Comments on Research Essay Drafts

(Sent via email on 5/11/09)

I have completed comments on your research essay drafts. Please check the wiki for those comments (usually in all capital letters).

HERE ARE SOME GENERAL COMMENTS:

Some of you are having difficulty with sentence formation and grammar. Be sure to proofread everything; if you're having problems with that, ask someone from class to proof for mechanical errors.

Almost all of you are having trouble with in-text citation style, appropriate style of quotations introducing quotes with signals phrases. All of these can be corrected if you look it up in your Hacker handbook. These are the easy things to fix, people.

Some of you have been quoting from Dictionary.com. We have discussed in class that a dictionary or an encyclopedia is NOT an authoritative source. It's a good place to start but don't rely on it, especially those who are trying to define words such as "friend" or other common ideas that don't really need a definition.

Some of you have been ignoring the rule about using "you." NEVER use this pronoun in a scholarly paper. Also, do not refer to groups that are exclusive, such as "we," "us," "our."

Remember, punctuation is usually placed inside the quotation marks. And, you MUST provide citation information in-text: either the page number or (if an online only source) the paragraph number.

These are some basics that you should keep in mind for any paper and ones that we discussed at the outset of the semester.