Essaying the Past by Jim Cullen

Author:Jim Cullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119111900
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Don't Stick with the Facts

Whatever you do, never use a topic sentence for merely factual purposes. A sentence that begins with something like “On November 11, 1918, World War I finally ended” is useless unless you're going to immediately follow it up with an analytic statement that explains why such a fact is important. A writer whose work consists of a series of facts or dates isn't writing an essay at all, but a report. And academically speaking, you're beyond that now.

I should point out that in essays, as in many other enterprises, rules are made to be broken (though they're best broken by people who know how to play by them in the first place). All the examples I've used in this chapter have topic sentences at the beginning of the paragraph. But while that's a good rule of thumb for reading as well as writing, there are justifiable variations. This is particularly true in the case of texts that do not conform to the typical norms of academic history, though confident and agile scholars can also tweak established conventions to good effect. Take, for example, this discussion of Herbert Hoover's presidency, from Richard Hofstadter's much-celebrated The American Political Tradition. Hoover, Hofstadter is explaining, lacked the psychological resources to confront the Great Depression because by temperament and training he looked backward rather than forward. He's just finished a discussion of Hoover's economic philosophy and then shifts to another aspect of his background:

Hoover, moreover, was trained as an engineer, and his social philosophy was infected with professional bias. Economy and efficiency became ends in themselves. To him it mattered dearly not only what goals were adopted but exactly how a job was done. This craftsmanlike concern for technique, a legitimate thing in itself, stood him in bad stead politically during the depression, when people grew impatient for results rather than method.4

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