Argue it, don't list it.
Weight competing causes and watch a thesis assemble itself, dial a source's provenance to see its value move, then take a position between two historians.
Weigh the causes, build the thesis
FIG. 01 · CAUSATION & JUDGEMENT · AO1Your thesis
Move a slider to start.
Paragraph spine
Judgement
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All three sit on the encoded options: 1C The Tudors and 2N Revolution and dictatorship, Russia 1917–1953.
What separates a Level 5 from a Level 3. Not more content — a sustained line of argument. The examiner is looking for a judgement stated early, defended throughout and returned to at the end, with the subordinate factors shown operating through the dominant one rather than queued up beside it. Set the weights the way you actually believe them, then check the spine reads like something you would be willing to defend.
Turn the provenance dial
FIG. 02 · VALUE & LIMITATIONS · AO2—
Choosing a source sets the dials to roughly where its provenance sits. Then move them yourself and see what changes.
How close the writer stood to what they describe, in time and in access.
Could this person say what they thought without consequence? Under coercion, content stops being testimony and becomes evidence of the coercion.
Purpose and audience combined: how much did the writer need the reader to reach a particular conclusion?
The AO2 sentence stem that always works. "The source is valuable for X because of who wrote it and when; it is limited for Y because of why it was written and who was meant to read it." Note what happens when you drag freedom to speak to zero: the content becomes almost worthless as testimony and simultaneously becomes first-rate evidence of how the regime manufactured its own record.
Stand somewhere between two historians
FIG. 03 · INTERPRETATIONS · AO3—
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The evidence, seen from where you are standing
Your AO3 paragraph
Left = fully the first interpretation. Right = fully the second. The middle is not a cop-out if you can say which parts of each you accept.
Interpretations are arguments, not facts. AO3 credit comes from explaining why a historian argues what they do — the questions they asked, the archives they could reach, the moment they wrote in — and then testing that argument against evidence, including the evidence it handles badly. The red-marked items are the ones your current position has to explain away. If there are none, you have probably not committed to anything.