The Unwritten Rules of History

Tag: academic writing

Historical Writing as a Creative Endeavour

Coloured pencils lined up against a white background

Note from Andrea: Due to some unforeseen problems, the blog post we were originally going to publish today has been delayed to next week. So we hope you enjoy this one instead!

Special thanks to Krista McCracken, Stephanie Pettigrew, and Catherine Ulmer for their help drafting this piece. And thanks to Heather Green, Samantha Cutrara, Stephanie Pettigrew, Sam McLean, Kesia Kvill, Maryanne Reed, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Pam Calvert, Aisha Wynter, Stephanie Bangarth, Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail, Mary Chaktsiris, Gillian Leitch, Maxime Dagenais, and Dan Horner for answering my random questions!

One of the most common questions that people ask me, (besides how on earth I managed to do the roundup), is: how do you manage to write a new blog post every week? Usually I give my standard response: when you teach four courses a semester, you get really good at writing lectures fast. And a blog post is pretty much just a shorter lecture. But more recently, I’ve started to rethink my approach to writing history.

 

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How to Write Scholarly Book Reviews

How to Write a Scholarly Book Review

The inspiration for today’s blog post comes from the lovely and talented Dr. Anne Dance, historian and Programme Director of the Parliamentary Internship Programme!

 

Publish or Perish is pretty much academia’s guiding principle. Our careers are, to a large extent, dependent upon our publications (bet you thought it was teaching. Nope!). This is as true for tenure-track professors as it is for sessional instructors. It used to be that graduate students were encouraged to focus on their theses and dissertations rather than on publishing articles. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and individuals completing their PhD are often advised to have at least one peer-reviewed publication under their belt prior to graduating (though two is better!)

A good starting point is to do book reviews for scholarly journals. However, as is the case for scholarly articles, there are few guides or resources available on how to do this successfully. Most of us end up learning by trial and error, or by following the patterns that can be found in existing book reviews. So to save you the trouble, in this blog post, I am going to walk you through the basics of writing book reviews. While I am approaching this subject as a historian, the basics apply no matter what humanities or social science field you are working in.

 

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Canadian History Roundup – Week of January 1, 2017

Roundup January 1, 2017

“The Ice Castle, Montréal, Winter Carnival 1887” (1887), J. T. Henderson. Library and Archives Canada, e011074265 CC by 2.0

The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.

*As promised, this roundup includes everything from December 18th forwards. It’s three for the price of one! In an effort to keep this somewhat organized, I’ve separated each roundup by week, going from oldest to most recent.

 

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