Project Work, Source-Based Analysis, and Extended Writing
Project work and extended writing test whether you can turn a topic into a question, handle sources honestly, and build an argument under exam conditions.
Designing the project
- Narrow the scope: 'How did the 1857 revolt affect one district?' beats 'The Revolt of 1857'.
- Match the question to available sources: gazetteers, census volumes, district records, newspapers, memoirs, museum objects, oral testimony.
- Record provenance for every item: author, date, purpose, audience.
Source-based analysis
Work through provenance, content, tone, silences and corroboration. A colonial report describes what officials wanted to see; a petition reveals what petitioners hoped to gain. Both are evidence; neither is the truth.
Extended writing
- State a thesis in the first paragraph and keep returning to it.
- One paragraph, one claim, supported by a named source.
- Engage a counter-argument rather than ignoring it.
- Conclude by weighing evidence, not by repeating the introduction.
Worked example
A question gives two accounts of a nineteenth-century riot, one a police report and one a merchant's memoir, and asks which is more reliable. Reasoning: both are partial - the report constructs a legal narrative and assigns blame, the memoir defends a community's reputation. Reliability depends on the specific claim, so compare what each could know and what each had reason to hide, then use a third source such as a newspaper report or court deposition to adjudicate.
Traps
- Narrating events with no argument.
- Quoting a source without naming it.
- Treating one source as decisive.
- Padding with background that does not answer the question.
- Copying sentences without citation - plagiarism voids a project regardless of quality.