The DBQ Essay Process

First things first: writing clearly is just good essay writing.  DO NOT ASSUME that the person reading your writing has the same background knowledge that you do.  In your writing it is your job to communicate that background knowledge to your reader.  If you want some support for this idea, take a look  HERE (I'm including an excerpt, quoting Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker):  "For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls 'the Curse of Knowledge', which he defines as 'a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose... A considerate writer will...cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms... Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all.'"  This is a very good read--I recommend it strongly. 

The Document-Based Question (DBQ) is the hallmark essay question on the Advanced Placement U.S. History exam offered by the College Board.  It is just like any other expository essay that you have ever written—you must make an argument, and then provide evidence to back up that argument.  The difference is that the DBQ provides you with pieces of evidence (primary source documents) that you will use in addition to your own knowledge on the subject.  Using your own outside information and the DBQ documents to craft a convincing argument will lead to a solid score on a DBQ.

Follow these steps IN THIS ORDER to help you craft a solid DBQ essay.

PREPARING YOUR ESSAY

PRE-STEP 1:  DO NOT READ THE DOCUMENTS.  Not yet.  We’ll get there, but reading the documents first can be counterproductive.

STEP 1:  THE QUESTION PROMPT.  Read the question CAREFULLY—make sure that you address all parts of the essay question.  What is it asking?  What do you have to answer/prove?

• It can be helpful to try to break the question down.  Questions typically ask you to provide responses that are organized in one of these three ways:

  1. A list of reasons (sometimes this can be a chronological list)

  2. Categories

  3. Compare-and-contrast

• More information on QUESTIONS here.

STEP 2:  BRAINSTORMING.  Once you know what the question is asking for, ask yourself “What do I know about this topic?”  Start brainstorming some relevant ideas/information that will help you answer the question.  Sometimes this can be a challenging task (i.e. “Where do I start??”).  One tool that can help jumpstart your thinking is PERSIA:

Political

Economic

Religious

Social

Intellectual

Area (Geography)

More information on PERSIA here.

 Once you have brainstormed your ideas, organize them into an outline (click HERE for a brief example of how to start and outline) that will help you answer all parts of the question.

STEP 3:  ANALYZING THE DOCUMENTS.  FINALLY, we can read the documents.  Well, kind of.  First, we need to critically analyze the documents before we read their content.  We need to figure out the who/what/when/why of the document, before we figure out what it’s saying.  To help us, we can use SOAPSTone:

Source--ALWAYS be sure to source your documents (be sure to provide the POINT-OF-VIEW or BIAS of the source)

Occasion

Audience

Purpose

Subject

Tone

More on SOAPSTone here.

"But how do I actively read a document?  What does that look like?"  See an example of how to have a CONVERSATION with a document HERE.

Documents in the DBQ package help us do one of two things because they either:

a) provide evidence for something that we have already brainstormed and have already organized into our outline, or

b) they cause us to think of new ideas that we need to add to our outline.

After analyzing the documents, adjust your outline accordingly—incorporate documents where they fit, or add to your outline so that you can now more completely answer the question prompt.  Once you have this stage accomplished, you are pretty much ready to write.

WRITING YOUR ESSAY

Below is the scoring guide that I will use on your DBQ essays.  It is written as sort of a checklist—make sure that you have addressed each part of the checklist so that you don’t leave easy points laying on the table (and, of course, to insure that you have written a coherent essay).

Video Tutorials about using the Scoring Guide Tools:

• The Introductory Paragraph