Ex Post Facto

We historians usually avoid using the first person “I” or “we” in our formal writing. We do so for the very good reason that the first person pronoun so often distracts the reader (and the writer) from the historical issues at hand.

More specifically:

None of this is to say that you should never use the first person in a historical essay. Historians do routinely use the first person in prefaces and introductions when they are discussing why and how they did their research. Furthermore, historians do sometimes need to write about personal experiences. The first person should be reserved for such special occasions, rather than interjected into analyses of the far removed past.

Blogs provide a useful forum for readers to interact with blog authors and with one another. There are many different kinds of blogs, however, and there is no single correct way to post a comment. Different kinds of blogs engender different kinds of comments. The primary purpose of Ex Post Facto is to promote discussion of history, and many historical issues are complex. A constructive comment, then, may be fairly complex while still being concise. When making comments here, please consider including the following elements:

1. Opening: Start by making it clear, somehow, what you are responding to. Are you responding to an idea or question in the original post? Make that clear. Or, are you responding to a comment left by another reader? If so, use the person’s name in your opening sentence.
2. Main Point: A solid comment often consists of a single paragraph. In most cases, you should use this paragraph to make a single main point, and you should state that point as clearly as you can. If you have multiple, separate points to make, it’s probably best to post more than one comment, simply to make it easier for others to respond.
3. Explanation and Evidence: After you have stated your point, you will probably need to explain it a bit. In many cases, you will need to give evidence to support your point. Why do you believe your position to be true? Feel free to include links to any evidence that exists online. (See the second comment below.)
4. Further Questions: You may want to conclude by asking a question or two of the blog author or of other readers. If you do ask a question, or if you just want to follow any subsequent discussion of the post, you can click the checkbox to sign up for comment notification for the post that you are responding to.

When commenting, there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. First, remember that your comment will be published online. You are making a public statement, and you should therefore be civil. This site will not publicize your email address, but whatever name you enter will be public. You may use your first name and last initial, rather than your full name — it’s up to you. Second, if you are making a substantial point, you should use standard written English. (Write in complete sentences and use proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.) Finally, if your comment is very specific, you can add a title at the top in ALL CAPS in order to make your topic clear, visible, and easy for other readers to refer to.

I have posted a sample comment below to illustrate the points that I’ve made here.

A pseudo-thesis is an attempted thesis statement that falls flat because it fails to state a specific argument.

Often, the pseudo-thesis appears in the form of a rhetorical question, such as, “Was it really neccessary for the United States to enter the Great War?” Although this kind of questioning is important to the writing process, it is counter-productive within the context of an argumentative essay. The point of the essay, after all, is to attempt to answer the question. To withhold the answer — to withhold your position — is to risk losing your reader. It’s only with the thesis in mind that the reader can make sense of the essay’s evidence.

Another way to write a pseudo-thesis is to tell the reader what the essay is going to do. For instance: “This essay will explore the significance of foreign trade for the U.S. entry into the Great War.” That’s all fine and well, but it only reveals the topic of the essay — not the argument. Likewise, the pseudo-thesis might simply list the subjects that the essay will cover: “This essay will consider the role of political idealism and economic interest in connection with the U.S. entry into the Great War.” In this case, the author should go ahead and make the nature of that connection explicit.

Most commonly, a pseudo-thesis is just plain vague, as in the following examples:

Each of these examples begs the question. What were the reasons? Why was it controversial?

A pseudo-thesis is not only ineffective, but it often symptomatizes a larger problem: the need for revision. Writing a good essay requires embarking on a process of drawing some significant conclusion and arguing on its behalf. It takes time and thought to sharpen a thesis. Many good writers actually start out with a pseudo-thesis, just to get going, and only gradually refine that statement into a specific and precise statement about the position to be argued.

For more help, see “So What? Writing with a Thesis.”

The “topic sentence” that you (probably) know that you should have at the beginning of every paragraph in an essay is probably misnamed — at least if you are writing to make an argument. In an argumentative essay, topic sentences should go well beyond mentioning a “topic” for the paragraph. A topic sentence should both state a specific main point for the paragraph and implicitly refer back to the essay’s thesis.

Just as the defense attorney explains why the witness’s testimony exculpates her client, the topic sentences of an essay should move your argument along, explaining how and why the forthcoming evidence supports your main point. If a paragraph lacks an argumentative topic sentence, it is merely dispensing information, which may well seem pointless to your readers.

To test whether a would-be topic sentence is actually doing its job, you might ask, does this sentence have a built-in answer to the question: so what? If not, you probably need to revise. Often, you will need to write a somewhat more complex sentence that links together multiple concepts. (If you start applying this test, you might notice that no sentence that simply states a fact — that merely describes — can meet the “so what” criterion.)

The topic sentence, then, plays a crucial role in the development of your essay’s argument. An essay without argumentative topic sentences will probably leave your reader unpersuaded and unsatisfied. You may be filling the pages, but you won’t be making your point.

(Note: These guidelines are for the Position Papers for the Early American Republic course.)

Three times during the semester, you will submit a 2-page “Position Paper” both on paper and to the D2L dropbox. The schedule in the course syllabus specifies the due dates and topics.

Follow these guidelines for each position paper:

You do get a few hits for this phrase if you Google it, but I recognize that it probably needs to be defined.

Syntax refers to a language’s rules about how words fit together in a sentence. Many of these rules go unstated most of the time.

If I were to rephrase the previous sentence as follows, you would know that I wasn’t following the rules of English syntax:

Go unstated most of the time many of the rules.

Few native speakers of English would say such a thing. (Yoda’s native tongue was not English.) But native speakers do sometimes write sentences whose syntax suffers from indeterminacy: it starts out heading in one direction but then takes an unexpected — and ungrammatical — turn, leaving readers scratching their heads and forcing them to start over.

When I encounter such a sentence, I find myself mentally repunctuating it as I read it for the second or third time. Read this sentence carefully:

Abraham Lincoln was in his forties as a national crisis erupted over slavery, going back into politics for this reason, Lincoln ran for the senate and the presidency.

Did you notice any problems? This sentence is a form of run-on known as a comma splice. Furthermore, it suffers from syntactical indeterminacy. If you were indeed reading every word, you probably assumed that the phrase “going back” was going to refer to the crisis over slavery. Instead, the (imaginary) writer started over with a new independent clause that had no syntactical connection to the previous independent clause. The comma should have been either a period or a semicolon (which indicates a full stop in most situations).

If you were skimming over the words (barely reading), you might not even notice such an error, but if you were reading carefully, you probably had to stop in your tracks, go back, and reread. As far as I can tell, the human brain can only track one syntax at a time, so it doesn’t do so well when the syntax suddenly shifts. Creative writers, of course, sometimes play syntactical tricks on their readers, but if you are writing to argue or describe or explain, you probably don’t want to throw up roadblocks to reader comprehension.

To avoid syntactical indeterminacy when you are integrating quotations into your own sentences, and thus into your own syntax, you need to make sure that the syntax of your sentence matches up with that of the quotation. Just because you are quoting does not mean that the rules of syntax no longer apply!

Usually, if you are quoting part of a sentence, you can find a way to work it naturally into your own sentence, with no special punctuation. For instance:

The 1848 Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments” echoed the Declaration of Independence, stating that “all men and women are created equal.”

If you are quoting more than one independent clause, however, you need to set the quotation off with a colon, thus separating the syntax of your sentence from that of the quotation. If you don’t use a colon in such a situation, you create a run-on. In other words, if a quotation starts inside your own syntax, it must end there, too. Here’s an example of an error:

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln noted the surprising length and severity of the Civil War, “Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.”

Above, Lincoln’s sentences are simply spliced onto the previous sentence, creating a comma splice. Notice how the next example runs on:

Much like the Declaration of Independence, the 1848 Seneca Falls “Declaration” included a long list of grievances, such as “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both natives and foreigners.”

This kind of error, unfortunately, does appear in copyedited, published writing. The problem here is that, technically speaking, the three independent clauses of the quotation have been inserted into the syntax of the original sentence, which creates a series of run-on sentences. Again, just because you are quoting does not mean that the rules of syntax no longer apply. All that this passage needs is a colon to set off the quotation. The rule-abiding reader will know that the colon constitutes a syntactical break.