GENERAL RULES:
1. Keep a BACK-UP COPY of your work.
2. Double SPACE, use one-inch MARGINS, and 12-point font.
3. NUMBER pages, beginning with the first page of text.
4. PROOFREAD.
5. Turn in all REQUIRED MATERIALS.
6. Take advantage of the WRITING CENTER; acknowledge you did so within your honor pledge.
7. Ask a classmate or friend to read your paper and to provide general FEEDBACK; acknowledge his/her contribution within your honor pledge.
8. If a research paper: use Chicago Manual (Turabian) style for notes (endnotes or footnotes) and bibliography.
9. If single-book essays, film reactions, take-home exams, book reviews: provide page numbers in parentheses for quotations only.
SOME RULES FOR CLEAR WRITING:
10. Use VERB TENSE logically and consistently.
Past tense is the most widely used and logical tense for historians, but present tense is standard in some situations (e.g., “in his book, historian John Doe argues that”). Be especially careful when using different tenses for different aspects of your paper (e.g., “Doe asserts that the Puritans were”).
11. Use PASSIVE VOICE carefully (e.g., “the decision was made.” By whom??).
Passive voice is NOT past tense, and it is not by its nature wrong; however, passive constructions are usually vague, lifeless, and uninformative.
12. Always provide FULL NAME AND IDENTIFICATION when referring to a person for the first time.
13. Always IDENTIFY THE AUTHOR OF A QUOTATION AND PROVIDE A BRIEF IDENTIFICATION
(e.g., “as presidential candidate Mary Smith explained”)
14. Write in THIRD PERSON. Avoid “I,” “our,” “we,” “us,” “you,” in most history papers.
15. Avoid “THIS” without a reference word. (“This was a problem.” What was?) Do not assume that what is clear to you is clear to your “ignorant” reader.
16. Prepositions should not end sentences.
17. Avoid:
- SLANG, COLLOQUIALISMS, and CUTE EXPRESSIONS.
- JARGON AND TECHNICAL LANGUAGE that does not fit a general reader.
- STUFFY, WORDY, LECTURING PHRASES, e.g., “it is important to note that.”
18. Avoid:
- Overreliance on “FEEL/FELT” when you mean “think/thought” or “believe/believed.”
- Overuse of “VERY” and “EXTREMELY.”
19. Never use:
- “A LOT” in formal writing.
- CONTRACTIONS or ABBREVIATIONS in formal writing.
SOME RULES ON MECHANICS AND PUNCTUATION:
20. Do not confuse HYPHENS (-) with DASHES (–).
- Both are created through use of the hyphen key, and neither has spacing around it.
- The DASH (two strokes of the hyphen key) is used to add words/phrases to a sentence, much as parentheses are used.
- The HYPHEN (one stroke) is used to break words.
21. Do not use SINGLE QUOTATION MARKS unless you are indicating a quotation within a quotation.
22. PERIODS and COMMAS: go inside quotation marks.
COLONS and SEMICOLONS: go outside.
23. Do not confuse the following:
- it’s = it is; its = possessive
- There is no such thing as its’.
- affect = verb; effect = noun (except when used to mean caused)
- accept = verb; except = preposition
- lead = present tense; led = past tense
- number of people vs. amount of fuel or money
