History 152 Cover Sheet
Your Name:
Paper’s Title: [Write a bumper sticker that expresses the essence of your argument.]
Topic: Complete the following sentence: “My paper is about the . . . .” [Be specific. A topic is
too broad if you can state it in fewer than four or five words.]
Settled Knowledge: Complete the following sentence: “Insofar as my classmates have thought
about this topic, they most likely assume that . . . .” [Your paper will challenge this assumption.]
Disruption: Complete the following sentence: “But there is a problem with my classmates’
assumption because . . .” [Use words like “but” “however” “nevertheless” to signal a disruption.]
Claim: Complete the following sentence: “My paper will force my classmates to change their
minds about the topic by proving to them that it is instead true that . . . .” [This is the paper’s
main point. Your discussion should be focused on this point. If you are not writing in your
paper about the words that appear in this sentence, you are not proving your argument.]
Significance: Complete the following sentence: “When my classmates say, ‘OK, what you claim
about the topic is true, but so what?’ I will reply, ‘What I have proved matters to historians who
are studying this topic because it will lead them to view the topic in the following new way . . .”
Optional: On the back side of the cover sheet, copy out the point sentence from each paragraph
of your paper. (The point sentence is the one that makes the paragraph’s main point.) If the
assembled sentences, when read in succession, do not make a coherent argument, you have a
structural problem in your paper. You then need to revise the paper by moving, adding, deleting,
or rewriting the paragraphs in it. Also, check to be sure that the key words in your claim
sentence reappear frequently in the point sentences of the paper’s paragraphs.