Most of my students have never written a paper like this before.  Coming out of high school, they are not generally accustomed to constructing historical arguments based on a close reading of textual sources.  Heck, this can be a challenge even for graduate students.  But there’s no reason that undergraduates can’t practice and learn this writing skill while they’re also learning history.  I see it as my job to teach this skill to them right along with the “content” of the survey.

I start by showing students how to write the introductory paragraph for such a short paper.  I provide them with a sample first paragraph, accompanied by a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the rhetorical function of each sentence and the overall rhetorical structure of the paragraph as a whole.  We go over this in class, and we spitball some further examples on the spot, crowdsourcing a few different intro paragraphs on the fly so the students can get the hang of how this structure feels. Then I tell my students to imitate this structure in their own writing, rhetorical move for rhetorical move.

I have uploaded part of the “First Paragraph” handout I prepared for my students this fall — if you follow this link, you should be able to view/download it from my Google drive.  If you end up adapting this handout for your own teaching, please let me know.  And if you see a way to improve it, please let me know that as well.