Some good questions were asked in seminars about these.
Quite deliberately, there is no set structure for you to follow, and my expectation is that students will submit different plans according to what suits them best. But please bear in mind the criteria I laid down in the coursepack for what I want to see from these – that you have thought about the topic and how to structure your argument, that you are engaging with the historical literature, and that you give room for us to provide advice. In order to do this, my expectation is that most of you will want to employ a mix of full sentences and notes. I expect you to come close to the word limit. So just submitting a list of very sparse bullet points on the basis that this is how you always plan your essays is not enough (and indeed, if that is how you always plan your essays, you should have a think about whether that is sufficient more generally…) I will not hold you to the plan you lay out in your final piece of work – plans will change over time of course – but it is important for you to see the planning of an argument as a stage in your research as well as your writing process. It is okay for you to admit areas on which you are unclear or where you need further clarification – indeed, this would be a good thing for helping our responses – but writing ‘the entire area is unclear because I have yet to do any reading or thinking about the topic’ will not get you high marks. Hope this is helpful.
