2. Create a cover page like that on the essay exemplar (some variation in the spacing is possible here). A cover page includes the following:
a) The centred title of your essay, which should indicate your topic, in the top third of the page.
b) Your full name, course name and code, the teachers name, and date centred in the bottom third of the page.
3. Indent all paragraphs about 1 cm, even the first one, double space the text (2.0, not 1.0 or 1.5), and do not create special spaces between paragraphs, even to mark the introduction and conclusion. The blocks of text with a space between paragraphs found in business letters and on the Internet must be avoided. Use 12 point typesetting and a standard font such as Times New Roman; avoid weird fonts and reserve italics for foreign words.
4. Provide an introduction with properly developed thesis and arguments, a focus on the thesis throughout the body, and an excellent conclusion that reflects on the thesis and arguments. There should be abundant and accurate evidence using primary and secondary sources, an excellent knowledge of the historical topic, clear and logical organization of the evidence, and sophisticated analysis.
5. You should have excellent grammar and spelling and a clear, effective style; the text should flow effortlessly from point to point and paragraph to paragraph. Read it out loud to yourself or someone else to see if it flows easily and naturally.
6. Not even one sentence of your essay should be plagiarized. Each sentence should be either in your own words or inside quotation marks. Paraphrasing with proper attributions is fine. Make sure that you fully disclose your sources so that other historians such as your teacher can replicate your research and confirm its validity. Otherwise you could be making everything up or even worse stealing ideas from other historians, which makes you a bad person and earns you a trip to our Plagiarism Course and other unpleasant and embarrassing consequences.
7. You must use the Chicago Manual of Style Notes and Bibliography Style (not the author-date style) bibliography and footnote or endnote format used by historians across the English-speaking world. This is not the same as the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) style, American Psychological Association (APA) style, or many other styles out there. Embedded notes in the text (Smith, 184) are not permitted. See the essay exemplar and Chicago Manual of Style website https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html or sample essay at https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/
cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/cmos_nb_sample_paper.html
8. All of the works in your bibliography must appear in your footnotes or endnotes to show how and where you used them. Footnotes are created using the InsertFootnote function on the menu that puts a number at the end of a sentence and at the bottom of the page, where you add your footnote. A minimum of five footnotes or endnotes must be used for the final paper, all based on the Chicago Manual of Style Notes and Bibliography Style (not the author-date style). When you rely on another historian, document it, whether you are quoting a primary or secondary source, paraphrasing something you have read, providing statistics, or making a statement that is even slightly controversial. You do not need to document easily verified facts that you might find in a childrens encyclopedia, such as someones date of birth, the location of a famous battle, or that planet Earth is spherical in shape. Historians typically reserve quotations for primary sources, but you can also quote secondary sources if you wish. Just make sure that you do not indulge in excessively numerous or lengthy quotations. If a quotation is more than about 100 words long it becomes a block quote. Indent the quotation about 1 cm on the left, separate it from the text above and below by one line, single space the quotation, and drop the quotation marks. Use of primary sources in your essay is a major asset.
9. Set up a separate page for the bibliography. Students are encouraged to have more than five sources, and they must be professional ones produced by people who have masters or Ph.D. degrees and have had their work accepted by a professional journal or academic publisher; an alternative is work published by a reputable organization that carefully fact checks its work such as the National Geographic Society or Government of Canada. If a source might be professional, but you are not sure, please ask your teacher. To access professional articles go to Aurora High School Library Databases EBSCOhost (username aurora, password eagles#1). Considerable patience may be necessary because EBSCOs search system is awkward and may often indicate that it has no articles on your topic when it actually does. Note that Internet websites in your bibliography require more than
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