History 353 Y

Give careful consideration to choosing your topic. Make a choice based on interest, but then do some preliminary exploring to make sure that there are a sufficient number of good sources (written in the languages that you read) for you to use. Choose a topic from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Go to the class syllabus for ideas. If you would like some extra help formulating a topic, or are uncertain about whether the topic you have chosen is a good one, please see me.

Your research essay outline should identify your subject and should also describe the arguments and approaches that you are thinking of using in your paper. This outline must show evidence of preliminary reading. It should be clear that you have already learned something about your topic, and that you are familiar with some of the major historical debates on or approaches to your topic. The outline should also point to the argument or thesis which you may build in your paper. It should also provide some sense of how you are thinking about elaborating upon this potential thesis. What evidence and examples might you expect to use to support your contentions? What structure do you envision for your paper? Your outline is the place to brainstorm about your topic. Try to group the ideas that you come up with under logical headings. You can use point form. Your final paper may not follow this initial outline, and that's just fine. The purpose of writing the outline at this early stage is to get you thinking about your essay in a more concrete way, both in terms of content and argument, and in terms of structure and style. An essay outline evolves continually, and changes as your own thinking about a given topic changes.

The preliminary bibliography should contain five sources. Do not include textbooks, encyclopaedias or dictionaries. General surveys are good for background information, but should also be excluded from this bibliography. Include monographs - books that are about a specific and well-focused topic. You may include primary sources. Include one scholarly journal article on your given topic. You will write a precis of this article (details below). Provide a brief (a couple of sentences maximum) description of the other four sources listed in your preliminary bibliography. This requires you to actually skim through the books and to determine whether and how they are useful to you.

It is up to you to find the article that will form the subject of your precis. The course syllabus is a good place to start. If, for example, you are interested in the Communist period in Poland, go to appropriate sections of the syllabus and take a look at what is listed. There may or may not be a suitable article there. Alternately, you can choose one of the books (either general or specific) listed on the syllabus and go through its footnotes to find an article that might interest you and that might also suit this assignment. It is very important that you have some idea of the particular focus of your paper before you choose the article that will be the basis of your precis. "Communist Poland" is not much of a topic. The more focused and specific you can be, the better. If, for example, your interest is in the diplomatic relations of Communist Poland with other Eastern bloc countries during the initial decade of Communist rule, it might not be the best idea for you to write your precis on Padraic Kenney's article, which is entitled, "The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland" (1999). The point is to pick an article that will be very useful to you in terms of writing your research paper. Writing a precis is an exercise in the precise and careful reading of a given text. Think of the precis as a summary or description of the text. In this sense, it is different from a critical book review. When writing a precis, you are illustrating that you understand the author's argument, that you are able to follow the way in which that author advances his or her argument, and that you are able to communicate your interpretation in a clear fashion. You are not required to advance your own argument or to comment on the viability of the author's contentions or conclusions. Writing a precis is an exercize in comprehension. It is also a writing exercize. The article that you are describing may be thirty pages long, and yet you have to summarize and synthesize it as accurately and as fully as you can in just one double-spaced page. You must write clearly and concisely. Your precis should go through at least a few major edits! The end result should be a polished piece of writing. You are not required to provide footnotes / endnotes in a precis. Do not quote from the article (unless you are absolutely convinced that the author has said something so profound and elegant that you could not possibly write a description of the article without it). A precis follows a rather rigid and simple structure. In the introduction of the precis, you will, not surprisingly, introduce the article and describe the author's argument. What is the article about? What point(s) does the author argue? What is his or her thesis? This introduction should only be a couple of sentences. The body of the precis will be two or three paragraphs. In the body, you will talk about the content of the article. Highlight the main arguments that the author advances and provide some sense of how he or she elaborates on them. Pay attention to the author's emphases and to the relative weight that he or she gives certain points. The conclusion of your precis will summarize the author's conclusions or findings, and may comment briefly on tone and style.

If you are unclear about any part of this assignment, please see me!!! And I encourage you, again, to check out the U of T Writing Centre website. There you will find lots of additional information about how to write an essay outline, a research paper, etc.