When doing A-Level History, I found the NEA absolutely daunting. It had a much higher word count than any essay I had ever written, as well as a slightly different structure and it was worth a whole 20% of the A-Level. Looking back, I realise that the main reason I found it daunting was most likely due to not quite knowing exactly how I was supposed to write it. This article is here to make sure that you don’t feel the same, that you have all the information you need to be able to write your A-Level History NEA and score well.
If you are struggling with your A-Level History NEA title, then I recommend you check out our Think Student article with over 30 ideas.
Continue reading for a step-by-step guide on how to write your A-Level History NEA. This guide will take you through the initial research stage all the way to the end with your conclusion and the final formatting.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Research for your A-Level History NEA
The first step in writing your A-Level History NEA, after choosing your title, is researching for it. This is because this extended essay is so dependent on the research that without it, you won’t actually have anything to write.
In your research, you’re looking for 3 things: primary sources, historian interpretations and context. Look at the following list for a short explanation for what each of these are.
- Primary sources – Primary sources are the “evidence” you’re going to use to back up your points. These sources are all from the time of the event and the ones you choose to use in your NEA should provide some insight that either agrees or disagrees with your points. These sources may be journals or commentary from individuals at the time, official documents, records or receipt, etc.
- Historian interpretations – Historian interpretations are exactly as they sound. They’re the interpretations of historians, that are usually published in their books.
- Context – In this case, all I mean by context is historical facts, in as much detail as possible. This would be very similar to the kinds of facts that you would put in your normal essays.
In order to carry out your research, you can use both physical books as well as using online resources. The important thing is to make sure that you keep track of exactly where all the information, sources and interpretations have come from so you can use them in your NEA.
To do this, you may want to go to the library at your college or another one in your city or town. If there’s a local university nearby, you could see if it would be possible to visit their library too.
Step 2: Plan your A-Level History NEA
Once you’ve done a good amount of research, you can get onto planning your A-Level History NEA. Planning is incredibly important so that you can sort out all the information, the sources and interpretations that you have. Then, you can figure out how you want it to work together to become your essay.
There are many different ways to plan out your NEA and your teachers will most likely help you get started with this. They may even give you planning sheets.
Personally, I planned my NEA in a Word document. I wrote down all the important things I had to remember, such as the structure and formatting, in bullet points at the top and had my research under this.
To plan my actual essay, I used a table. I put this in the same Word document so that everything was in the same place.
In this table, I had a row for each paragraph. Then I had columns for the topic of the paragraph, the line of argument as well as the primary sources, historian interpretations and context that I planned to use in each paragraph.
Personally, I found that this made everything very clearly set out and was a lot easier when it came down to actually writing. However, while this worked for me, it might not be the best for you, so use whatever form of planning you feel is best.
The most important thing is that you are fully planning out these elements for each paragraph to make the writing process simpler.
Step 3: Write the introduction of your A-Level History NEA
The introduction of your NEA is pretty different to the introduction in any other essay you would have done before. While you do still need to respond to the question and state your line of argument, there is more required of you.
You will also have to address your NEA title and line of argument in reference to historian interpretations.
One of the first things that you should do is look at specimen answers and focus in on the introduction. The idea here isn’t to copy. It will probably be better if you look at specimen answers that have completely different topics to yours.
Instead, you are reading these to get a feel for how it is written as well as learning the structures that people have used. This is because these answers are meant to provide insight into the “perfect” answer and thus have good structures many of which you should also try to be using.
In a normal essay, you might begin by stating whether you agree or disagree with the statement. However, in the NEA, you are addressing the statement/ question with the views of a historian, generally this will be the one(s) you support.
You should briefly explain their interpretations in reference to the title of your NEA and present the opposing views and historians also. This should be in a similar way to how you would set up the factors in an essay within the introduction.
You can see an example of a specimen answer from AQA on this page from the Weebly website.
Step 4: Write the main body of your A-Level History NEA
Once you have everything planned out, the rest is pretty straight forward. All you have to do is fill in the blanks.
There are different ways to do this, but I will set out how I wrote mine. Of course, there are other methods that you can use.
First of all, start your essay with the line of argument, in a similar way to a normal essay but you should also refer to a historian’s interpretation. For this, you will need at least one quote for each historian you mention.
Then, I used a primary source in place of the evidence section in a normal essay, so this primary source should support your line of argument. You will need to evaluate this source using both provenance (author, type of source, date, audience, purpose, tone, etc.) and your contextual knowledge.
Then depending on the usefulness of the source based on your evaluation of the primary source as evidence, you will need to evaluate the line of argument, saying if this strengthens or weakens your argument.
When actually writing the main body of your NEA, there are several other things that you need to keep in mind. First of all, the word count.
While it will depend on the exam board, you will likely need to stick to a word count around 3,500 and 4,500 words. You can learn more here on the AQA website. Although, like me with OCR, your exam board may not actually enforce this word count but use it as a guideline instead.
You will also need to make sure that you are referencing throughout. Referencing is incredibly important and doing it throughout, will save you a lot of time. You can learn all about it in this article by Newcastle University.
While you will need to do your referencing throughout, you will also need to do a separate bibliography. This bibliography will be at the end of your NEA and will include citations to all of your research, including contextual information, if you got it from websites or even a textbook. For more on bibliographies, look at this article by Teesside University.
Step 5: Write the conclusion of your A-Level History NEA
The conclusion of your A-Level History NEA is much like any other conclusion you will have written while doing A-Level History. By this, I mean that the main purpose of this conclusion is to wrap up your essay and present your final answer to the title of your NEA.
While you will need to have done this throughout while evaluating and justifying your line of argument, it’s of upmost importance in your conclusion to directly address the wording of the title.
While doing the A-Level, you will have come across different trigger words for essays, such as “justify”, “how far do you agree…?”, “to what extent…” and “assess…”. These are all trigger words that may be in the title of your NEA.
Especially for the trigger words “how far do you agree?” and “to what extent…”, you will need to make sure that you are explicitly mentioning the degree of which you agree or disagree with a statement.
For the “assess” trigger word, you are being asked to compare all of your different factors amongst each other. In this case, it could be best to rank all your factors in comparison to the main one that you support to show that you have “assessed” the different reasons for something or other factors.
I hope this guide helps you with you’re a-Level History NEA. Happy writing.