, Slavery and Indentured Servants, 1.

If the fact is from the Instructor’s online Constitution

If your fact is from this 1-page listing of all clauses in the Constitution about slavery, use this endnote.

All Issues in the Constitution about Slavery in 1787, 1.

Click here If You Want to Know Why We Use These Shortened Citations (This link goes to the bottom of this webpage.)

What Is Essential Background for Success with These Primaries?

Let go of your biases and assumptions. Study the map as though you were alive then and your future was at stake. Use the link at the top of the folder and ground yourself in math.

Tip: If you never looked at the links about these links when you did your Course Plan, do it now. This link defines the words primary and secondary history or covers History Department’s requirements for all instructors. Save yourself from unnecessarily low grades by understanding these words and these realities.

What Is the Rubric Used to Measure Your Content and Your Following the 5 Good Habits for Evidence and How Does It Work?

What is a rubric? Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines a rubric as “a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests.” Frequently, rubrics are in a table:

·         With rows for each criteria (such as this one with criteria for Reading FOR Evidence, Writing WITH Evidence, Following Directions for Evidence, and Mechanics)

·         With columns for each grade level (such as this one with columns for “F” through “A.”

Click here for an explanation of the rubric and how to use it as a grader or as someone graded. (This is also available in several parts of the course including in Evidence Quiz 4.)

How Does Grading on the Paper Work?

For this assignment, you look at the graded rubric and the corresponding marks on your paper. You fill out the form at the bottom of the rubric identifying which of the 5 Good Habits for Evidence that you missed. After you do that, I enter the grade at My Grades. The point value is @ 50 points for content and @ 50 points for following all 5 Good Habits for Evidence

If You Want to Know Why We Use Endnotes

The reasons are:

1.       All of your written assignments are required to be brief. (Brief is harder, but generally makes better thinking.) 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 or footnotes 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 want people to be able to check for a source if the reader does not know it and to skip the source if they already familiar with the evidence. (Unlike the other standards for citations, readers can ignore citation or quickly find the source for a specific fact by looking for an endnote with a specific number.)

·         They are helping people understand the past, not just providing a collection of facts.

·         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.

There is one other benefit: only Chicago Manual of Style and its notes about evidence (either footnotes or endnotes) let a person prepare a document with notes, copy it, and then delete all the notes. Example: a 1-page memo for a boss.

 

3.       In this class, you place your citation in endnotes and provide a bibliography so that the citation is brief, but clear. FYI: With this 1-page paper, I ask you to use endnotes instead of footnotes because it is easier to tell when you are exceeding the maximum amount of text.

If You Quote (and You Do Not Have to) - 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. 2003-2018

 

WCJC Department:

History – Dr. Bibus

Contact Information:

281.239.1577 or bibusc@wcjc.edu

Last Updated:

2018

WCJC Home:

http://www.wcjc.edu/