Writing a History Extended Essay that Will Get You Through
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011Tips for successful history extended essays
Since history is a discipline which cannot be studied only by reading books, history teachers ask for essays quite often. Certainly, more than desirable when writing is not your forté. History extended essays give the students the chance to demonstrate their knowledge acquisition through many abilities: comprehension of processes, causes and consequences; fact distribution; handling of academic bibliography as well as other sources (documents, letters, newspapers and magazines, photographs, the Internet, etc.). And because teachers base their grades almost entirely on written assignments, your history extended essay should be accurate and clear.
If you are not sure where to begin, here we give you some advice. Of course, you can always buy custom essays from us if you don’t feel like writing. 100% quality work written just for you! No plagiarism, no mediocre papers but only unique and original papers with academic value.
Choosing the appropriate essay structure
Since every historical event has reasons, your history extended essay may be focused as a cause and effect essay (for example, the Russian Revolution was a consequence of the thought of Karl Marx). You may also choose to write a comparative essay (for example, comparing the independence process of two African countries). It may be a good idea to outline a discussion essay if you wish to express your own viewpoint about a certain historical fact.
On the other hand, a narrative essay is quite an inappropriate structure for history papers. Why? Because, even when providing the facts is very important, when writing higher history essays, every student should try to use their innovative and critical thinking abilities, while analyzing such facts. So, if you only provide a chronicle of events, a timeline or (even worse) a list of names or years, your essay will be incomplete.
Never invent facts
You are not writing a Hollywood script. You can’t just make up things in your history assignment! If you believe that describing a day in Queen Victoria’s life is going to help you achieve a deeper analysis, think again. Perhaps you are not inventing, but taking the data from a source which is less than appropriate, such as a TV documentary, a random web page or a school textbook. In any case, teachers won’t appreciate you writing a historical novel.
How to extend your essay
If your essay writing is not long enough, and feel you’ll never reach the appropriate essay word count on your own, follow these tips.
– Extend the quotations: Instead of quoting a sentence, why not quoting the whole paragraph? This way, you’ll write a bunch of words without even thinking! However, you should always remember to mention the author of the quote, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism and pay the consequences.
– Write a long introduction / conclusion: Writing a longer introduction or conclusion can help you extend your history extended essay, since in these sections of your paper you are allowed to paraphrase other parts of it. Remember that synonyms are useful for avoiding repetitions.