Super-Curriculars for Humanities: Argue With Something

Humanities degrees assess one thing above all others: can you construct an argument, from evidence, that a specialist would take seriously.

Everything follows from that. The activity is not reading. The activity is disagreeing well.

This is why the standard humanities paragraph fails. "I read widely around the subject" describes consumption. A degree in History or English is not a reading competition — it is three years of making claims and defending them against people who have read the same things and concluded otherwise.

Find the disagreement

The most useful habit in the humanities: for whatever you are interested in, find the argument about it.

Historians disagree about causes. Literary critics disagree about what a text is doing. Philosophers disagree about almost everything and are professionally required to. Geographers disagree about the relative weight of physical and human processes.

Once you can name a disagreement, you have something to write about that is not a summary. And once you have taken a side, you have something an interviewer can push on and you can defend.

Practically: read a thing, then read someone who disagrees with it. Two accounts of the same event, two readings of the same poem, two positions on the same ethical problem.

Go to the primary source

The specific move that separates humanities applicants, and it is free.

History. The National Archives' education service publishes digitised British state records with guidance on reading them. Working from a document — a cabinet minute, a report, a piece of correspondence — is what a history degree consists of. Almost no applicant has done it.

English. The British Library's Discovering Literature holds manuscripts, first editions and contextual material for set texts. Reading a draft with the author's crossings-out changes what you can say about a finished poem.

Classics and Ancient History. The British Museum and the Ashmolean publish their collections online with scholarly records, and both are free to visit. An object whose interpretation is contested is an unusually concrete thing to write about.

Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is peer-reviewed and free. Use it to orient yourself on a position, then read the primary text it is summarising. Reconstructing one argument properly beats surveying five.

Geography. Your own fieldwork, measured and analysed. The Geographical Association publishes student-facing resources and runs competitions.

Criticism at the level the degree expects

Between popular writing and academic journals sits a layer most applicants never find: serious critical journalism.

The London Review of Books is the obvious example. Its essays are long, argumentative, and written at roughly the register of a good undergraduate essay. Reading a few teaches you what a humanities argument sounds like far faster than any guide.

JSTOR's open content gives free access to a substantial body of academic articles if you want to go further.

Essay competitions

The humanities are unusually well served here, and our catalogue holds dozens: college prizes at Oxford and Cambridge across History, English, Classics, Philosophy and Theology, plus national competitions.

They are worth entering for a reason that has nothing to do with winning. An essay competition forces you to construct a sustained argument to a word limit against a question you did not set. That is the assessment format of the degree. Doing it once, seriously, teaches you more than a term of reading.

Do not list the competitions you entered. Write about the argument you made in one of them.

Where humanities graduates go

Worth knowing, because the "what will you do with that" question comes up constantly and a vague answer is unconvincing.

Across the courses we hold official outcome data for, fifteen months after graduating:

• History: 19% in business and public service roles, 10% teaching, 7% business/research/consulting, 7% finance, 5% media
• English Literature: 19% business and public service, 14% teaching, 11% arts/writing/performance, 8% journalism and media
• Classics: 17% business and public service, with media, teaching and the arts behind it
• Philosophy: 17% business and public service, 11% teaching

The honest reading: humanities degrees do not funnel into one career, and they do not leave graduates stranded either. The spread is the point. If someone asks what you will do with History, "a wide range, and the degree is training in constructing arguments from evidence, which is what most of those jobs need" is both true and more convincing than naming a job.

Writing it well

The weak paragraph:

"Reading Sapiens opened my eyes to the sweep of human history and deepened my passion for the subject."

The strong paragraph names a position:

"Harari treats the agricultural revolution as a trap that made individual lives worse while making the species more numerous. I found the argument persuasive on the evidence and unpersuasive on the framing — 'worse' is doing a lot of work for a claim about people who left no account of themselves."

The second version disagrees with something specific, on stated grounds. It could be wrong. That is what makes it worth reading.

What goes wrong

Reading lists. Naming five books is not evidence of engagement with any of them.

"I have always loved reading." So has everyone applying. It distinguishes nothing.

Summary instead of argument. Retelling what a book says is not analysis.

The passion vocabulary. Passionate, fascinated, captivated. These words carry no information and take characters from words that would.

Big claims without evidence. "Literature teaches us empathy" is a thesis you cannot defend in 200 characters. Say something smaller and support it.

Common questions

How many books should I read? Fewer than you think, engaged with harder than you think. Two or three with real positions taken beats a list of ten.

Should I read literary theory? It helps if you use it as a lens rather than as vocabulary. Applying one critical idea to one text is worth more than naming three schools of criticism.

Do museum and site visits count? Yes, if you write about an interpretation rather than the visit. "I saw the object" is not analysis; "the label claims X and the object suggests Y" is.

Is an EPQ useful for humanities? Very. It is the closest thing to an undergraduate essay you can produce at school, and you chose the question.

What if my school does not run essay competitions? Almost all of them accept individual entries. You do not need a teacher to submit for you, though it is worth asking someone to read a draft.

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Writ coaches the new three-question UCAS statement with rubrics written separately for History, English Literature, Classics, Philosophy and Geography. It never writes a word for you — it attacks the argument you made until it holds. Try it free.