Show your tracks.

When you're writing about history, whether it's for an academic paper or a blog post, you are going to shape your argument into a narrative. The more general your audience, the more you are going to want to shape your history writing into entertaining storytelling. And there's nothing wrong with that! I do it myself all the time, whether on r/AskHistorians or my own website Women of 1000 AD.

In doing this though, you are inevitably going to end up making some calls about how much you want to simplify certain complicated parts of the story. Maybe there is a scholarly controversy about something that's really just a minor point in your narrative, so you don't want to bog your writing down with too much attention paid to it. Maybe you feel strongly that the rest of the historians writing about your topic have gotten something majorly wrong and you're looking to throw out everything that's come before and forge ahead with a bold new argument. The point is, if you want to be responsible about writing history, you need to allow readers to see some of the scaffolding of your argument. What sorts of evidence do you rely on to make your argument? Why do you consider that evidence more valuable than the evidence that the people you're disagreeing with are using? Which pieces of the story are historians missing and why? Why might people disagree with you in spite of the evidence you've laid out?

There are different ways to do this. You can shape your whole narrative around how we know (or don't know) something, bringing readers along with you for the ride. If you're not interested in using your own investigation strategy as the framing narrative of your writing, there are other ways you can do it too. You can use good old-fashioned footnotes or in-line citations (if you're writing an academic paper, this is a requirement!). You can have a "further reading" section where you include some comments about which sources you used for different pieces of your narrative (this is what I do when writing on the Internet since I don't like doing bibliographical citations in my free time). You can include hyperlinks to academic articles and other reputable sources embedded in your text. You can make entertaining digressions about the absurdities of academic arguments and expose your field for the uneasy alliance of egos that it is. Or, you can simply admit that you are making an educated guess and that others might arrive at different but equally fair conclusions.

Whatever way you decide to do it, your history writing will always be better if you show your tracks. There are several benefits to this. If someone comes along and wants to engage in your argument, they can do so in a way that will be much more fulfilling for both of you because they can see how you got to that point. Also, when we're writing for the general public, I believe that historians have a responsibility to make it clear that history is built on the painstaking assemblage of evidence and assumptions. If you are open and honest about the assumptions you had to make along the way, the next people who come along will be able to make a more informed decision about whether to accept your argument.

Hope that helps!