Prewriting in College History Courses

How can we best teach historical writ­ing? The most common method when I was an undergraduate was imitation. I was assigned good models for my week­ly readings, then told to go and do likewise in my term papers. For years I taught my own students the same way. I was always eager to offer helpful advice about research methods—urging stu­dents to accumulate vast stores of note cards, article references, primary sources, computer files, etc. I could also point them to various handbooks and style-sheets that discussed matters like footnote formats and indented quota­tions.

In terms of finding a thesis and orga­nizing their papers around it, though, I simply referred students to the exam­ples of the eminent historians whose works I had assigned them to read. But in fact their papers seldom resembled the works of the eminent historians. Instead, their papers were all too often confused in focus, incoherent in argu­ment, appalling in grammar, bizarre in format (despite the style-sheets), and (despite the note cards) jumbled and incorrect in factual detail. Puzzled, I, quite naturally, looked for (other) peo­ple to blame. The students themselves, the English department, the high schools, and television all furnished good candidates.

The English department was closest; eventually I took my complaints there and encountered the spate of new (and revived old) ideas for teaching composi­tion, being spread around campuses by the “writing-across-the-curriculum movement.” Several of these new ap­proaches have received attention at the regional teaching conferences and an­nual meetings of the American Histori­cal Association and in articles in The History Teacher. History instructors are urged to design their assignments care­fully, with specific attention to rhetori­cal concerns like purpose, audience, and format; and to require students to write multiple drafts of their papers—allow­ing instructors to oversee the process of writing instead of simply evaluating the end product. In my experience, these prescriptions work. Following them will help history students iron out many of their problems in conceiving arguments and addressing them in formal papers.

Less attention, though, has been paid to another of the ideas widely discussed among composition instructors: that is “prewriting” or “private writing.” This is not surprising, since historians typi­cally value only “public writing,” fin­ished pieces with the clear reasoning and factual accuracy required to stand up to critical reading. Anything less—purely personal reactions to the past, simple descriptions or narratives, un­original summaries of readings, unsup­ported “hunches,” etc.—we tend to dis­miss as unworthy to be considered col­lege work. This paper is an exploration of ways in which prewriting assignments can help students attain the level of finished work that we desire.

Types of Prewriting Exercises

Prewriting exercises are not simply un­polished or preliminary versions of fin­ished papers, but are wholly different in form and purpose. They represent the first stages of recording ideas and evi­dence on paper. While careful assign­ments and multiple drafts can contrib­ute to better finished papers, prewriting helps students get the facts straight in the first place. This idea is familiar to our colleagues who teach composition courses. The goal of “writing to learn” has been advanced by thoughtful com­mentators on teaching like Janet Emig and Mina Shaughnessy. Researchers in the links between cognitive psychology and “the writing process” point to prewriting as an effective “problem-solv­ing” technique for use in “chunking” parcels of information that exceed the limited capacity of the short-term mem­ory. Finally, several of the modes of prewriting correspond to those dis­cussed by rhetorical theorists, from Ar­istotle (whose works on this subject have recently been revived) to modern rheto­ricians like James Britton and James L. Kinneavy.

In my history courses, I term the prewriting assignments “exercises,” us­ing the analogy of drills and warm-ups performed by athletic teams limbering up before the game. Although these preliminary exercises bear some resem­blance to what will later go on in the game, they have a different, less formal purpose, and they “count” in a far dif­ferent way. So do my prewriting exercises. Below follow five types of exer­cises, each of which differs markedly from the formal writing I also require.

1. Class Notes. Lectures continue to be a major component of most history courses. But what do students do in their notebooks during lectures? Do they jot down the lecturer’s principal points, linking them to a background of specific evidence, or to other major points in the general scheme of the course? Or do they painstakingly record as many individual details as they can, making little or no effort to differentiate opinion from evidence, general from specific?

Class notes have usually been taken for granted, disregarded as a course “assignment.” But an instructor’s glance at them can provide answers to these previous questions. Inspecting students’ class notes need not be too arduous a task. Class notes may be examined in toto, as are lab notebooks in science courses, or they may be sampled occa­sionally, with the assistance of photo­ copies or (easier still) carbon paper. Reading a set of carbon copies of the notes written by a class during a lecture may be a sobering experience for the lecturer; it may also lead to suggestions to the students on how to order and group the ideas and information con­veyed in lectures.

2. Student Logs or Journals. These are the purest form of what Britton and Kinneavy term “expressive writing,” in which students are encouraged to aban­don objectivity in favor of recording their own feelings. They may be most useful for those students who lack per­sonal engagement with the subject mat­ter, or for those who have too much of it. In the former case, assigning students to write personal journal entries twice or more a week may lead them to develop the empathy with historical characters and movements that is essential to his­torical research. In the latter, students whose opinions about the past threaten to overwhelm any sort of objective study can use their journals as a release and perhaps learn to consider the feelings on both sides of an issue. It is probably because of this latter function that stu­dent journals are a common feature of college social-science courses.

3. Simple Analyses. Historians regular­ly break down their subjects of study in terms of political, economic, social, cultural, and other factors. Breaking sub­jects down in this way makes them easier for students (and others) to under­stand—but only if they are familiar with the factors employed. For many college students the range of analytical factors that has come to be second-nature to historians is not familiar or clear.

Consequently, it can be a useful exer­cise simply to identify the different pos­sibilities for analysis present in a narra­tive or description. “The causes of the Civil War included political, economic, and social factors,” is not a very original beginning for a term paper, but, as a prewriting exercise, it can help students practice the use of basic analytical terms. I hold class competitions among small groups of students to see who can iden­tify the greatest number of analytical factors in given pieces of primary­ source evidence.

4. Narratives. A simple chronicle of what happened first, second, third, fourth, and so on is the most primitive form of historical writing. As such, I discourage its appearance in essays and papers. Yet some students still seem to have difficulty ordering the events of the past, or in grasping the length of time over which large historical changes took place. Moreover, even with access to tables of dates, some students are unable to sort out time sequences that underlie cause-effect relationships, or even to understand the tern poral order of such common historical terms as the ancient world, the middle ages, and the Renaissance.

Poor preparation in school, however, may not be the only cause of such confu­sion; recent studies by developmental psychologists suggest that the mental capacity to deal with chronology ap­pears late in childhood. R. N. Hallam suggests that this capacity may not de­velop in many people until age sixteen. If this is the case with even a sizeable minority of our students, we should not imagine that narrative history is as ele­mentary to them as it seems to us.

Narrative exercises assigned to stu­dents can be used to accustom them to ordering things chronologically while at the same time reviewing important terms that they might otherwise misstate in essays and papers. In the course of studying the social background of the English Civil War, for example, I ask my students to write, using their textbooks or other sources, one-page narratives incorporating a set list of  ten or twelve principal events. Despite the seemingly obvious and mechanical nature of this task, instructors should be prepared for the fact that some students-perhaps many-will make errors in doing it. An­alyzing and addressing these errors give instructors the opportunity to correct elementary confusions before they pre­ vent more serious consideration of the subject.

5. Summaries. Like narratives, simple summaries and descriptions have not been activities calculated to win praise in college history courses. Yet summariza­tion is also a basic historical skill that students need to master before they can go on to write in more complex modes. Moreover, writing summaries can reveal to students the structure, as well as the content, of historical arguments, and thus serve as an introduction to histori­cal writing and thinking. “Probably no form offers the student so much practi­cal help,” wrote Mina Shaughnessy:

It encourages him to read closely but with an eye for the total pattern of thought in a work. It gives him exer­cise in grouping details under general categories. . . . Finally, it prepares him to distinguish between a summary and an interpretation and an analysis.

Summarization involves students in an active confrontation with their readings rather than a passive absorption that too quickly drains away.

Recent studies by developmental psychologists suggest that the mental capacity to deal with chronology appears late in childhood.

Typical exercise assignments require students to produce one-page summar­ies of increasingly longer and more dif­ficult sections of their textbooks, or of the theses and supporting evidence of articles in scholarly journals. In consid­ering the Industrial Revolution, for ex­ample, I ask students to summarize the main points and supporting evidence in selections from the works of T. S. Ash­ton and E. P. Thompson. Or, students can be assigned to write one- or two-sentence summaries of the main ideas of each lecture. Students come to perceive the main ideas of the authors whose works they are summarizing, and to sort those ideas out from the supporting details. On the other hand, students’ confusions about the material they are assigned to summarize can be identified and addressed before they are magni­fied in formal papers.

It would be ideal if prewriting exer­cises were not graded at all. As prelimi­nary exercises, they should certainly be exempt from rigorous grading and blue-penciling for mechanical mistakes. I experimented for a time with ungraded exercises, with the ideas that prewrit­ing should be essentially private, and that the intrusion of the instructor-as-judge would disrupt the expressive character of students’ writing. I also experimented with minimal responses to student exercises, limiting myself to a check, a plus sign, or a minus sign.

Assigning actual marks, however, has proven to be best. Besides promoting a more regular submission of exercise work, the marks also provide me with an opportunity to communicate to students about the quality of their comprehen­sion of the material. So, I continue to mark exercises, after assuring students that the total exercise grade will not exceed a quarter of the total grading in the course, and urging them to feel free to take risks in doing the exercises. The exercise papers have come to replace my weekly quiz on the readings, and student evaluation reports have overwhelmingly favored the exchange.

Twice a week, then, students in my introductory freshman history course submit prewriting exercises that fall into one of the categories described above. In more advanced courses I usually re­quire exercise papers only once a week. I type up an assignment sheet for each exercise, on which the actual writing is also to be done. This usually limits the length of the exercise to whatever can be written on one sheet of paper. Good papers can easily be photocopied as ex­amples for the rest of the class.

Short exercises are also easier for the instructor to read. A complex response is not necessary, since the principal mer­it of the exercise is in the writing (and thinking) itself. In reading my students’ exercises I keep only two purposes in mind: gathering information about their understanding of the course mate­rial, and assigning the mark. I find that I can read and mark about one exercise per minute. That is not much more time than I once gave to marking the weekly quiz, and is not a burdensome part of my teaching duties.

In the final analysis, prewriting exer­cises are precisely that. They are cer­tainly no substitute for the real thing: the carefully researched, formally writ­ten, critical and argumentative essays and term papers traditionally assigned in college history courses. Prewriting is an aid to better formal writing and history comprehension.