History IA Confusion

[Stereoisomer]

Hey everyone!

I am just "finetuning" my history IA and I have two quick questions:

1) What should I include in my appendices?

In my draft, I basically just included every single source I used. Is that necessary? Or is a list of all the sources sufficient?

If so, then what should I include in my appendices? Facts and numbers? And perhaps the two sources I evaluated in the evaluation of sources section?

2) HOW ON EARTH can you stick to the word limit of 2000? MINE IS WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY OVER.

Thanks guys!

[sweetnsimple786]

You have a Works Cited/Bibliography page, right? That should list, with details, the works you used.

I wouldn't put a work in an appendix unless it's a very important passage, probably a primary document, that you refer to often. If it's a newspaper article or something like that with mixed media, and the actual thing helps the reader to gain some information or understanding to your IA, then make an appendix for it. I didn't have any appendices. It's not really needed unless you've found something you want to share with your reader. He/she isn't going to want to read over your sources to make sure your quotations are correct and you haven't plagiarized, if that's what you're thinking.

Way way way like 2000 words over? Because then you should hope that a lot of yours was summary/flowery language/unnecessary details that you can cut or else you'd have to narrow your topic and decide what's relevant. A lot of people use footnotes, although you'll anger the reader if you put actual information there. I used to cite within the body of my paper and at the end. I moved my body citations to the footnotes.

Condense. Take a hard look at your descriptions and see if you can shorten them by using synonyms or just taking them out.

Get a friend or teacher to underline things that might be off topic or could be more straight to the point on a hard copy of your paper.

Good luck!

[lightofthedawn]

Have you checked this website? http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/rmhs/departments/socialstudies/ibhistoryia/rubric.htm

It was a big help to me!

Also, you might want to be careful of the word count -- the assessment rubric penalizes you heavily under criterion F just by exceeding 2000 words! I agree with what the above posters said, if you can't condense it by cutting superfluous words, then perhaps you should think of narrowing your topic /: