“Where once history was part of the humanities and historians were considered great writers in their own right, now the historical profession is much more likely to reward analytical sophistication over a good story”
Throughout the past century historical writing has become a very academic field. In that I mean that the writing has become less about presenting history in a story, and more presenting it with only facts and “professional” writing. If you’ve read any sort of scientific or otherwise sort of paper in your college career, you know exactly what kind of writing is to be expected from professional Historians in their papers/articles/books. But this sort of writing is stilted, and in the current world we simply do not speak or write to one another with this level of verbose vocabulary. In a more casual sense we speak to each other in shortened language or phrases and communicate ideas via language that is much easier to understand. Due to this, shouldn’t academic writing in history adjust for our current world? I’m of the opinion that one should write how they would speak to a professor or other higher up, but they also shouldn’t force themselves to use words outside of their casual vocabulary. You can speak professionally without sounding like a walking thesaurus.
“When we ask students to create historical work in a digital environment, we create the possibility for greater collaboration between the students in the course…”
This next section of the chapter tackles how students writing can go beyond just the course. In some cases their published writing can be viewed by other students, or people outside of the class like professors or other university students. Of course many students leave these papers in the trash after going over their grade or deleting them from their hard drive. But, if students were to publish these papers or share them, communities within the history field could see fresh takes on historical analysis.
“Writing about the past remains central to our discipline, but in the digital world students live in, “writing” takes many forms.”
Writing essays is not the only way to present historical analysis. Throughout every student’s life in this classroom we have had access to a plethora of presentation tools. It falls to the teachers of our classes to teach us the proper ways to present using these tools. We learn throughout K-12 how these programs work, but beyond presenting for class projects we never really learn how they work. We should be taught how professionals use these programs in jobs or other settings versus just presenting info as fast as possible for a grade. Further, blogs, twitter accounts, and other social media sites or programs can be used professionally. These should also be taught with to assist future interactions with jobs.
