1. Essay Writing Tips (1/2) Organisation
1. Always make sure you address all aspects of the assignment
2. Stick to the assignment (word limit, submission date, format…)
3. Structure your essay clearly (introduce the topic and its relevance; make and support your case; highlight main conclusions)
Presentation
4. Ensure effective communication of ideas: accurate, relevant, to-the-point – language needs to be up to academic standards but avoid overly complex syntax and terminology!
5. Be precise about historical detail, use concepts properly, be sensitive about language use, reference facts and ideas properly
6. Proof-read: be precise with editing of text and footnotes

2. Essay Writing Tips (2/2) Argumentation
7. Document/support your claims: it is not enough to simply argue something, it needs to be grounded in analysis (of primary sources and/or secondary literature) and demonstrated
8. Pick your battles: it’s better to make a limited number of points clearly and convincingly than to try to bring in too many things that cannot be sufficiently supported by the evidence you present
9. Be precise when representing other people’s ideas, particularly when it’s second-hand -> misrepresenting other people’s work shows lack of understanding, while presenting it as your own constitutes plagiarism
Example footnotes (See student handbook and departmental website)
Peter Bailey, ‘Parasexuality and Glamour. The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’, Gender and History, 2 (1990), pp
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, (London, 1994), p. 67.
Sarah Gaunt, ‘Visual Propaganda in the Later Middle Ages’, in B. Taithe and T. Thornton (eds), Propaganda. Political Rhetoric and Identity, (Stroud, 1999), pp

5. Anglo-Mysore Wars
; ; ; 1799

10. What types of border crossings took place in the context of captivity?
List at least five different types

11. Regarding his return to Britain, Thomas Pellow stated that: ‘I did not know my own father and mother, nor they me’
Compare Pellow's experience to that of other go-betweens: what does it tell us about the effects of border crossings?
Why would captives ‘cross over’ into captors' societies?

12. - In what ways did Domingos Álvares act as a go-between and what are the wider crossings his life bears testimony to?
- How do the cases of Álvares and Equiano help us approach the broader question of how go-betweens saw themselves and were seen by others?

13. James Sweet states that: 'Domingos really was the chameleon- like character who emerges in the documents, shifting his identification (or having it shifted for him) to fit the circumstances’. Linda Colley describes Thomas Pellow as ‘a man able to adjust his cultural mannerisms as the need arose’ -> How useful do you find these descriptors in thinking about go- betweens?

14. Colley mentions how captivity narratives ‘meshed comfortably with the tradition of spiritual autobiography, while also becoming progressively coloured by the novel’ (174)
– Can you identify evidence for this in Equiano and De Bourk’s accounts?
- What does De Bourk’s account reveal about European anxieties and self-image?

15. In what ways does Olaudah Equiano's account testify to the profound mental effects of (forced) border crossings?
Identify passages
BBC 4 Documentary: ‘The Extraordinary Equiano’ (2005)