Session 6- Writers of History Draw on Awareness of Timelines Writers, you all know what a timeline is. Timelines are tools of thought, and they set you up to think about how one event can cause another, and about how events across time can be similar, creating a pattern. Let’s begin by getting your thinking-with-timeline-muscles going. Will you look at this timeline of a simple story that you all know-”Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” You and your partner take any one of the events that happens later in the story and ask, ‘How is this event related to an event (or more than one event) that comes earlier in the timeline?’ TURN and TALK The Bears sit down for breakfast, but their porridge is too hot so they go for a walk. Goldilocks comes into the house. Goldilocks tries all of the porridge and eats Baby Bear’s. Goldilocks tries all of the chairs and breaks Baby Bear’s. Goldilocks tries all of the beds and falls asleep in Baby Bear’s. The Bears come home, discover the eaten porridge, the broken chair, and Goldilocks asleep in Baby Bear’s bed. Goldilocks wakes up and runs out of the house.

Let’s talk about some of the relationships you and your partner noticed Any patterns? Cause and Effect? Today, I want to remind you that when you write and revise as a historian, it is important to keep in mind not only qualities of good writing, but also qualities of good history. Historians write about relationships between events because the past will always have an impact on what unfolds in the future. This is called a cause–and-effect relationship. **And here’s another cool thing: a history writer can highlight relationships simply by having a timeline close by as he or she writes. Researchers don’t just collect armloads of facts and throw them into a report. You need to look closely and think deeply. Writing research is really about studying sources carefully, and seeing more in them than most people do.

What kinds of relationships can you see among some of the early explorers? Discuss this with your partner.

What did you come up with? Right now I would like you and your partner to continue thinking about these Early Explorers. See if you can draw arrows that either connect two things in which one may have caused the other, or connect two things that seem sort of similar, although they happened at different times. (use copy of previous slide) What did you come up with?

Information Writers 1.Think about the topic-and parts of the topic –to write about. 2. Plan how the writing might go. 3. Research, taking notes. 4. Draft 5. Revise with various lenses: growing ideas, looking for patterns, and asking questions, thinking about how geography of a place impacted how the events unfolded, thinking and speculating, thinking about how the timeline of history impacted how the events unfolded.

Link : Ask yourself, “Does my writing show qualities of good writing Link : Ask yourself, “Does my writing show qualities of good writing?” But also “Does this show good thinking about history?” Today , and from this day on, whenever you write about history, I hope you remember that you can reread your writing and look at it through the lens of everything you know about good writing, ‘Is this well detailed?’ ‘Is this well structured?’ and things like that. But you can also reread your writing by looking at it with the eyes of an historian, and to do so you might ask, ‘Have I bought out the places, the geography?’ ‘Have I brought out this event’s place in the timeline of history?’ And the very best thing to do is not only record the place and time but to use maps and timelines as tools to think about your topic, growing ideas.