Writing tips for my students
Since I am in the middle of grading a large batch of final papers for a class I feel inspired to write down some tips for my future students (since these tips ain't helping my current classes.)
You earn your A’s in an online class through writing, plain and simple. Because most hands-on class activities are simply impractical, written papers and online discussion forums take up the bulk of how you’re evaluated in just about every online class, and certainly of every online class I teach. This does not mean you need to be a great writer, but adhering to a few simple guidelines will help to improve your grades.
Rule #1: Know the assignment requirements.
Here’s the key to understanding how your written work is graded in online classes. Because of the large amount of writing that your instructors have to grade, the absolute easiest thing to do is to dock points for missed requirements rather than adding points for the quality of the writing. Thinking through how well you’ve explained a point or how sound your logical reasoning is is tough, but getting the word count for your paper from Microsoft Word and comparing it against the requirements is easy.
Rule#2: Pick a clean format and stick to it.
The best thing to do is to use a standard style guide like APA or MLA for all your papers. As a matter of fact this is often one of those requirements that is easy to grade against. Typically your program will provide you with a style guide so that you know which one is preferred, but unfortunately many students assume this only refers to how sources are cited. These style guides give you much more than that, including what font to use and how to set up your title page. Take the time to figure it out once and simply copy the style for the rest of your papers after that.
For style guidelines, nothing beats the Purdue Online Writing Lab. Check these out:
Rule #3: Do not copy and paste.
Just don’t do it.
First of all, I obviously want you to not plagiarize anything. Plagiarizing the work of another means that you have taken something someone else has said, included it in a piece of writing with your name on it, and not properly cited the source from which you got it. THIS INCLUDES DISCUSSION THREADS. This is a very common thing people do, and you have to realize that it is easy — NEARLY TRIVIAL — for an instructor to tell when something has been plagiarized just by reading it. After all the student writing we consume from term to term, we know how people who are not professional writers write, and we know how students who are not e=yet experts in this field write. And we get to know you as an individual pretty quickly. For papers that are submitted to dropboxes many schools use some form of originality software (such as TurnItIn) that not only checks your work against published sources, but also against papers other students have submitted to online programs. You will get caught.
Secondly, when you copy and paste text from somewhere - even if you plan on citing it - you often carry with it formatting from the source that will disrupt the look of your paper. You may be pretty savvy with your word processor, and so this might not be a problem for you. If you’re not, however, it is better to retype your quote so it looks like it belongs in your paper. Doing this also helps to keep your quoting in check. For most class assignments - and certainly for discussion threads - quoted material should not account for more than perhaps a few phrases here and there. There are exceptions of course, but over-quoting external sources can make it look like you don’t really know what you’re writing about.
And to be clear, plagiarism is cheating. It’s a violation of the school’s academic integrity policy. And it’s an easy way for an instructor to find an excuse to stop reading your work and slap a big old zero on it.
Rule #4: Use a winning formula.
Here is the basic structure of what your instructors need to see in an academic paper:
- “I’m stating a problem.”
- “I’m drawing conclusions in my own words from this explanation of the problem.” AND “This is the external source I’m using to justify what I just said.”
- “This is the answer to the problem.”
In its simplest form this uses the paper structure you were probably taught in English class over and over: intro / body / conclusion. For your academic papers, however, you are almost always expected to back up your assertions with external sources. There will be exceptions, I suppose, but in nearly every class your opinion only matters insofar as you can point to an external source that backs you up. Let’s consider the parts of the formula I am suggesting in more detail:
“I’m stating the problem.” This part of your paper serves three purposes. First, it takes up some of the word count / page count requirement you were inevitably given, so it plays to your advantage to include it. JUST DON’T COPY AND PASTE THE ASSIGNMENT. Secondly, it demonstrates to your instructor that you understood what the assignment was about in the first place. Believe it or not, this is important, and it can go a long way towards making it up if you end up getting the ‘solution’ wrong. For many instructors having a correct solution is only part of what they’re looking for. Third, writing out this section helps you to clarify for yourself that you’re actually responding to the requirements of the paper. There’s nothing more frustrating than finishing a paper and then reading feedback that says, “you missed parts B and C of the requirements” or “this isn’t what the paper was supposed to be about.”
“I’m drawing conclusions in my own words from this explanation of the problem.” You have to do something with what you learned in the course. You have to ‘answer’ the question that the assignment poses. For most of this seems like the meat of the thing you’re supposed to turn in, but far too many people turn in only this part.
“This is the external source I’m using to justify what I just said.” Here you either are saying essentially “I was able to say there were 32 professors at Hogwarts because the author wrote it on page 122 of the Chamber of Secrets” or you’re saying “Not only does my argument about Harry Potter being the bad guy make sense for reasons X and Y, but Dr. Xavier Grumpybutt in the New York Times agreed with me, and here’s where you can go read it.” There are many other reasons to cite sources, but in the context of fleshing out the formula for writing a good paper, these are two of the most important things for you to do.
“This is the answer to the problem.” You need to end your paper with some conclusion that summarizes the things you just said. This can be a brief paragraph, and it should be more brief than the body of your paper.
Rule #5: Don’t get too comfortable / Don’t write like you talk
I don’t know if this is a product of high school writing assignments or just the informal nature of electronic communications in general, but a common problem I see in academic papers is overuse of personal opinion, personal observations, and humor.
The first place to start is the perspective of your writing. Academic papers – unless explicitly assigned otherwise — should always be written in the third person. First person (“I believe . . . “) And second person (“you should . . .”) are inappropriate and too casual. Even if the assignment says something like ‘respond with your opinion on . . . ‘ or ‘in your own words . . . ‘ you should always use third person.
Jokes don’t work in writing. It may seem like a comfortable way to make a point, but they delegitimize the points you’re trying to make. Just don’t do it.
On the subject of getting too comfortable, avoid sounding like you have an opinion. Like you’re sitting around with a group of friends speculating about how things might be.
This may sound harsh, but your personal opinion does not matter. What does matter is if you can make a point and refer to some article or text that agrees with you. In many cases this is kind of a fine point, but it comes down to whether you’re making argument that someone who doesn’t know you could follow or are you just stating a theory based on your feelings and guesswork.
Where this becomes a noticeable problem (as in, something that your instructor might immediately start deducting points for) is if your opinion is stated as a broad, sweeping conclusion (“I believe the Internet is a force for good snd should be preserved at all costs.”) Instead work on specific proposals such as “The Internet can be used by humanitarian organizations to speed up aid in crisis situations.” That might actually be an opinion, but stated in such a declarative way it sound like someone is making a point, and it invites someone to ask, “How so? Tell me more!”