The best way I have found to approach them (and I am by no means the last word on this topic or even a model to follow!) is to treat the paper as trying to accomplish two things simultaneously and one at they very end of the paper.

First, a good historiography is really a series of highly-focused and condensed book reviews that cut to the chase and lay out the skeleton of the author's main arguments and sources. The goal here is not to get too carried away and have your paper lost in a recapitulation of the entire book or article. Instead focus on the major theme and highlights, and it helps if you have a choice quote or two you can use to explain an interesting aspect of the author's argument. One flippant way to put it is that your precis should be about the proper length of a Scotsman's kilt: long enough to cover the important bits, but short enough to still be interesting.

The second component is a bit more tricky than parsing down complex arguments. What you want to be doing throughout the historiography is treating the topic in a meta manner showing how these individual works do not operate inside in a vacuum, but rather interact with each other, or in some juicy instances, talk past each other. There are a number of stratagems for this meta approach such as dividing up the scholarship into your own, personally-defined, historical camps, looking at the development of historical understanding chronologically, etc. The important thing is to prove not only that you have read and digested the material, but you can weave a coherent intellectual tapestry out of such diverse material.

Finally, a good thing to do at the end of the paper is to come up with some insight of your own as to where scholarship on this topic should be or where it can go. This part should be tailored much more to the parameters of the class itself; graduate classes will likely want some inkling of how you will incorporate this into your own development as a historian, while undergraduate survey classes might have you channel it back into the wider themes of the course. But this third element will help distinguish you from not only someone who has read and understands this material, but also as one who has their own voice as to where knowledge should go.