Undergraduate Lesson Plan on How To Write History Papers

While working on my M.A., I’ve been serving as a teaching assistant for undergraduate history courses. Plenty of students in entry-level history courses have never taken college-level humanities or social sciences courses before—let alone history courses. Many are working towards STEM degrees and have had little experience writing argumentative papers since high school. With that in mind, I decided to put together a lesson plan to teach undergraduate students how to write history papers.

History papers are different from other types of papers that students may be familiar with. In high school and earlier, students might develop the misconception that history is just a summary of the past. But that’s not right. History involves interpretation of primary and secondary sources to formulate a convincing argument about what happened in the past.

Furthermore, writing at the college level is held to a higher standard than in K-12 classes. So undergraduate students must take special care to cite their sources—and to cite them correctly. (Chicago is the standard citation style for the field of history.) The higher standard also requires closer attention to detail in answering the prompt and in referring to historical people and places correctly.

I’ve synthesized these tips into the lesson plan below, which teaches undergraduate students how to write history papers. I believe it would also be helpful for high school upperclassmen, as well as undergraduate students enrolled in other humanities and social science classes.

An Undergraduate Lesson Plan on Writing History Papers

I hope you found this lesson plan to be useful!