In 2025, the Society is hosting an occasional series of online discussions on ‘Writing Well’. In this series we’ll focus on how historians write, and write well, across a wide range of publication types and formats.
In other recent events, the Society has focused on how to undertake research and how to publish the findings of this research. By contrast, we and other organisations, spend relatively little time considering how we best communicate this research in the written form, and the skills required. ‘Writing Well’ seeks to offer an opportunity and forum to do just this.
Events in this series will be informal 60-minute sessions, held over a lunchtime to enable as many people as possible to attend. Sessions will be hosted by historians with experience of what makes for good and effective writing in a particular publication type or arrangement.
Hosts will lead discussions on good writing practice at which those attending will also be able to share advice, questions and examples of historical writing.
Please Note: sessions in the ‘Writing Well’ series are reserved for Fellows and Members of the Royal Historical Society.
To enable discussion, places for each of these events are limited to 50 attendees.
We begin this new series with the following two sessions, with booking now available for those in April and June 2025.
1-2pm, Monday 28 April: ‘Writing together: co-production and collaboration with fellow historians’. With Professor Paul Readman (King’s College, London) and Dr Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (Cardiff). Register for this session
1-2pm, Thursday 26 June: ‘Writing an Introduction to a Scholarly Edition’. With Professor Siobhan Talbott (Keele and co-editor of the RHS Camden Series) and Dr Kelsey Williams (Stirling and editor of the Scottish History Society series). Register for this session
In September and October we plan to hold two further sessions to discuss:
- ‘Ending well: how to conclude your monograph’
- ‘Structuring a journal article’
Further details of these third and fourth meetings will be released in the near future.
If this ‘Writing Well’ proves popular, future topics for discussion could include:
- Writing short: op-eds , blogs and ‘minigraphs’
- Voice and tone
- Case studies and micro-histories
- Narrative history
- New directions in academic historical writing
- Autobiography and writing history in the first person
- Creativity and ‘non-fiction fiction’
We welcome suggestions for subjects for 60-minute sessions on Writing Well. If you’d like to suggest a topic please contact: academic.director@royalhistsoc.org.
To coincide with the series’ launch, we’ll also be creating a running list of guides and resources to historical writing, and examples of good writing from which we can learn. Again, recommendations for this listing are welcome via the email above.
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