Heather Cox Richardson's Richardson's Rules of Order Wins Cliopatria's Best Series of Posts

Randall Stephens

Congratulations to Heather Cox Richardson, contributing editor of THS blog, who is the winner of Cliopatria's Best Series of Posts for 2009! Heather's Richardson's Rules of Order won high praise from the premier history group blog. (I must admit, I was on the committee that was tasked to make the decision. But I recused myself of judging Heather's wonderful series.) We're thrilled that she took the award.

"It's the year of the female history blogger," writes Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, "with women having won at least 4½ of the 6 awards. It's also the first year in which one blog won two awards." The award was announced last night here at the AHA in San Diego.

Here's the description of Richardson's series from Cliopatria:

"Please remember that your professors are human and it's hard work to stand in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and talk for an hour," Heather Cox Richardson of U. Mass Amherst writes in a series of 9 (and counting) posts that collectively provide an instructive, gentle, and eminently useful guide for college students in history classes. In an age of changing rules and often a challenging lack of civility, Richardson provides both useful information and a practical etiquette manual which could help improve the classroom environment everywhere. This series of posts will soon be finding its way onto syllabi in history courses across the country.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part XI: A Note About Professors

Heather Cox Richardson

Please remember that your professors are human and it’s hard work to stand in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and talk for an hour. In the last decade, students seem more and more to regard us as if we’re behind a screen, and seem to think they can talk, read, sleep, or just stare at us glassy-eyed without it having any effect on our performance. This is a shared enterprise. It’s hard to lecture to an apparently disinterested sea of eyes. If you don’t think a lecture hall is intimidating, take a minute after class some day to stand behind the podium and look at all those seats. Then imagine holding the attention of everyone in those seats for an hour, two days a week. Wouldn’t it be easier if the people there seemed interested? You don’t have to act like you’re watching U2, but do try to make it clear your heart hasn’t actually stopped beating.

Please don’t let the anonymity of a large classroom make you feel like you can use an evaluation form to be vicious. While you can walk away from that form, remember that your teacher is going to live with whatever you say on it for the rest of his or her career. Your bile, spilled on a page, can devastate a junior professor, while even older scholars would rather not have the chair, the members of the personnel committee, and the dean (all of whom read our evaluations), read commentary on our personal attractiveness, our choice in clothing, or on what professions would suit us better. Criticize when it’s appropriate, yes, but do so constructively. It doesn’t hurt to mention things that have gone particularly well, too.

Remember that for many history professors their university jobs dictate that only about a third of time and energy should go into teaching (although it always takes way more time and effort than that!). We have significant responsibilities outside of the classroom. We’re supposed to sit on the committees that keep the university running, as well as to manage national and international scholarly and educational projects. In addition to teaching and what is called “service,” we’re also supposed to maintain a prominent profile as scholars and writers. These three parts of our professional lives mean that we are usually trying to manage three different kinds of schedules, as well as three different kinds of work, all of which take place in widely different locations and settings. If we cannot meet you at a time you think is convenient, it is not because we’re being jerks, but because, for example, we have to be in another city that week to help evaluate a university. We will try to make things convenient for you, but please do remember that we have other professional commitments.

Finally, you might want to Google your professors to see what they do outside the classroom. You will probably see that your school has an extraordinary faculty. You might find that your school has national leaders in nanotechnology and sports medicine; or Pulitzer Prize winners and consultants to the State Department. Go meet these people, talk to them, work with them. When an extraordinarily famous professor agreed to work with a friend of ours on her undergraduate thesis, we were shocked. “How did you get HIM?” we demanded. “I just went and asked,” she answered. “He says no one ever asks him to do anything anymore because he’s too famous, and he misses students.” A professor can’t work with every one who asks, but it’s certainly worth talking to someone whose work you admire.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part X: A Word to Athletes (or Musicians, or Artists, or Anyone Who Has a Significant Interest Outside of the Classroom)

Heather Cox Richardson

Sometimes it seems as if athletes feel as if they’re not welcome in academic classrooms; that they’re in college to play a sport, and the classes are only to keep them eligible. Somehow, they seem to feel that good athletes cannot also be good students. THIS IS RIDICULOUS! I don’t believe it, and you shouldn’t either.

The years you have spent perfecting your sport (or your music, or your art…) have given you a skill set that makes you an ideal student, in many ways. You know how to work hard for a long-term goal. You know how to push yourself. You know how to look at the larger frame of a race, or a game, to get the best end result. From working with a team, you know how to look at a goal from a number of different perspectives and to chart your own course to see it through. You know how to budget your time and energy. You have rare skills that translate precisely to a classroom. Many of your classmates don’t have these skills and, rather than feeling unwelcome in a class, you should recognize that your perspective is imperative.

You should do the work for class discussions and then take part in them. Your unique perspective is welcome in class. Yes, you might feel like you’re approaching things in a very different way than your classmates, but this is exactly why your view is so important to the class.

It is true that the years you have spent on the playing fields or in the pool may have shortchanged your writing or reading skills. But those skills can be acquired quite easily with practice. That practice doesn’t necessarily mean tying yourself to a desk and suffering through moldy old books. Stop IMing or picking up your cell phone and instead write emails to your friends and family using good English. Keep a journal. Write to elderly relatives (often nursing homes will print out emails for patients, so don’t say you can’t get to the post office!). And read… anything, so long as it’s grammatically correct. Read blogs, the sports pages (some sports reporters are brilliant writers), the latest Stephen King novel. As you read, think about what you’re reading. Do you agree with the latest predictions about the upcoming baseball season? Why or why not? What makes an argument on a blog convincing? When do you tune someone out? Why? These are the same skills you will use to write term papers and to evaluate arguments. Like anything you do, practice at reading and writing will make it come easier. If all you read are the scholarly books listed on a syllabus, of course it will be difficult. (Imagine trying to play in a golf tournament with no practice, first!). But with a modicum of talent (and everyone in this classroom has a modicum of talent at the very least), practice will achieve a respectable outcome.

Don’t forget, too, that your professors are here to help you, and that there are also a number of academic services on campus.

You don’t have to see yourself as an athlete only, or even as an athlete first. There’s no reason you can’t be both an athlete AND a scholar. Yes, you spend a block of time every day at your sport, but do you really think the students who don’t play a sport spend those hours at the library? They have jobs, other interests, and often just hang around. And you have significant time in buses—enforced work time, when you’ll miss nothing by settling down with work—as well as time spent doing repetitive activity like running, during which you can be reviewing your work in your head. Sports require you to organize your life, but they don’t demand that you ignore everything else.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IX: What is Historiography, Anyway?

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Editor's note: Professor Richardson gave a wonderful lecture at ENC last night. Her talk, "Wounded Knee: Gilded Age Economics and the Road to an American Massacre," opened a window on her forthcoming book--out in 2010 with Basic Books. Heather is a obviously a terrific teacher. (Was nice to see some of her advice about the history classroom shine through in person.) Her lecture led to some great discussion afterward.

What is Historiography, Anyway?

Heather Cox Richardson

Historiography is the study of the way historians have written about the past. It is NOT specifically about the particular events of the past, but rather about how historians have interpreted those events. For example: In the expansionist late nineteenth century, American historians tended to see the history of the American West as one of the triumph of civilization over savagery. During the 1930s, a time of depression and environmental disasters, historians saw western life as a product of environmental determinism. By 1970, in the midst of liberation movements, historians argued that Western history was about racism and the destruction of native peoples. During the 1980s—a time when western Republicans were revolting against Washington—historians looking at the American West focused on the role of the federal government there. In all these examples, historians were studying the same place and the same events, but they advanced very different theories about why things played out the way they did.

When I was in college, I found this an impossibly hard concept. It might have been easier if someone had explained to me why anyone bothers to study historiography. There are a number of reasons professional historians concern themselves with this seemingly odd pursuit.

First of all, the way someone interprets the past invariably says a great deal about the concerns of his or her own time. Studying historiography, then, often enables us to understand the past better.

People also study historiography because at different times, historians have advanced quite different theories about how and why things happen. Anyone interested in how human societies work will want to read a number of different theories and evaluate whether or not those theories seem to make sense in the present.

The study of historiography often helps to illuminate the work of other scholars. By understanding that one set of historians is responding to those that came before them, a reader can more clearly figure out what each scholarly group cared most about.

Historiography helps to sharpen critical thinking skills. How have different historians used the same evidence? Which is most convincing? Why? How can you learn from them to make your own arguments?

Generally, there are trends—at least loose ones—among historians of a certain era, making it possible to see “schools” of historical thought. Learning the skeletons of these “schools” can often speed up your work and make it more informed, enabling you to pull a book off the shelf and, by glancing at the author and the year in which it was written, to have a sense of the general theory the author will probably advance, along with the biases s/he will have.

It may be easier to understand the concept of historiography if you put the idea of it into a different context. Think of movie Westerns. Almost invariably, they deal with the Plains West from about 1860 to about 1900. But their interpretations of the events of those years are strikingly different. It’s impossible, for example, to image someone making Brokeback Mountain in 1950, or Stagecoach in the 1980s. Just as those movies tell us a great deal about both the eras in which they were made and the filmmaking theories under which they were filmed, so too can historiography tell us much that we need to know about society.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIII: Plagiarism: Who Cares?

Heather Cox Richardson

This is not a discussion of what plagiarism is. When you entered your college or university, you most likely signed a document saying you understood plagiarism. If you don’t, there are places listed on the syllabus, the internet, and so on, to explain it. You can also ask us. Make sure you know. The punishments for plagiarism are severe.

This is a brief document about why professors care so much about plagiarism. Students sometimes see it simply as “copying,” a quick way to get through an assignment, and seem surprised that professors get so hot under the collar about it. Here’s why we do.

Ideas and words are how we make our living. You would not steal the plans for a new product from a technology company, or even a new car from a dealership. Stealing our words or ideas is no different than stealing a new product, and it’s much worse than stealing a car, which is simply an object. Our ideas, expressed in words, are the products of our hard work (and if you don’t think research and writing isn’t hard work, you try to write a 350-page book in the spare time that work and life allows you!), and also of our life experiences. Our minds and hearts both are in them, and they are the product we contribute to the world. To have someone steal and claim authorship of them is a profound injury, attacking both an individual author and the entire enterprise to which we’ve devoted our lives.

When you entered college, you indicated that you wanted to take part in the enterprise of scholarship. You are here to learn and to contribute your own ideas and skills to human knowledge. If you cheat, you are undermining that endeavor. You can think of it, perhaps, as a team sport. Everyone on a baseball team, for example, has different skill levels and different perspectives, but the players, coaches, and support staff all share the same goal of creating a successful team and all contribute to it in their own way. If someone is cheating, though, s/he is changing the rules of play and ruining the sport for everyone. In sports, cheating is not tolerated, and it isn’t in academia, either.

Aside from the larger implications of plagiarism, professors find it insulting on two levels. First of all, a student who engages in it is essentially saying: “Even though you’ve spent years and years studying this material in all its complexity, you’re still so stupid that you won’t notice if I, who have spent only half a semester on this topic, copy directly from Wikipedia or recycle someone else’s paper. Even if you should happen to notice, you’re too dumb to use the internet the same way I do, or to recognize an old paper, so you’ll never catch me.” Think about it. Would you play a tape of Eric Clapton to Derek Trucks and try to pass the guitar work off as your own? And if you did, how do you think Trucks would respond?

Plagiarism also insults our skills as teachers. The way a student talks, thinks, and writes is unique. We notice when a poor writer suddenly writes at a professional level, or when a student who has not been able to make sense of the material suddenly writes an A+ exam. Even worse, in some ways, are obvious instances of plagiarism like cut-and-pasted articles from the internet that are printed in different fonts. Once again, this shrieks that the student believes the teacher to be an absolute fool.

Finally, we hate plagiarism because resolving it steals large blocks of time from our good students and hands it to bad ones. It takes a good deal of time and mental energy to deal with a plagiarism case, time that could be going to writing letters of recommendation, editing chapters for thesis students, or helping an enthusiastic “C” student learn how to be an “A” student. Most of us are in this profession to teach, and we are quite willing to give our time, energy, and expertise to any student trying to learn. But to throw time away on someone who cares so little about a class that s/he is actually willing to cheat drives us crazy. That time calculation should matter to students as well as teachers. Plagiarism cases and the need for letters of recommendation often coincide at the end of a semester, and the strict timelines for pursuing plagiarism cases mean that plagiarism comes first. So, yes, it is possible that your recommender missed the deadline for your letter of recommendation because s/he was busy with a plagiarism case.

In my experience, most plagiarism comes either from panic or laziness. If you’re panicked, deal with it not by compounding the problem, but by approaching your teacher honestly, admitting you can’t complete the work by the assigned deadline, and asking to brainstorm about options. Occasionally, yes, you will get hammered by an unsympathetic professor who berates you and says there’s nothing s/he can do to help. But this is unusual. If you’ve been a decent student in the class, the chances are good s/he will work with you to get you through the assignment. And if the professor is unsympathetic, wouldn’t you rather deal with that reaction BEFORE s/he’s caught you for plagiarism? Plagiarism is unlikely to make him or her more reasonable to deal with, and it’s unlikely anyone else will help you out, either, once you have plagiarized. You will be in much worse trouble than you were when you panicked in the first place.

Laziness is also a poor excuse. Being too lazy to do the basic work for a class indicates that you think the class is a waste of time, which brings me back to the issue of appropriate behavior in a college classroom. You don’t have to care about the class, but don’t insult those who do. And if it’s such a waste of your time, why spend your not-insignificant college tuition on it? Take something else you DO like.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIIb: Tips for Taking College Essay Exams

Heather Cox Richardson

Taking the Exam:

Unless you have very badly misjudged the themes of the class, some of the questions on the exam should look familiar. They will never, however, look exactly like the ones you studied. This is not cause for panic. Just as when you discuss a question, you will often need to rephrase or slightly jockey an exam question to make it one you’re comfortable answering.

For example, say you prepared for the question (from the previous post): “In their drive to protect the political power of their region, Northerners and Southerners both accused the opposite section of trying to take over the national government,” and decided you would answer it by citing, among other things, John Brown’s raid and the attack on Sumner.

The exam question, though, is: “Were Northerners’ fears of the Slave Power legitimate?” You could develop an exam answer here that argued something to the effect of, “Well, yes, the Slave Power was trying to take over the government, but so were Northerners,” or “No, while each side cited plenty of examples of the other side trying to take over the government, these examples were largely propaganda. . . .” In either of these answers, you could easily use the same details and arguments you had developed in your practice answer to your own question. Do, though, nod to the actual exam question in your introductory paragraph, with something that acknowledges it. “While Northerners complained vociferously about the Slave Power, in fact both sections of the Union bore the responsibility for the coming of the Civil War.” Simply launching into a different essay than the one assigned is a mistake.

Having developed practice answers, coming up with your examples and details to answer this essay question should be almost automatic. You may need to rearrange things, but you should not find yourself desperately trying to remember something relevant. You should find it quite easy to put together. Your essay will have a thesis, examples, and details, drawn from a wide range of course material, just as a good essay should.

Be careful not to try to take too large a scope in your essay. If the question focuses on the Civil War, don’t try to start with a history of America from the colonial era. You won’t have time to get to the heart of the essay. Keep focused. Similarly, don’t aim too low, either. If the question asks you to compare America before and after the Civil War, don’t talk only about Reconstruction. You need to demonstrate control over a wide range of course material.

Don’t use throw-away sentences, like: “The Civil War changed America in many ways.” Such an obvious observation is a waste of your time and energy. Be specific: “The Civil War changed America by forcing individuals to confront emerging technologies . . .” leads directly into an essay.

Remember to write history in the past tense.

Do be sure to budget time to conclude your essay. An essay that just stops can never earn a higher grade than a B, at best. Where you end is just as important as where you start, and it’s the final impression you’ll leave on your reader.

Judge your time accurately. If it is a two-hour exam and you finish in 25 minutes, it is unlikely that you have covered enough material to earn a passing grade. If you have two hours to write four short essays, you should budget a half-hour for each. Do not, in that case, spend an hour and a half on one essay.

After You've Mastered the Basics:

A good way to cover extra material in an exam answer is to introduce the opposite argument in your introductory paragraph, and then to dismiss it. “While Southerners pointed to the rise of abolitionism, the North’s dismissal of the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s frightening raid, and Lincoln’s election as proof that Northerners wanted to destroy the South, in fact it was Southerners who were on the offensive in the 1850s. Abolitionists were never more than 1% of the population, the Dred Scott decision was improperly corrupted by politics, John Brown was a maverick, and Lincoln had no intention of harming the South. Southern slave owners, though, systematically attacked the foundations of the American government. . . .” In this way, you’ve essentially given yourself credit for a whole bunch of stuff that can’t fit into your essay, and left the reader with the impression you know the material so well you can talk about anything.

If you’re really feeling elegant, you might want to memorize a short quotation (or an interesting fact) to put into the final paragraph that sums up your understanding of the material, just as icing on the cake. “The triumph of the Union cemented the principles of the Declaration of Independence for, as Lincoln said on the Gettysburg battlefield, ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . . .’”

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VII: Tips for Taking College Essay Exams

Heather Cox Richardson

College history exams are different than high school exams. In high school, often you are asked simply to master a relatively small body of material and then to regurgitate it back to prove you memorized it. History at the college level is very different than this. You are asked to read and think about a huge body of material, and then are asked not to dump specific answers onto a page, but rather to think about the material and to answer questions by making an argument for which you marshal evidence from the large body of course material. These different exams require very different approaches to studying and to exam taking.

Studying:

Don’t make the mistake of simply reading your notes over again and again, hoping that the information will spring into some sort of order when you’re confronted with an exam question. Instead, read your notes over to get you thinking about the course. What are the themes of the course? What did the professor and the readings emphasize?

Now think. If you were writing an exam for the course, what would you ask? Put your ideas into the form of questions. “Something about politics,” is not a question. “How did the quest for political power affect the coming of the American Civil War?” is.

Once you have a number of questions, start to answer them, with your notes and books before you. Brainstorm to see what points are relevant to the topic, and jot them down. When you have a list, think about how you would answer the question, drawing on material from sections as well as readings and lectures. What do YOU think about this topic? Why? What have you learned in the course? An exam is where you get to have your own say about what you’ve learned. You’re part of a larger academic discussion when you take an exam and, yes, we listen to what you have to say. You should have fun putting your ideas together, and enjoy sharing them with us. Remember, there is no right answer. What we want to see is that you can think critically, and that you can weigh evidence to come up with your own ideas. “Wrong” answers are ones that are not based on factual evidence, but so long as you can back up your ideas with legitimate evidence, you can argue whatever you want.

As you fill in your topic sentences, each with at least three specific factual examples, you will need to refer back to your notes to make sure you know the details about those examples. Say, for example, you decide to answer the question above by saying: “In their drive to protect the political power of their region, Northerners and Southerners both accused the opposite section of trying to take over the national government.” You could come up with a number of different examples of occasions on which this happened: John Brown’s Raid, the attack on Charles Sumner, and so on. You’ll want to look up those events so that you really know about them. You may want to go ahead and jot down a skeleton answer to your questions, along with the details of the events you’re discussing, so you can study by them.

The idea here is to put the information in the class into some kind of order that makes sense to you. You will note that you are not trying to learn every single thing covered in class. That would be impossible. What you are trying to do is have control over the material, and develop your own ideas about it. This means that you will probably learn a great deal about some events and very little about others. (I know a great deal about the militarily unimportant Battle of Stone’s River because it was important politically, for example, but know only enough about military maneuvers to be able to figure out larger patterns of change). That’s okay. When you answer a question, the detail you put in about a few events stands for your overall knowledge. (This is called “post holing,” by the way). Do draw from all different kinds of material presented in the class, rather than focusing only on lecture notes, for example.

It doesn’t hurt, either, to talk to your classmates about class material. This doesn’t mean quizzing each other over terminology, but rather having discussions about larger themes. Do you think the roots of the Civil War were in economics? Then marshal your arguments and debate with someone who blames everything on Westward expansion. This type of thought does not necessarily have to be done at a desk, by the way. This can be accomplished over dinner, while biking, running, and so on; rather than talking about the latest episode of Lost or True Blood, try arguing about course themes.

Make sure you get a good night’s sleep for the two nights before an exam. Staying up all night to study is a terrible idea, since fatigue actually slows your ability to think. It’s more important to have a functioning brain than to have a few extra facts crammed into your head.

The Mechanics of Taking an Exam:

READ THE DIRECTIONS! In every single class, there is at least one student who forgets to take part of the exam, or who answers every question rather than picking one of two, or makes some similarly wasteful mistake. Don’t let that person be you!

Write legibly. It’s worth going a tad slower than you’re used to simply to make sure that we can read your writing.

Write your name and that of your professor and TA on the cover of the exam. Make sure you get the names of the professor and your TA right. Incorrectly identifying either suggests that you have neither come to class nor looked at the syllabus.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VId: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson concludes her Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course. Earlier, Richardson discussed how to develop a topic, organize the paper, and craft a strong argument. Here she describes the finishing touches to put on a paper and what might be done after completion.

Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson

Finishing your research paper:

Standard font for a research paper is Times New Roman, size 12, double space. It should have page numbers at the bottom of each page (except the first, but if one shows up there, don’t worry too much about it).

Your essay must have notes—either endnotes or footnotes (endnotes print more easily, by the way)—and unless you are specifically told otherwise, you need to prepare a bibliography, too. This should be easy if you wrote down the full citation information of each source as you used it. The citation format for bibliographies is different than that of notes, though, so check to make sure you’ve got it right.

Your essay needs a title. The title page should include your name, the names of your professor and your TA (if there is one), and the date.

Getting the essay back:

If you’ve invested this much in an essay, you should get enough feedback on it to understand where you were successful and where you were not. Many graders don’t write many comments because so few students ever bother to pick up their essays, although they’re quite willing to elaborate if they know someone’s interested. If there are not enough comments on your essay to enable you to understand how to write a better one next time, go ask. (For how to do this, see the section on proper behavior in a classroom).

If you enjoyed writing the essay and the professor agrees that it’s an excellent piece of work, consider submitting it for a university prize, for a national prize, or, perhaps, cutting it down for a local newspaper. UMass history prizes are listed on our website; national prizes are on the internet, and your local newspaper editor is listed in the paper itself.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIc: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson

Writing the Paper:

You’re ready to write your paper. You have a thesis: “Custer led his men to a slaughter because he was determined to regain the favor of his Commander-in-Chief, President Grant.” Write that thesis on a sticky note and put it over your workspace, to guarantee that everything you put in the paper supports that thesis. When you get tangled up in your writing, and can’t decide what to put in, that paper will be the judge. Does whatever you’re writing advance your thesis? If not, it stays out.

Plot your paper out. If it’s a ten page paper, you can plan on using a half a page at both the beginning and the end for your introduction and your conclusion. So you have, essentially, about nine pages to make your argument. In your mind, divide those pages up into sections of relatively similar length. You have about four sections of two pages each, or three of three, to make your argument. (Section numbers and lengths will vary depending on the length of the paper and the nature of your material). For your Custer paper, you’ll need to explain to a reader what happened at Little Big Horn and then make your argument, which really doesn’t leave you much room. What are your most important points that prove your thesis? They should be the subjects of your different sections. Within those sections, each paragraph should support the section argument, which in turn supports the thesis. Make sure you have a plan, and that you stick to your section limits. This is sort of an outline using space rather than headings (although outlines are still useful). Your “section breaks” are not literally different pieces of a ten-page paper (which would leave it looking a bit like a long poem!), but are places where you will change to a different aspect of your presentation. Do not make the common mistake of just starting to write, hoping you end up somewhere. Do it this way, and you will almost certainly use most of your space on your first point, and end up being forced either to rewrite or to rethink the paper, neither of which you want to do at this stage.

Sit down to write, but leave your “writing hat” on the rack. The most common error students make is to assume that they won’t sound smart unless they use complicated sentence structures and long, scholarly words. If you generally talk like that, go for it. Your writing will sound quite natural. But if you normally talk like the rest of us, don’t try to sound like a nineteenth-century professor of rhetoric. Just tell us, in your own words, what you’ve discovered. You can correct grammar and structure later, although if you write naturally there will not be as much to correct as if you try to work with words and structures you don’t know well. My rule is the dinner table test. If you could not read the paper at the dinner table without your friends cracking up, it’s not written in a believable way.

If you find yourself stuck staring at a blank screen (or paper), stop writing a “paper” and write your material as a letter or an email to a friend, usually someone older who is interested in history but who doesn’t know much about your topic. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to send it!) You will find the story falls into order fairly easily. Humans are naturally storytellers, putting material in where the listener needs to know it, so mimicking a conversation in an email or letter often is a big step toward getting material down for your paper.

You cannot write a good paper in one sitting, but you want to continue the flow from one writing session to another. One way to do this is to leave the paper just when you know exactly what you’re going to write next, and are eager to do it. That way, when you sit down to it again, you’ll start right in and move forward easily, rather than staring at the screen (or paper) wondering what on earth to write next.

If you can’t face writing a certain piece of the paper, or can’t recall exactly what you want to say there, it’s okay to mark that section with a note to yourself to come back later. Use something a search will pick up easily: a “XX” or “TK” (which doesn’t show up naturally in English). Then go back later and do it.

Never, though, write funny/angry comments in a document—either yours or a friend’s—thinking that the writer will certainly find them all and delete them before handing it in. Those comments do, sometimes, slip by, and the embarrassment of explaining them and recalling the essay is excruciating (for the professor as well as the student!). Better to make a lifetime rule that you will never mess with any document that will go to a third party. (You don’t want to do it in your career, either).

BACK UP YOUR WORK DAILY AT LEAST. HOURLY IS BETTER!!! Keep a copy of each day’s work in two different locations. Get a flash drive, use your school’s server, use your own machine, use the Apple back up system, buy space with a commercial server (about $5 a month or less). BUT DO NOT THINK YOU WON’T LOSE THINGS!!!! If you learn nothing else from this tip sheet, learn this! YOU MUST BACK UP YOUR WORK!!!! IT IS INEVITABLE THAT DISASTER WILL STRIKE EVERYONE AT SOME POINT HAS THAT UNFORTUNATE EXPERIENCE!!! BACK UP YOUR WORK!!!!

As you write, enter in your endnote information in correct form. In Word, you do this by pulling down the “insert” menu, and clicking on “reference.” Then click “endnote” and, under “options,” click the 1, 2, 3, format. When you move text around later, the endnotes will move with the text, and you won’t have to worry about lost citations.

You should have a draft of the paper at least a week before it’s due. Now it’s time to leave it alone while someone else looks at it. Hand it to an interested bystander—a roommate, someone at the writing center, an instructor—and take their comments seriously. They may not tell you how to fix something, but when they comment “I don’t get this,” it means you need to rework something.

Give yourself a few days away from the essay, checking a few last sources if you need to, but ignoring it, otherwise. Check to make sure you have paper and toner for printing; buy it if you don’t. After a few days, reread the essay CAREFULLY—I reread out loud, which means I catch many errors—and note changes you want to make. Combine them with the comments of your reader(s). Revise the essay.

Do not forget the “who cares” question, but don’t make the common mistake of overreaching. It’s unlikely your ten-page paper will force us to rethink all of American military history. Don’t be ridiculously general either. “Custer’s failure was important because understanding the West is critical to understanding our nation’s history,” doesn’t tell a reader much. It may be that you don’t need to address the “who cares” specifically. It might be apparent through your explication of your thesis. But if you need to put it in, make sure it passes the dinner table test.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIb: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson

Research (and this is primarily for American history, especially for students working on nineteenth-century topics):

There are two ways to find a topic for a research paper. The first is to follow up on something that has interested you in a class or a reading. What do you feel isn’t well explained in the books you’ve read? Is there a topic there worth digging around in? Does it resolve itself quickly when you check Wikipedia and a few books? Or is there something we really haven’t thought through in a way that you think makes sense? By the way, there are precious few topics in history that can’t bear a reexamination, so don’t worry that you can’t think of something to research.

The other way to find a topic is to immerse yourself in primary sources and see if a different story emerges than the one we usually tell. There are a number of places you can start to see a new story in history. Your college, university, or public library website can link you directly to Proquest's historical New York Times and the historical Boston Globe. If you’re interested in a particular topic or a particular year this is a good place to go to see what people at the time were saying. The Making of America website at Cornell University and the University of Michigan have huge collections of nineteenth-century books and journals as well as The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion; you can search them for specific topics. Don’t forget Google Books, either—that has an extensive pre-1923 collection—which can give you much information you wouldn’t have thought to look for. If you hit “full view” books, you’ll get those books that are in the public domain, and which you can read on-line in their entirety. The X-roads project at the University of Virginia also has a wide range of material.

The Digital Collections at Harvard have a wide selection of material on-line, including a good collection on the economic lives of American women, another on marriage and family, and another on immigration. The Native American Documents Project at California State University, San Marcos, has good material on Indian history. The American Memory site at the Library of Congress holds much, but it is appallingly organized, so be careful to keep track of where you’ve been—you might not find it again. It’s good on the American West and on African Americans. There are a number of excellent specialty collections at different libraries (Stanford has a collection of dime novels; the Denver Public Library has one on Western photographs), so look around.

The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara is invaluable for studying presidents because it has official documents of recent presidents; it also has the text of every State of the Union address—which is a great short trip through the highlights of a particular year, since the secretaries of each department write their own sections—and every Inaugural Address. It also has the political platforms of every major political party for each presidential campaign. The Presidential Recordings Program from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia contains recordings of all the White House tapes, as well as transcripts of them. The website A New Nation Votes, based on the Philip J. Lampi collection at the American Antiquarian Society, holds the election returns for every local, state, and national election from 1787 to 1825.

These are good places to start. Read around for awhile and see what interests you. Don’t take notes yet—just keep a brief record of what you find and where you find it. The reason I suggest you start with internet sources is that they are easily searchable and working with them first will cut down your time looking for a topic. Give yourself time to find something you really like and want to know about. There’s not really much point in spending weeks researching something you hate. It’s also unlikely you’ll produce anything anyone wants to read if you hate what you’re doing.

Once you’ve fallen in love with something, the fun really begins. Now you can track down the leads you find in the secondary sources you look up in the library (don’t make the grave error of thinking you can use the internet only—almost every research paper will need to be informed by the secondary works other historians have written, and will need other primary source books and manuscripts that are unavailable on-line). Follow the trail in front of you. Go to the library. Dabble in old newspapers. Go to local libraries or local archives. Use manuscript collections. If you find yourself admiring the work of a certain (living) scholar and wish you could ask him or her for advice, do it. Drop him or her an email. S/he’ll almost certainly answer with helpful information, and if not, who cares?

Let yourself enjoy the process. It may be that your topic changes as you conduct your research. That’s fine. As your research advances, a question will emerge.

That question is the heart of your essay. Your TOPIC might be The Battle at Little Bighorn, but your QUESTION might be: “Why did Custer bring his men into such an untenable military situation?” Many students make the mistake of confusing a topic and a question. Now your research is very directed, and you should take good notes on your sources. ALWAYS put everything you quote directly into quotation marks, and write down the full and correct citation for each source IN YOUR NOTES! (Just memorize correct citation form, it’s easier than reorganizing everything later. The form, including correct punctuation, is: Author, Title (Place of publication: Publisher, Date), pp. XX.) Make notes, too, of questions your research raises. Why was Ulysses S. Grant mad at Custer? Was there a larger struggle going on over Indian policy? Was the army in danger of losing its funding? Was Custer jealous of other commanders? These will be questions your reader will also want to have answered, so keep a list of them somewhere.

As your research advances, you will be able to answer your question (as a student did very successfully a few years ago, suggesting historians had gotten the story wrong until her research). You might have come to believe, from your research, that Custer was upset that he had recently lost President Grant’s favor and was determined to regain his former prominence (as some historians have said). Why do you think that? What information have you dismissed as less convincing than that explanation? Why do you dismiss it? It is fine, by the way, to have concluded that an existing explanation is correct, but you need to be able to demonstrate that you have considered alternative explanations and are siding with a specific one for solid reasons.

By the time your research is done, you should also have an answer to that all-important question: Who cares? Why should we care about Custer’s motivations at Little Big Horn? Well, perhaps they show that generals have to be very careful to assess a junior officer’s mental state before giving unsupervised command. Maybe they suggest that presidents shouldn’t come from the military. Maybe they suggest any number of things that will stay with a reader and inform the way s/he thinks in the future. You may not have to spell this out in the paper—it might be obvious from the way you develop the essay—but make sure you know the answer yourself before you start writing.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VI: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson

My first, and maybe most important, piece of advice for writing a research paper is to give yourself the room and the time to enjoy the process. We use harsh words in our society for writing assignments—“I have to write an essay,” “how many words does it have to be?”—but writing is, at heart, a creative enterprise that should be, at some level, fun. Think about it. If you were asked to paint a picture, or act out a play, or make a video, you wouldn’t groan, and yet those activities require far more practice than you’ve already had with writing. So try to think of an essay as an enjoyable assignment, rather than a hurdle to throw yourself over, groaning. (If you need more of a pep talk than that, read Stephen King’s On Writing).

A research paper is not a book report, or a journal entry, or a reflection paper. Those have formats and rules that are different than those I’ll discuss here.

Here I’m not covering grammar or much structure. You should read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style every year, and keep it handy on your desk, next to your dictionary and your thesaurus. The Elements of Style covers all the most common grammatical errors in clear, interesting prose. It also offers great tips on structuring essays. If you don’t want to invest in a copy, Professor Strunk’s original write-up of grammar rules for his college classes is available on-line at Google books. Take the time to read it (it doesn’t take long). Paying attention to it will improve your writing by at least one letter grade on each essay.

These are just some of the tips I’ve told students over the years, gathered into some sort of order.

Beginning your research paper:

First of all, be certain you understand the assignment. You need to know exactly what the professor expects before you begin your work. What kind of research is appropriate? How long should the paper be? What kind of citations and bibliography should you compile? (This is much easier to do while you work than to recreate after the fact).

You should begin your research paper THE DAY IT IS ASSIGNED. I hear you laughing, but let me tell you why this is important. There’s a practical reason, first. Most students put off long-term assignments, so early in the process that the library tends to have all the books they’ll need, the microfilm readers will all be free, university wifi networks will be empty and fast, librarians will have plenty of time. In contrast, in the panic in the week before the paper is due, the library will be stripped bare and everyone will be fighting over resources.

There are also academic reasons for starting early. The hardest part of writing an essay is not the research, it’s the thinking. You need to let things percolate in your head, which they simply can’t do if you try to write a paper in a week. You need to give yourself plenty of time to let your ideas gel. You also need to leave yourself time to chase down those things that occur to you as a project develops. How many times have you finished a paper at the last minute and thought, “If only I could do these last few things, it would be a better paper”? Give yourself the time to do those last few things.

Plan to work on your research paper a little every day, or at least a bit every other day. This way, you will remember where you are in the process, and won’t waste time redoing what you did before or trying to remember what needs to be done. Keep a record of the questions your day’s work has raised, and jot down what you plan to begin with in your next session, so you can start right up.

Always plan to have your project finished a full week before it’s due. That will leave you time for revisions (even a thorough reorganization if necessary), for proofreading, for tracking down final points. It will leave time for someone to read it for you and tell you what works and what doesn’t. LEAVING ENOUGH TIME TO REVISE A PAPER IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part V: Tips for Discussion Sections

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order Heather Cox Richardson describes the purpose of discussion sections and offers advice on public speaking and how to have a successful discussion.

Tips for Discussion Sections
Heather Cox Richardson

Discussions sections (in my courses, at any rate), are designed primarily to do two things. First, they give students an opportunity to explore in-depth material that pertains to the class, but which we don’t have the time to cover in lecture. Second, they give students a forum in which they can practice speaking and arguing in public.

My discussion sections are usually designed around a problem raised by the course material. This problem is identified in the “discussion question” part of the syllabus, listed for each week, near the readings. To prepare for discussion, do the readings and think about the question. How would you answer it? Why? What do the readings (or films) have to do with the question? What other ideas or issues have the readings raised? You should have a clear idea of what you are going to argue in class before you get there. If you are required to write your answer, remember to do so and to bring your response to class.

In discussion sections students can learn to present ideas and argue through problems. This is a critical skill that you really must have as you go out into the world. There is not a single profession you can choose in which this skill is not important. Almost no one is comfortable speaking in class at first, so don’t think you’re alone in being nervous about it. But wouldn’t you rather develop the ability to speak in public in a setting where your performance earns only about 1/12 of 20% of your grade in one of the many courses you’ll take in your college career, rather than at your first job, where your performance in meetings might well determine your employment status? There are tricks to making speaking in class easier (below).

History discussion sections are not supposed to mimic lectures, with a teaching assistant reiterating what the professor has said in lecture. The purpose of a history section is not to clarify the lectures (as is often the purpose of sections in science courses). History discussion sections have a different format, and a different goal. If you’re confused about lecture material, of course you should ask the T.A. if s/he can help, but don’t be surprised if s/he refuses to spend class time going over what has already been covered. S/he has a different agenda, set by the professor, and cannot spend large amounts of time going back over lecture material. If you’re confused and can’t find your way clear using the textbook or reviewing your notes, then visit your T.A. during his/her office hours.

Tips to Make Speaking in Class Easier:

Act. Of course you’re uncomfortable putting your ideas out there. Everyone is (including me!). But imagine how you would act if you weren’t nervous. Then do the act. Gradually speaking your ideas out loud becomes easier and more natural.

Learn the names of your classmates. Your college years are the time for you to meet new people and, yes, make contacts for the future. Can you imagine working with a colleague for three months without learning his or her name? Of course not. So why pretend that your classmates are so interchangeable that you don’t need to bother recognizing them as individuals? You may well end up meeting someone whose interests coincide with yours, or by whom you are impressed enough that when you need a graphic designer for your new start-up company, you know whom to call. At the very least, you won’t have to deal with the ridiculousness of referring to your classmates by pronouns after spending three months in their company.

Discuss things. Sections are not supposed to be a time to chat with the teacher. Discussions mean that you should talk to your classmates, while the T.A. acts primarily as a facilitator. This is not unlike a discussion of the last Red Sox game around the lunch table. You may not have something wildly original to say; actually, you agree with what the gentleman sitting two seats away just said. If that were the case, you wouldn’t sit there woodenly, watching other people talk. You would nod, or interject “I agree with Mike on that. The Red Sox should never have traded Clemens,” or in some other way indicate your interest in the conversation. If you’re not a fan, and the Red Sox discussion is losing you, you wouldn’t sit at the table silently. You would say: “Wait a minute. I’m lost. Who’s Clemens, and why is he so important?” Or you would even say: “I can’t get into the Red Sox. Baseball leaves me cold. European football is a far more important sport nowadays, since it’s followed by the entire world.” And if someone at the table wasn’t involved, you would ask him or her what s/he thought. Often, that would turn out to be the person with a slightly different perspective that s/he thought didn’t really fit the conversation and so was quiet, but when asked, made a point that got you to rethink the whole issue. This is exactly what should happen in classes, although the material should, obviously, be related to the week’s class material.

Now, how can you participate if you’re really lost? Ask questions about what people say: “Carole, could you say a little bit more about that? I really don’t understand how this material shows that Andrew Jackson was operating for the good of the majority.” And in the rare instance where you’re caught out having not done the week’s reading? Pass the ball to someone else. “I’m not sure what I think about this issue yet. I’m interested in the approach Maya is taking, though, and I wonder what Oleg would say about it.”

Speak up in the first two weeks of class, even if it’s just to say, “I agree.” No one has any expectations about your behavior in the beginning of the semester and, even if you’ve never made a peep in a class before, no one will know that. You can start speaking up and people will just assume you’re comfortable speaking in class. If you wait much beyond the third week, though, it will get harder to speak with each passing class.

Remember, too, that you have a responsibility to your classmates in discussion sections. Because of the nature of sections, you need to pull your weight to enable them to learn. We’ve all been in discussion sections which are deadly because only two students have done the work and the rest sit like statues. That’s not fair to anyone, and there’s no way a teacher can save such a class, since it won’t work without the students doing their share. Your responsibility includes making a section work well. If someone is floundering, help. If someone never speaks up, include him or her in the discussion. If you find yourself talking too much, work to throw the conversation to someone else by asking what a classmate thinks. While there is an ultimate payback for this behavior in your better understanding of class material, there is also a more immediate one. Did you save a classmate who was lost? Next time you falter, s/he’ll help you. But if you don’t….

And yes, all these skills translate directly into the skill set you need for your career—any career.

Rules for Discussions:

No fist fights. (I had to put that in… and yes, I had one in a class, once, but not over the class material).

Comments of any sort that make your classmates or T.A. uncomfortable are never appropriate. This includes political statements, incidentally. You are always welcome to talk and even argue about politics in my classes, but you must be respectful of all opinions that are not hate speech. No attacks on fellow classmates; no blanket name calling, as in: “All ------s are idiots! They all think that….” No referring to a group with which a classmate identifies by a derogatory name: “babykillers,” “fascists,” or “treehuggers.” All statements need to be backed up with verifiable facts, not just talking points from a political party.

If you want to make general comments linking the week’s material to a different issue, fine, but you cannot try to turn the week’s discussion into a detailed fight over another issue unless the entire class has access to the same materials to which you’re referring and unless the entire class wants to have that particular discussion. If an issue needs clarification and a resort to outside materials, it needs to be deferred to the following week, when everyone has looked at the relevant materials.

Actual explanations of outside issues and how those issues might relate to the week’s material are always welcome.

What you wear can make your teachers and classmates uncomfortable. If you want to wear something that makes a statement because you want to take a stand, that’s fine. But don’t carelessly put on a shirt that makes a sexual statement or show up in clothes that would be inappropriate to wear to your job because you’re not thinking. How you dress does affect the way you’re regarded. It’s hard to take seriously a student who shows up in a shirt that celebrates drinking or drug use, and it’s downright offensive to have to deal in a professional setting with someone wearing a shirt that makes overt sexual comments (women are just as guilty of this as men are, by the way). Someone once told me that the more powerful you are, the less flesh you show. Think about it. When was the last time you saw Dick Cheney in ratty shorts and a “The Liver is Evil; it Must be Punished” t-shirt?

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IV: How to Read for a College History Course

In an essay on "Success" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear." Careful reading is difficult to master. Undergrads in history find it tough to get that kernel of truth buried deep in a document. Others search long and hard for the thesis in a haystack with little luck.

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order, Heather Cox Richardson gives advice to college students on close reading. She poses some crucial questions students should consider when they make their way through that microfilmed newspaper article, court record, diary entry, novel, census record, television program, or monograph.


How to Read for a College History Course
Heather Cox Richardson

There are two types of sources in history: primary sources and secondary sources. They should be approached very differently.

Primary sources are things produced at the time. Letters, photographs, census records, songs, movies, advertisements, newspapers, TV shows, paintings, emails, and books are all examples of primary sources. Primary sources tell historians about the world at a certain time, and how people who lived then saw their world.

When you read a primary source, you need to read every word very carefully. You want to figure out who produced the source, and for whom it was written. A letter from a Confederate prisoner of war to his elderly father describing the black Union soldiers who had captured him would be very different than the memo from the black soldiers’ captain commending their actions, and neither would exactly reflect what had happened. (Think about it—a letter to your grandmother describing a day of college life would be a very different thing than a letter to your best friend describing the exact same day and, again, neither would be one hundred percent accurate).

Why was the document—or film, or canvas—produced? When James McLaughlin wrote his book My Friend the Indian (1910) was he trying to excuse his role in the murder of Sitting Bull? When Frank Triplett wrote The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882) was he attacking the Republican government that controlled Missouri and the rest of the nation in the 1880s? The answer to both of these questions is yes, and as a result both authors strongly slanted their telling of events. No one produces anything without a bias, so you need to know the author’s agenda when s/he produced the source, to give you some sense of what can and can’t be learned from the document. McLaughlin is fairly reliable about mid-nineteenth-century Lakota treaties, while Triplett is reliable only for giving us an excellent picture of how ex-Confederates perceived the postwar Republican government.

When and where was the primary source written? A Southern version of Reconstruction written in 1868 would be dramatically different than one written in 1890, just as a letter to a friend about an exciting new job would be very different after five years of overwork, underpay, and an eventual sacking during a downsizing, even though both letters were about the same job and were written only five years apart.

Finally, a question most students have trouble answering: What does the source say? What can we learn from it about the time in which it was written? This will be much easier to decipher once you know the “who, when, where, and why.” Think, for example, of Jimi Hendrix’s famous version of the Star Spangled Banner performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Without any context except a knowledge of rock and roll history, his version has meaning for guitar fans, but someone who had never heard of Hendrix, or the song, or the era would probably dismiss the piece altogether as “a bunch of utter garbage,” as a student once called it when we listened to it in class. With a knowledge of the history of the song as the nation’s anthem, Hendrix’s position as America’s premier guitarist at a time when African Americans and Native Americans were demanding rights in the nation, the context of the Vietnam War, and both domestic and international challenges to America’s stratified society, and the story of Woodstock, it becomes a vital piece of America’s history.

Secondary sources are things written after the period, which analyze primary sources to make an argument about how we should interpret the events of the past. In history courses, secondary sources will usually be books or articles, but they can also be documentaries or websites.

You read a secondary source very differently than you do a primary source. Your goal in reading a secondary source is to discover the author’s argument, and to see what evidence s/he marshals to support that thesis. Once you have a handle on the argument and its evidence, you need to analyze whether or not you buy the argument, and why you’ve taken your position.

To read a secondary source, begin with the introduction, even if the professor has not assigned it and has asked you to read only a chapter or two of the book. Historians tend to say what they’re going to say, then to say it, then to say what they’ve said. Introductions almost always lay out the argument of the book. Once you’ve read the introduction, skip to the conclusion, looking again for the argument of the book. In the conclusion, an author usually summarizes the book’s thesis. Stay in the introduction and conclusion until you are certain of the book’s argument.

Once you know what an author is up to, read the body of the book. The most efficient way to do that is to read the introduction and conclusion of each chapter, to see how the argument progresses, and then to go back to the beginning of the book and move through it, reading the topic sentence of each paragraph. By now you should have a very clear idea of how the book works and how the argument develops. You can now go back and read the book to see how the author uses evidence to support his or her points. Check footnotes sometimes, especially if something seems forced. Is the source a solid one, or does it seem insufficient to support the point it makes?

This is a different way of reading than you are accustomed to, and it will seem awkward at first. It’s worth developing the skill to do it this way, though. This is by far the most efficient way to read secondary sources in history (and many other subjects), and will give you the best command of the material in the shortest time. Remember, what matters is not how many hours you spend reading, but whether or not you actually understand what you read. A student once told me proudly that he had taken all day Saturday and Sunday to read every single word of a book I had assigned although he didn’t understand any of it. Personally, I can’t think of a more thorough waste of a weekend. Please recognize—as he didn’t—that simply passing your eyes over the letters on a page is not a good use of your time.

Once you have command of the book, think about it. Do you agree with it? Did the author make his or her point by using factual evidence that supported the conclusion? If not, what seemed wrong? Did s/he make a sweeping argument about nineteenth-century American society and use evidence only from a few decades? Did s/he put into footnotes critical information that contradicted the argument in the text? Does the argument seem radically different than prevailing thought? Does it appear forced, without adequate and believable sources? Does it seem to make assumptions about the past in order to fit a specific theory? Or does the book seem to make a solid argument about the past that illuminates the way society works? Do you agree with the argument? Does it change the way you think about things?

Thinking about a book doesn’t have to take place at a desk. It’s a good way to take up time when you’re walking somewhere, or doing repetitive exercise, or even going on long drives. Make thinking about your studies part of your life. This, too, will be a habit that takes some effort to acquire, but will stand you in very good stead in the future, when you’ll have work issues that require more thought than you can give them during work hours.

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IIId: Appropriate Behavior in College Classrooms

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson offers up more wisdom for history undergrads. See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Grading:

Never tell a teacher that you “need” a certain grade on an assignment. You earn grades; they are not “given” to you. If you need a certain grade to maintain your athletic eligibility or to graduate, it is your job to work all semester to maintain a healthy average. You cannot simply “get” a passing grade because you “need” one.

If you are disappointed in an exam grade, talk first with your TA about what went wrong on the exam, and how to write a better exam the next time. If you feel you still don’t understand how to write a good exam, make an appointment with the professor to talk about it. Do not go to a professor to argue about the points awarded on an exam unless there is a clear error. An example of a clear error would be a case in which a grader did not see one of the answers.

If you are disappointed in an essay grade, follow the same procedure you would for an exam. Ask your TA and your professor for strategies to enable you to learn how to write a better essay. If your teacher has written comments, study them. Learn from them. Never write a rebuttal to your professor’s comments, or otherwise argue with them. If you want to dismiss them, fine, but don’t expect that arguing about the professor’s assessment of your work will get you a better grade. If, after talking with the professor about your work, you think s/he is truly out to lunch, contact the ombuds office for help negotiating your way through—or out of—the course. In twenty years of teaching, I have seen this situation only once, and other professors stood by the student from the beginning. If you’re the only one complaining about the grading, be honest with yourself about the quality of your work.

Few college professors will permit “extra credit” assignments. Do not try to bargain for a passing grade if you have failed the course. Do the course work and you will not need to try to save yourself at the end.

If you are going to make an excuse for your performance in a course, or ask for an exception to the course assignments laid out on the syllabus, recognize that the teacher’s job is to keep the playing field level for every student. S/he cannot simply change the rules for you. If you do need adjustments to the course, take an honest look at your reasons. Are they excuses the rest of the students in the class would accept if they heard them? Death and illness (either physical or mental) are almost always good reasons; “I’ve been busy,” usually isn’t. Actually imagine yourself explaining your circumstances before your classmates. Would they buy your reasoning? If so, take it to your professor. If not, though, don’t hope you can arrange something with the teacher that the other students won’t know about. It’s the professor’s job to be the advocate for the whole class and, even if s/he would like to cut you a break, s/he cannot give you a better deal than the rest of the students got.

Letters of Recommendation:

Do ask teachers for letters of recommendation when you have established a good rapport with the instructor. You do not necessarily need to have an “A” average; you need to have demonstrated an interest in the subject and shown some effort to do well in the class. Ask for a letter immediately after the semester ends, DO NOT wait for several years, by which time the teacher will not remember you nearly as well as s/he does right after the course ends. You can—and should—set up a dossier at the career services department, where letters of recommendation are kept on file for whenever you need them.

You must ask for a letter, not demand one. Always give the instructor the option of declining. Perhaps s/he was less impressed with you than you thought; or perhaps s/he simply thinks someone else can write a stronger letter than s/he can. You do not want a weak letter in your file. Give the instructor room to say no.

Always give the instructor plenty of time to write a letter, provide addressed, stamped envelope(s), and drop the instructor an email reminding him or her about a week before the letter is due. Instructors often have dozens of letters to write at approximately the same time, and it’s easy to get mixed up about what’s due, when.

If you are going to use the professor as a reference again several years after you graduate, drop him or her an email to let him or her know and to remind him or her who you are. Put in the class you took, your interests, anything that will help jog his or her memory. When we deal with hundreds of students a year, it’s confusing suddenly to get a phone call asking us to identify and recommend a student from several years before. It doesn’t help your case to have the employer trying to jog our memories so we can recall exactly why we recommended you in the first place. Give us some warning, and we can be ready when they call.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IIIc: Appropriate Behavior in College Classrooms

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson follows up earlier posts with more advice to undergrad history majors. See previous posts below for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Emails:

Address your professors formally—“Dear Professor Liu,”—unless they tell you to do otherwise. Keep your messages short, unless the professor has indicated that s/he is willing to have longer discussions over email (I am, by the way). While email messages are more relaxed than other forms of communication, don’t use “Yo,” or baby talk, IM abbreviations, or inappropriate slang. The informality of email doesn’t mean you should write to your instructor as if s/he was a roommate.

It is not appropriate for your parents to make requests on your behalf over email.

Everyone writes messages in anger or frustration that should never be sent. If you have written such a message, store it in your “drafts” folder for at least a day before you hit the “send” button. Then reread it and reconsider whether or not it is appropriate. You will save yourself considerable embarrassment.

If a professor emails you about something, answer.

Complaints:

Do not sit quietly all semester in conditions that make it impossible for you to learn. If you cannot hear when you sit in the front of the classroom, tell the professor. If the room is too dark for you to take notes, speak up. If there is someone in the class of whom you are afraid or with whom you cannot work on a team for personal reasons, tell the professor. If you cannot understand the TA’s accent, tell the professor. All of these situations can be remedied. Do not stop coming to class and then try to justify a failing grade at the end of the semester by complaining of poor conditions.

If your problem with the class is more substantive, consider first whether there is anything you can do to remedy it. Are you unable to finish the reading? Ask yourself first whether or not the amount of reading is appropriate. For a college history course 100-400 pages a week is reasonable. If the professor is assigning 2,000 pages per week, there is a problem with the course. But if s\he is assigning fewer than 300 pages, the problem is yours. Do you need to budget more time to read? That’s your problem. Perhaps, though, what you need is more guidance about how to read for a history class. In that case, go to the teacher and lay out the problem: “I can’t seem to make it through the reading and I know it’s not an inappropriately large amount. Can you help me figure out how to get through it more efficiently?”

Do not try to tell the professor that you know how to teach the class better than s/he does. “I’ve never heard of a class that assigns 300 pages a week!” is going to get you nowhere. Similarly, complaints that “this course goes too fast,” or “you cover too much material,” are only going to work if it is the first time the professor has taught the class. If it has been taught before and gotten positive reviews, it’s unlikely that your complaint is going to sound like anything other than whining. That being said, if you are an obviously good student who is involved in the class, and you tell a professor that a specific point wasn’t clear or was rushed, s/he will probably thank you for the feedback and remedy the problem.

Do not try to make your point by claiming that students in another section of the class don’t have to do such work, unless it is absolutely certain that a TA is acting in ways of which the professor has no knowledge, simply canceling class and telling the students s/he’ll give them all “A”s if they keep quiet, for example; or showing an established pattern of discriminatory statements in class. Professors supervise their TAs, and most have an excellent sense of what is going on in a section. “My roommate is in another section and her TA gave out all the exam questions!” isn’t going to fly without hard evidence.

See other Richardson's Rules of Order

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IIIb: Appropriate Behavior in College Classrooms

Heather Cox Richardson offers up more advice to undergrad history majors. See previous posts below for more from her Richardson's Rules of Order.

Electronics:

Turn off your phone.

You may use a laptop in class, but other students beg you to sit in the last two rows if you expect to check your email, surf the web, or play games. If you sit in front of them, their eyes are drawn to your screen and they miss out on class. If you are taking notes, though, or occasionally looking up something class-related on-line, you may sit anywhere.

Never record or photograph a teacher or another student in class without express permission.

Assume that anything you put on the web is going to be found and read by everyone in your university and by future employers as well. Be careful what you make public. That photo of you and your roommate in Florida over spring break might seem hilarious now, but s/he may not be very happy about it when it kills his or her job offer from IBM. Similarly, on-line comments about other students, the class, or the professor will almost certainly become public knowledge, so make sure you’ve thought over whether or not you want your comments to be public before you decide to post anything on-line.

Appropriate Learning Behavior:

It is your job to learn the material covered in the course. Come to class and do the assignments on time. Few students actually do these two very simple things. Those who do will tell you that you virtually cannot fail a class in which you have accomplished these two basic requirements. To get the most out of a class, though, think about the material. Put effort into it. Let it give you new ideas and open up new fields.

Most college-level teachers want to teach, and are willing and sometimes even eager to help you. If you don’t understand something, ask. Go to office hours or see if the syllabus states how the professor prefers to be contacted. If it doesn’t say, drop the professor an email or a phone call asking what is the best way to reach him or her.

If you find a class particularly interesting, you can go to a professor’s office hours simply to say hello and to chat. You do not have to have a question or a problem. Most teachers will be very happy to see an interested student who doesn’t actually want anything from them.

Do not ask your professor to do your work. Do not ask for lecture notes because you missed class, do not ask for the answer to questions that are answered in the textbook, do not ask for information listed on the syllabus. Check class materials first before you bother the professor. Do ask for clarifications of material in lecture, or for suggestions for future reading.

Do ask teachers if you can hand in a draft of a paper, but don’t then simply make the changes the teacher suggests and expect that the paper will earn an “A”. It is your job to continue working on the paper, and to continue to improve it. Do not try to use your teacher as an editor.

If, at the beginning of a semester, you can foresee a scheduling problem later on, most teachers will allow you to arrange for an extension or an alternative assignment beforehand. Do not skip an exam or an assignment due date and tell the teacher later that you had something else to do. To excuse a missing assignment under such circumstances, the teacher will need an official note from a health-care provider, a dean, or another official source.

Do not have your parents call a professor to collect your assignments, or to complain about the class and/or grading. College teachers cannot discuss your performance with your parents.

If you make an appointment to meet a professor, keep it. If something unforeseen happens to make it impossible to keep the appointment, telephone or email immediately to cancel. Many professors (and I am one) have been stood up by students so many times that they will not come to campus for a single appointment.

See also, Richardson's Rules of Order, Part III: Appropriate Behavior in College Classrooms
Richardson's Rules of Order, Part II: Tips for Taking Notes in a College History Course and Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?