Usage & Style

These are just a few of the many ways that you can improve your writing. Style is a subjective category and not an easily taught skill. Nonetheless, certain rules generally apply to good historical writing, and they can be learned.

Avoid Passive Voice

To put it technically, passive voice makes the subject of a sentence the receiver of the action. A particularly nonsensical example of this might be to write: "The bridge was hit by the car." Active voice, on the other hand, means that the subject of the sentence is the doer of the action: "The car hit the bridge." Passive voice is less concise, because it often makes the sentence longer, but it is also particularly worth avoiding in historical writing, because it can obscure who is actually doing what to whom. In contrast, writing in active voice forces you to provide more information and to explain the relationships between different actors and between cause and effect. It thus is much clearer and more precise. There are certainly circumstances when passive voice is preferable (for example, when you want to make a clear transition from one sentence to another). But more often than not, it is a way of fudging the actual historical circumstances. Consider the following sentence:

"The smurfs were attacked as dangerous radicals." (passive voice)

This leaves it entirely up to the reader to guess who actually attacked the smurfs. Whereas if you wrote:

"Many employers attacked the smurfs, thinking them dangerous radicals."

It is clear not only who is doing the action, but why.

Use verbs instead of nouns wherever possible

For example:

Noun: She had a belief in magic.

Verb: She believed in magic.

Write as concisely as possible

Avoid extraneous phrases like "the fact that," "he is a man who," "this is a subject that." Overuse of adjectives also tends to cloud rather than strengthen your argument. Ask yourself if you have really stated your point. Make sure you write about your topic and not about the process you used to construct your argument. Limit the number of important ideas in each sentence (do not use run-on sentences).

Avoid using hedge words

Beginning writers have a tendency to hide their uncertainties about their argument by using hedge words as camouflage. Examples of hedge words: perhaps, maybe, somewhat, relatively. Using phrases like "it seems to me," "it is my opinion that," etc., is also hedging since it makes the statement true only for you. Nobody can disagree with what you believe, but making statements of belief in historical papers does nothing to convince the reader of the validity of your argument. What you are really doing is shying away from asserting something that your reader must also logically agree with. (Be particularly careful of ever writing "I feel," since feeling is an emotional, not a logical or objective act.)

Use gender-neutral language

Phrase things in gender neutral language, unless you are actually referring only to men or women. This is simply a matter of being precise. If you are writing about a momentous social change, for instance, then it is more accurate to write that this change affected "humankind" rather than writing about its impact on "mankind". Similarly, no matter which historical period you are talking about, it is always inaccurate to write as if men's experience was universal. Writing as if it was simply misleads your reader. The most common example of this is to write of "universal suffrage" in reference to polities where women did not have the vote. What is actually meant is "universal manhood suffrage."