Like most other disciplines, history comes with its own set of writing conventions. Quite aside from the general rules of style and grammar, which you will find reviewed in the Style and Editing and Basic Quoting Skills sections of this website, we refer here to a set of broader skills that have to do with how we look at, and understand history.

Once you master the ways of approaching history reviewed in this section, they will help structure your writing on the subject. The basic skills we will be examining are:

• Cause and Effect
• Chronology
• Establishing a Broader Context

Because there are certain ways of looking at history we wish to discourage, this section also includes links to two cautionary pages on things to avoid. They are:

• Don'ts
• Common Fallacies

Elsewhere, incidentally, in the Critical Reading section of this website, we will introduce you to a second set of broad skills that will help you read history in a more sophisticated manner. They are: Historiography, Bias/Prejudice, and Evaluating Contradictory Data and Claims. For now, however, our concern is with skills that will make you a better writer on history. Please choose from the links listed above.