Essay 3 — History in Enigma

Purpose

This exercise increases your ability to locate sources and use them to support a written argument. This exercise also reinforces skills of stating theses and forming and presenting arguments. The exercise thus addresses the following learning outcomes:

• Outcome 1. Read significant texts carefully and critically, recognizing and responding to argumentative positions as part of a literal or metaphorical conversation between authors
• Outcome 2.1. State a defensible thesis for an argument
• Outcome 2.2. Support that thesis with relevant evidence
• Outcome 2.3. Use valid reasoning to draw conclusions from the evidence
• Outcome 2.4. Write clearly throughout the argument
• Outcome 2.5. Improve the substance of an argument through revision (only assessed for the final version of the essay)
• Outcome 3. Incorporate, with proper credit, information gleaned through library research into written arguments.

Background

Robert Harris’s novel Enigma is set against a background of actual historical events: Bletchley Park really existed and really was a massive but very secret code-breaking enterprise, one of its main targets really was the German Enigma cipher, etc. Harris provides very colorful glimpses of this background in the novel: how the characters live, the pressures they work under, and so forth. Your core job in this essay is to assess how accurately this background material captures the historical Britain of 1943.

In order to write this essay, you will need to learn something about British life and code-breaking in World War II. This is where library research comes in. To help you start this research, our class meetings on October 15 and 18 will be library research workshops led by Jonathan Grunert, one of the librarians at Fraser Hall Library.

Because this is a research essay, I expect you to use and cite external sources. While I am not dogmatic about citation styles, Turabian is a well-documented one if you want concrete guidelines. It is described in the “Chicago/Turabian Documentation” module of Conventions of College Writing. Fraser Hall Library’s excellent general guidance on citing sources also describes this style (click on the “Chicago / Turabian” tab on the main citation page, then follow the “Turabian Quick Guide” or “Official CMS Style Quick Guide” links).

Activity

Write an essay of four to six pages in which you state and defend some thesis related to how accurately Enigma’s portrayal of some piece of its historical background reflects actual history.

You may decide for yourself exactly what background element you want to work with. We will spend time in the classes that discuss the novel generating possible topics.

You must use and cite multiple external sources in this essay. I expect that topics appropriate to the size of this essay would require four to six authoritative sources to cover well, although you can of course use more if you wish. The word “authoritative” is important here: every source you use should be a reliable source of information; normally this means that it has undergone some sort of peer or editorial review. Every idea taken from an external source should be identified by a short citation in the text; these citations should reference full bibliography entries (author, title, publisher, date, etc.) at the end of the paper.

You will probably need to order external sources through Fraser Hall Library’s Information Delivery Service (IDS). IDS is phenomenal in its ability to get materials for you, but some can take several weeks to arrive. You therefore must make your IDS requests early, and you must have backup plans in case they don’t all arrive in time for the first draft of this essay. In order to encourage early requests, you need to turn in a list of sources you plan to use by October 18. This list should contain at least the information about each source that you would need in order to submit an IDS request for that source (e.g., author, title, the publication it appears in or the publisher, the date of publication, etc.)

Follow-Up

As mentioned in the main description of the assignment, you need to turn in a list of planned sources by October 18. You may email me the list, or share it in a Google Doc; in either case, do it no later than 11:59 PM on the 18th.

We will do peer reviews of drafts of this essay during class on October 27. Please be prepared to share the essay with the person you work with in the peer review. I expect that we will do these peer reviews via Zoom, as we have in the past.

During the three days beginning with the peer reviews, i.e., October 27 through 29, I will meet with you to share my thoughts on your draft and answer questions you have for me. You can make an appointment for this meeting via Google Calendar. Please make the meeting 20 minutes long, and schedule it to finish before the end of the day on October 29. So that I have time to prepare for these meetings, please share your Google Doc draft, or email me your non-Google-Doc draft, by the start of class on the 27th.

Following the peer reviews and meetings with me, you’ll have a chance to revise your draft essay. Share your revision with me by 11:59 PM on November 7. If your second version is in a Google Doc you already shared with me for the first draft, sharing it again just involves emailing me a quick note that the document is ready for me to look at.

Finally, I will meet with you again to discuss your final essay. Please schedule these meetings between November 8 and 10. The meetings should last 20 minutes, and should end before the end of the day on the 10th.