How to Write a DBQ Essay?

Writing a DBQ essay is a real challenge for anyone. When you enroll in an Advanced Placement (AP) course, you may not even know that a DBQ essay will be part of the game, waiting for you at a certain crucial moment ahead. However, by the time you see a DBQ prompt in your AP exam assignments, it will be too late to back down.

Until then, the best you can do is to prepare yourself. In particular, the current compact guide contains all the essential instructions on how to write a good DBQ essay, plus an example of a perfect DBQ paper.

What is a DBQ Essay

DBQ stands for Document-Based Questions. DBQ essay is a type of high-school assignment where students are required to write an essay based on a set of documents. They get a question, or, most commonly, a DBQ prompt, which comes with a range of supporting documents. DBQ essays are written on various social studies disciplines, such as history or political science. Documents may include historical records, facts, sometimes photos, memoirs, personal correspondence, and even maps.

The DBQ essay tests students’ skills in analyzing, interpreting, systematizing, and synthesizing document-based information, and their ability to write a coherent and evidence-based response to a given question.

DBQ essays are always a part of Advanced Placement courses. The latter are taken by high-school students in the US and Canada who want to obtain advanced knowledge and skills in social sciences. AP courses are usually highly valued and acknowledged by American colleges and universities, and students who get top scores on AP testing get a better chance of pursuing and obtaining graduate degrees.

DBQ essays are mostly in-class based, meaning students must write them as part of standard AP exams and tests. On average, they get 1 hour to study the documents and write an essay. However, some schools also practice take-home DBQ assignments, while others allow for mixed approaches – studying documents can be done at home, but essays still need to be written in class.

How to Start a DBQ Essay

You will have only one hour to write your DBQ essay. Within this time, you’ll need to analyze the given prompt and available documents, quickly grasp the crux of both, and start writing your response. Therefore, the success of your work utterly depends on your ability to understand what is required and to come up with a defensible response – a thesis statement that is both interesting and disputable. However, don’t spend more than 15 minutes on the documents, as when you linger a bit longer reviewing them, you’ll lack the precious time needed for writing.

Allocate about 1/4 of your time to quickly sketch an outline, paying particular attention to the thesis statement and its argumentation. The outline will become the skeleton around which you’ll need to build your evidence and develop the discussion. With good planning and time management, you increase your chances of writing a decent paper.

Start the introductory paragraph with background information about the topic. Usually, 2-4 sentences are enough, as the rest of the space has to be allocated to the thesis. The latter is not a restatement of the prompt, but an original argument encapsulated in a clear statement. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss it at length, including examples of weak and strong thesis statements.

Strong vs Weak Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is the foundation of your DBQ essay. When you look at a relatively short essay prompt on one hand, and a bunch of documents on the other, it is easy to get lost, panic and start answering the prompt without a clear goal in mind.

To avoid such troubles, you must formulate your answer to the given prompt in the form of a clear argument, or what is called a thesis statement. Do it prior to writing your essay’s text. A strong thesis statement should meet a number of important criteria:

• Be specific – concise and straightforward
• Be arguable – can be supported or challenged/defended and refuted
• Be relevant – target a specific question or prompt

Let’s illustrate this with an example.

Suppose, your DBQ essay’s prompt reads: “Evaluate the factors that contributed to the outbreak of World War II.”

You get a set of documents along with your prompt assignment, which includes a Treaty of Versailles statute, key facts about the Great Depression of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini pictures, maps of Poland under Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and others.

What will be a strong and a weak thesis statement in this situation? Let’s find out using several examples:

Strong statements are specific and goal-oriented, and they aim to evaluate and rank the AVAILABLE documents, while the weak ones lack focus, cast doubt and hesitation as for the goals of the paper, and even introduce NEW factors, favored by the author.

Remember, that there will always be additional documents present that are unrelated or weakly related to the main prompt. To compete for the highest grade on your DBQ essay, you’ll need to discuss ALL documents, explaining why you consider the impact of some of them to be insignificant or even contrasting to your thesis statement.

DBQ Essay Format

The exact DBQ format requirements may vary greatly, and they utterly depend on your specific course instructions, teacher preferences, and institution’s standards. Usually, though, a DBQ essay is written on a standard A4 format paper, or, if it is an electronic test, a Times New Roman font of 12 size and 1-inch margins on all sides apply.

How long should a DBQ essay be? A typical DBQ essay doesn’t exceed 2-3 pages in length. Since the DBQ essay is written during exams, i.e., in class, you simply cannot do more than that. It is the quality of your text that matters, not the volume.

For such a short paper, the standard essay structure applies:

1. Introduction
2. The Main Part
3. Conclusion

These parts of a DBQ essay are not typically divided into subheadings or chapters. Instead, all elements (introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion) go as one solid bulk of text, organized into paragraphs.

Students must support their arguments with at least 6 evidence-based facts using the available documents. The proper citation guides and rules apply (AP style guide per default).

Additionally, students are required to add at least 1 piece of outside evidence, which is not part of the given set of documents. This should be purely based on their knowledge and mastery of the topic.

A Perfect DBQ Example

Following our example of a DBQ prompt above, let’s now look at an exemplary constructed essay. Notice how it evaluates all the available documents and introduces a new one (Appeasement policies pursued by Western democracies) – the outside evidence required by the DBQ essay’s guidelines.

The Bottom Line

A DBQ essay is an important part of Advanced Placement exams and testing. It is assigned to a particular AP discipline, usually history, but can be anything from the field of humanities and social sciences. So, studying and preparing for a DBQ essay can only be done in advance, as part of the standard course’s curriculum, and when you come to the testing venue and get to see the Document-Based Questions, you’d better be already knowledgeable in that specific discipline.