Transcript Writing essays for ib psychology papers 1 & 2

WRITING ESSAYS FOR AP
UNITED STATES HISTORY
Tips, Tricks,
Advice and
Warnings
WRITING A GOOD ESSAY
IS A LOT LIKE BAKING A
GOOD PIE.
YOU NEED TO HAVE THE RIGHT PIECES.
In an APUSH essay, there are a few things that you absolutely
HAVE TO HAVE. These are:






Background knowledge
Documents
PIES
Critical Thinking
A Cohesive Argument
Context
There’s a lot more that goes into an essay, but these are the
essential pieces.
YOUR ESSENTIAL PIECES ARE LIKE AN
INGREDIENTS LIST.
You can’t cook even a basic pie without the essentials, like:
 Flour
 Eggs
 Butter
 Sugar
In the same way, you can’t write an essay without your
necessary pieces.
BUT WHAT DO THESE
PIECES REALLY DO FOR
AN ESSAY?
A piece by
piece
breakdown.
BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
You should be getting your background knowledge from being in
this class. You need to bring background knowledge into every
essay you write – think of the things that you’ve learned this
year and how they might apply to the question on your paper.
Your background knowledge is like knowing what goes into a
pie in the first place – for example, you (hopefully) know that
apple seeds and raw garlic have no place in good pie.
IN THE SAME WAY, THESE THINGS DO
NOT BELONG IN YOUR ESSAYS:
Personal opinions
Swearing
Informal language (first or second person)
Cultural insensitivity
Unsupported claims
PIES SHOULD PROVIDE A VALUABLE
FRAMEWORK TO YOUR ESSAY
P olitical
I nternational
E conomic
S ocial
Use PIES to break up and organize your essay – this way, your
paper is more readable and you cover essential topics that AP
graders are looking for.
Keep in mind that it’s OKAY to have more than one paragraph
about a topic, and that sometimes parts of PIES aren’t enough
to make a paragraph out of.
ALSO
 Keep in mind that you are writing an argument. You use the
documents and outside knowledge to defend your viewpoint.
 Keep the events in context. While you may not need to know
the exact date of every battle of every war ever fought, you do
need to know the major dates, events and people .
 Nothing in history happens independently. Everything is one
long chain of cause and ef fect , so you should talk about what
came before, what happened and what its ef fects were
afterwards. Even seemingly small, unimportant events can
play large roles down the line!
THINK OF PIES LIKE A RECIPE FOR YOUR
PAPER
Having a recipe to work from makes baking a pie much easier,
right?
It also helps you to keep track of what you have and have not
included in your paper – so you don’t run the risk of repeating
yourself and ‘spoiling the recipe’.
 Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin).
 2 Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking
powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl .
 Frost.
 Pour batter into prepared pans.
 Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire
racks.
 Heat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Grease a 9 inch pie plate.
 Beat together white sugar, buttermilk , baking
mix, melted butter or margarine, vanilla, and
eggs until smooth. Pour filling into pie plate.
 Bake until knife inser ted in center comes out
clean, about 30 minutes. Cool 5 minutes .
 Grease and flour two 9 -inch round baking
pans.
 Cool completely.
 Add eggs, milk , oil and vanilla; beat on
medium speed of mixer 2 minutes .
 Heat oven to 350° F.
 Cool completely.
 Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick
inser ted in center comes out clean.
HERE ARE
THE STEPS
TO BAKING
A PIE– OUT
OF ORDER.
C o u l d yo u p u t
t h e s e s te p s i n
order and cook
this pie the
r i g h t w ay ev e r y
time?
HERE’S WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW:
That was actually the steps from two cake recipes and a pie
recipe mixed together.
In the same way, when you start writing a paper without using
some kind of a framework, it’s very easy to accidentally drift
into other topics – and start writing a dif ferent paper
altogether.
Using PIES as an outline for your essay makes this much less
likely to happen – it’s like cooking with your recipe on hand.
DOCUMENTS
Your documents are like flour.
Flour is a necessary component to ever y pie,
but if you use too much, the pie will be
inedible. However, you can’t just leave out the
flour altogether – without it, your pie will fall
apart with no support.
In the same way, your argument in your essay
falls apart with no documents to support it.
However, if you use too many documents, your
essay can get muddled and hard to read.
PRIMARY VS. SECONDARY:
A TALE OF TWO DOCUMENTS
Primary
Secondary
 First hand sources
(letters, journals, tables,
eyewitness accounts,
pictures, etc.)
 Written by someone at
the event, usually at the
time of the event.
 Second or third hand
sources that comment
on the event or mention
primary documents
(articles, paintings,
essays, etc.)
 Written after the fact.
 The writer was not
necessarily present at
the event.
YOU ALSO NEED TO USE THE RIGHT
FLOUR WHEN YOU BAKE A PIE
Have you even eaten a pie that was made with
the wrong type of flour? It tastes at best off,
and at worst completely inedible.
The same thing happens if you use the wrong
documents to support your arguments: when
they’re put into the wrong spot, documents can
hinder rather than help a good argument.
LET’S SAY YOU’RE MAKING A PIE TO
ENTER INTO A CONTEST
You slave away, baking like crazy, adding in all the right
ingredients and following your recipe and cooking what can only
be described as beautiful food.
You finally pull your creation out of the oven, lay it out before
the judges, and let them eat.
The judges eat, and they’re amazed by
your food. The first one gets up and
says to you:
“THIS IS A CAKE CONTEST.”
…Oh. How could you miss that? I mean, it was right on the flyer.
You get disqualified from the contest, not because you can’t
cook – but because you can’t follow directions .
PROMPTS WORK THE SAME WAY
You could write the most beautiful essay known to mankind for
your AP tests, but your grader can’t give you points if you don’t
address the prompt.
Prompts work like guidelines about what you’re supposed to be
making in the first place – and if you don’t follow them, you’re
only setting yourself up for failure.
PUTTING IT IN CONTEXT
Context is important.
Really,
Really,
Important.
You can’t get away from it. You need to understand context. I
know I’m repeating this, but you NEED TO UNDERSTAND
CONTEXT. Not just chronological context, but social, economic,
international and political context.
SETTING YOUR ESSAY
APART FROM OTHERS
Critical
thinking and
inventiveness
are key.
DON’T JUST FOLLOW THE RECIPE
Remember, AP graders go through hundreds of essays – don’t
be generic! You want your paper to stand out – be inventive and
creative in your thinking .
AP wants to know that you can be thoughtful and contemplative
when it comes to your essays. They don’t want regurgitation –
they want synthesis.
USE CRITICAL THINKING
 Critical thinking is about asking questions. Never accept what
you’ve been told – explore, learn, be curious!
 Never be afraid to ask questions or be skeptical of claims .
 Make connections between historical events. History is just a
chain of cause and ef fect - and most events have more than
one cause (think PIES!).
YOU NEED TO COMBINE EVERY THING YOU’VE
LEARNED THIS YEAR INTO SOMETHING NEW.
Mrs. Trainor has spent the whole year giving you the necessary
pieces to write your own essay – but she can’t do it for you.
You need to take the raw ingredients and make something great
– you need to bake a pie.
SO YOUR PIE IS READY
TO BAKE
But wait!
You forgot
something…
ALWAYS POKE HOLES IN YOUR PIE BEFORE
YOU ADD ANY FINISHING TOUCHES
You have not finished your essay until you have poked holes!
Showing only one side of an argument makes your paper weak
and simple. You want to show that you can understand a
historical event from more than just your own perspective. Yes,
Christopher Columbus is a hero who was one of the first
westerners to sail to the Americas, but he also established the
transatlantic slave trade and caused
the genocide of millions of natives.
HAVING TROUBLE POKING HOLES?
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes you can’t think of any
arguments to poke holes through – or the argument is too solid
for you to poke any holes.
HERE’S A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO:
 Even little holes are still holes. You don’t always have to
completely destroy an opposing viewpoint in your paper –
sometimes just pointing out their weaknesses is good.
 Every viewpoint has a weakness. Yes, even yours. Sometimes
they aren’t obvious at first – but this is where critical thinking
comes in.
 Think outside the box. Everybody starts with the same
documents, so creative responses give you points with graders
– they like seeing that you can be thoughtful and considerate
when you evaluate theories and studies.
PUTTING IT ALL
TOGETHER
Why not all
pies are
created
equal.
SO, YOU’VE GOT YOUR PIE TOGETHER
But something’s missing. Right now, you just have a pie. But
you could have something world-shattering, career-making, the
kind of pie that people would kill to eat and die to know the
recipe for.
“I SHOULD MAKE MY PIE LOOK GREAT.”
Lots of people think this – but it’s not necessarily true. You only
need to work on your essay’s more superficial parts – word
choice, flow, grammar, spelling, etc. – if they are bad.
And when I say bad I mean the -essay -is-unreadable-because-ofthe-errors bad.
AP WANTS SOMETHING WITH SUBSTANCE,
NOT JUST SOMETHING THAT LOOKS GOOD
Just because you can make it look like you know something
doesn’t mean that you do – and no matter how much fluf f or
how many big words you pepper throughout your paper, the AP
graders will be able to tell that you don’t know what you’re
doing. The graders are looking for substance, not style. Show
facts and critical thinking, not fluf f.
Don’t spend all of your time decorating your pie – keep it
simple. Graders don’t care as much about what your
introduction or your conclusion look like as you think they do –
they want to see you demonstrate what you know.
A FEW THINGS TO
REMEMBER
Some
general
advice.
EVERYBODY
COOKS
DIFFERENTLY
A n d ev e r y b o d y
w r i te s
d i f fe r e n t l y. T h i s
isn’t a bad
thing!
DON’T STOP WRITING AFTER PUTTING
DOWN A FEW PARAGRAPHS
Would you eat a pie that had only been in the oven for five
minutes? No, it’s gross. Don’t turn your essay in after writing
only two or three paragraphs – it’s not done, and it’s not going
to be pretty to read.
One way to avoid running out of things to say is to make an
outline before you start. This is essential. Make time for it!
A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN
WRITING ABOUT HISTORY
 Don’t generalize. If you start writing about a topic, finish it!
Don’t throw out a thought and then walk away. Don’t make
broad generalizations.
 Be considerate of other cultures and time periods. Remember
that society and what was considered proper was dif ferent that doesn’t make it right or wrong . You are not writing to
make judgments. You are writing about history and historical
connections.
 Facts that aren’t relevant don’t count. If you know a good fact
about a topic, use it! But if you’re talking about Richard Nixon
and throw out something about Ronald Reagan, you’ll just
confuse your grader. Facts that aren’t relevant detract from
your paper.
ALSO:
 People are products of their time period. Remember to put
things into context. However, YOU are not part of their time
period, so this is not a blank check to call Native Americans
“savages” every time you mention them.
 Dates earn you crazy brownie points with graders. If you can’t
remember a specific year, at least learn a decade.
 Go above and beyond. Putting in that extra ef fort is often the
dif ference between a 4 and a 5 .
 Eat before you go to the test. It might seem like you are so
nervous that you can’t down anything, but you need to try to
eat. It will help keep you focused and calm down a bit before
the test. Hearing you stomach growl and trying to ignore the
hunger in the middle of the test will throw you of f, so eat
something. If you can’t eat a whole breakfast, get a banana
and some yogurt.
WE’VE ALL HEARD THAT PHRASE “MADE
WITH LOVE”
But obviously love isn’t an
ingredient that you can
actually use in a pie– or an
essay.
BUT A LITTLE ENTHUSIASM CAN GO A
LONG WAY
Let’s face it: papers that sound engaging are more fun to read
than papers that don’t. People that genuinely enjoy a topic tend
to have a lot more fun writing an essay than people that don’t –
and that enthusiasm bleeds into their writing .
I know it sounds like completely ridiculous advice, but get
comfortable when you write . Don’t stress yourself out on the
day of the test – just relax, sit down, kick of f your shoes and
have a little fun while you write your papers.
THANKS FOR LISTENING!
(And sorry
for making
you
hungry.)