A Pocket Guide to Writing in History

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, by Mary Lynn Rampolla, is a great modern companion to Strunk and White's 1918 gem, Elements of Style, for all students who have to write papers. It is particularly useful, as the title implies, for students of history.

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, by Mary Lynn Rampolla (2007) is an excellent tiny reference book for students of history.

Rampolla covers the essentials of paper writing in general, but with a view to the needs of history. If you are writing about an ancient group you should not apply modern values, you should be aware of your biases, and you should remember that not all members of the group were alike. When you start your paper, you should avoid broad generalizations that can't be proven, like "From the beginning of time...." Rampolla's section on researching the paper provides some references to tools that may help with historical papers, but the information is applicable to other academic disciplines, as well.

Where Rampolla's work really shines is in addressing issues of plagiarism and how to document sources in the age of the Internet, where copying and pasting is too easy and where earlier bibliographical forms were inadequate.

My only objection to Writing in History is that when writing about ancient as opposed to medieval or modern history, there are few written primary sources to use, so Rampolla's advice that you should never base your history paper on secondary sources alone seems idealistic. But then the book was not meant to discuss the special problems of dealing with ancient history, and for the truly conscientious, there generally are other, albeit archaeological or art historical, sources students could examine to supplement the secondary sources.