Make sure the essay very near both the beginning and the end makes it very clear what the reader is to take away as the main points. In other words, the essay needs to very obviously answer the SO WHAT question. This is something you need to do THROUGHOUT your essay in different ways, not just once in the intro.
Make sure you have one!
Make sure you are just listing places or areas that are important to your site. You want to provide a description of where that place is in relation to other stuff. Think at small and large scales. What other buildings are nearby? Or on the same street? What are the closest towns? What are the prominent geographic features?
This is not just an essay about a historic site–it’s a chance for you to show me what you learned from the earlier readings. You won’t cite everything and you shouldn’t try to cram everything in. But your essay needs to take advantage of our more abstract and theoretical readings as well to help us think more deeply about our sites and what they should or shouldn’t mean for us today. This is also a chance for you to connect the past, present, and future of your historic site.
Informative first sentences have a clear progression through the essay.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with long paragraphs, but long paragraphs are quite difficult to read on a screen, and are also rather off-putting to new readers confronted with a wall of text.
Especially since you’ll be paying attention to paragraph lengths, make sure paragraphs have an obvious point. Paragraphs are visual representations of ideas, so each paragraph should have one main idea connected to what comes before and after it.
Do not mention people who do not figure prominently in your essay (unless just mentioning them parenthetically as examples). Ideally all people and their key work (usually there is just one under discussion) will be linked to more extensive biographies like Wikipedia pages AND have a short introductory blurb in the text.
Here’s an example of expanding an important point that is way too compressed into something longer but much clearer. Obviously you’re not going to do this sort of thing for every sentence, but if you can do it for the most important points, future readers will get a lot more out of these guides—and come away with a very different perspective and appreciation of history!
Augustine’s City of God made history of human affairs seem less relevant because we are all simply living out God’s preordained plan.
St. Augustine (354–430), regarded as one of the most important Church fathers and early Christian theologians, suggested that the history of human affairs was less relevant than Biblical history because humans are simply living out God’s preordained plan. This view emerges in part from his classic work City of God, written to show that Christianity was not responsible for the fall of Rome, and which emphasizes how we are merely passing through the temporal and corrupt Earthly City on our way (with proper behavior) to the eternal and perfect City of God.
Our essays need to be skimmable. That is, if someone is quickly scrolling through the page and glancing at headings, a sentence here and there, and images/captions, they should still learn something. And hopefully will be inspired to read more carefully.
If you’ve followed the guide, these should already be in place, but make sure your essay has: