{"id":490,"date":"2020-01-07T22:46:29","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T22:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=490"},"modified":"2020-01-07T22:46:29","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T22:46:29","slug":"teaching-students-to-write-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/teaching-students-to-write-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Students to Write History"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was lucky enough to be on a roundtable panel at the AHA about teaching students how to write history, with some seriously kickass writing folks. Here\u2019s myself, Jennifer Foray<\/a> (who was an incredible chair!), Kate Antonova<\/a>, Kevin Gannon<\/a>, and Carolyn Levy<\/a>, right before everything began.<\/p>\n

\"Cate<\/a>
Session 284 at AHA20<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I plan to write up a more comprehensive review of all the things we talked about (spurred on, in no small part, by the fantastic questions from the audience) \u2013 but for now, I wanted to make available the assignment sheet I talked about in the panel. It\u2019s an assignment for a first essay in an introductory-level history course (whether survey or otherwise). My goal was to find a way to teach students the preliminary shape of writing an argument and deploying evidence, but to do so in a way that made space for them to write authentically, to discover their voice, to be creative, and to loosen their grip on a certain way of defining \u201cgood writing.\u201d I wanted the assignment to give them confidence in themselves as writers. (In this, I drew heavily from the marvelous Why They Can\u2019t Write: Killing The Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities<\/em><\/a> by John Warner<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The assignment is simple. Students write a letter to someone they choose, explaining why something they\u2019ve learned in the course so far is important.<\/p>\n