Students rewriting Gibbon, and other stories

Abstract

The most successful historical arguments are expressed in a voice unmistakeably the author’s own, yet this numbers among the most difficult skills to accomplish. In this article, I discuss a series of seminars which I ran in University College London’s History Department in order to help undergraduate historians develop their authorial voice. Some of these seminars were held under the aegis of University College London’s Writing and Learning Mentor Programme; others were held as a series of classes taken by all first-year undergraduate historians. The aim was to encourage students to think carefully about how historical research can be articulated, and about the links between different types of history and different types of argument. In order to define historical argument, we studied the characteristics of several different but very established historians, and used this as a springboard to focus on the authorial voices of the students themselves.