Identify a theme in the sources that your essay can expand on.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/einhard.asp#Piety

GERM 150 Essay Writing GuidelinesYour essays in this class are designed to exercise and assess your skills in critical thinking by making you analyze literature and historical primary documents and connect these sources to the information learned in class. In other words, rather than googling information that everybody with a phone or computer can come up with, you’ll need to develop your own thesis and organize your essay around it. Identify a theme in the sources that your essay can expand on. The prompt is giving you some very broad suggestions but ultimately your essay should have a more narrow focus. Try to make an observation or claim that is not immediately obvious to everybody who has read the same sources and then support this claim with concrete examples from the readings—this is called a strong thesis.Don’t summarize the readings—assume that the reader (your professor!) knows the texts—but use them as evidence for your thesis! Give persuasive examples by using quotes from the sources (but no block quotes, a 3-page essay is too short for that.) The same is true for historical context from the module pages. Don’t repeat or summarize them—I know what’s in them—but use specific points as support for your interpretation of the primary sources.Write in clear and concise sentences and make sure that your essay is organized in paragraphs that each discuss a separate aspect in support of your thesis. Instead of vague phrases, be as concrete and specific as possible. This shows that you’re really using the material. For example, a vague sentence would be: “From the beginning of time, the Germans were violent.” Sentences like this don’t help anybody. A better sentence is: “Early Frankish law codes tried to regulate violence by making offenders pay in money for the damage they caused.” Try to craft statement with concrete actors, times, and contexts.Avoid passive voice and pretentious language. Your thesis and ideas do not become better by using “big” complicated phrases and sentence structures. Try to avoid giving your opinions on the material (save this for the Discussion blog) but make arguments supported by evidendeSince you won’t use any outside sources, you won’t need any footnotes or bibliography. You do need to indicate your quotes, both direct (the ones in quotation marks) and indirect (when you paraphrase something). To make it easy, simply indicate the source in parenthesis after your quote. For example: According to Einhard’s biography, Charlemagne’s wars were “most skillfully planned and successfully planned” (Einhard, “The Life of Charlemagne”). If you use information from lecture or lecture summaries in the Module, paraphrase the information (don’t quote me verbatim. Make it simple but make sure that you account for any information you give. Example: Under Charlemagne’s rule, most of the other Germanic tribes became part of the Frankish Empire (lecture, week 5).