Reaction Pape-r #1 (History Class)

Paul Gilmore’s Guide to Common Problems to Avoid When Writing Papers

In the papers I have received over the years, there have been several common problems. You should use this list of explanations of those problems as a guide. Some items may seem obvious, but they are so common that I have included them. Although excellent papers require more than technical proficiency, you will be well on your way to writing much clearer and better-organized papers if you avoid these mistakes.

I write quite a bit on your papers to explain where I think your paper is strong or weak. If the grammar is poor, I typically correct the first page and then give up, paying attention only to your arguments. Frankly, when I read a poorly written paper, I find it hard to understand the arguments. This means that poorly written papers get poor grades. Papers that are not up to college standards will be returned with a zero.

If you want to cultivate the skills of a very good writer, you should develop the habit of reading newspapers, magazines, nonfiction, and especially novels. Novelists sometimes break the rules of grammar, but they typically follow them. More importantly, great novelists know how to pack their sentences with meaning. The words may be unfamiliar and the sentences may be complicated, but once you learn the words, you will find that good novelists are exact, clear, and profound. Through a steady diet of reading, you will become familiar with the written word without even consciously studying the rules. I make no claims to being a great writer, but I know that I have improved immeasurably since I started reading fiction.

Paper Format

Refer to the syllabus for the basic format of your papers. You should begin at the top of the page, not three or four inches down; you need at most two inches for your name and title. Also, do not leave blank spaces between paragraphs. Instead of working to stretch out a few words, you should be struggling to pare down your essay and fit your ideas into the word count requested.

Common Problems

1) Since you are the author, I know that your paper is an expression of your thoughts. Therefore, there is no need for phrases like “I think,” “in my opinion,” “I have to say,” or “I feel.” These phrases not only clutter your papers, but they also give your writing an uncertain tone and weaken its persuasive power. They act as constant reminders of your authorship; as such, they turn the reader’s attention away from the quality of your arguments to questions of your authority to offer your opinions. You should eliminate these phrases, except on the very rare occasions when they are absolutely necessary.

2) Do not use “you” unless you are directly addressing the reader. I address you, the readers, throughout this guide, so I use “you.” Many students write statements like: “History is so boring that you fall asleep in class,” but although I once fell asleep in my mother’s English class, I never fell asleep in history class. You did.

3) When writing numbers, the basic rule is to write out simple numbers and use the number keys for more complex numbers. Examples: Ten, twenty-five, three hundred, one million, 945, 1,986, 53,432.

4) Leave two spaces between sentences. This may seem trivial, but it is quite important to me; the period and the spaces are visual cues to me that you have finished your thought.

5) If a sentence begins with the word “what” or “it,” you may want to revise it. These words should be a hint that much of your sentence conveys no meaning. What I often find is that when I begin writing a sentence, I start with many unnecessary words. For instance, in the last sentence the words, “What I often find is that,” are useless. In fact, the entire sentence should be revised to: “I often begin sentences with many unnecessary words.” Try to cut half of the words out of your sentences. Try cutting your sentences in half.

6) When you use the word “it,” make sure it refers to something obvious in the sentence. If you cannot tell me what “it” refers to, I do not know what it means. When people are in a hurry, it makes them write poorly and it’s common that they overuse “it” as a result. It’s quite often unnecessary to use that word. It was quite hard for me to learn this. It’s something you can remove from a sentence if it is just re-phrased a little. Try it with the preceding few sentences.

7) There are too many punctuation problems to list them all, but a few quite common ones are worth mentioning.

First, never use ellipses (. . .) unless they signal some missing text in a quotation. They should not be used, as they often are, to denote a meaningful pause. For example, it is incorrect to write a sentence like, “History is boring . . . really boring.”

Second, when words in quotation require punctuation, the punctuation marks must almost always be placed inside the quotation mark. The use of quotation marks in this guide should provide you with plenty of examples of correct punctuation.

Third, do not use contractions unless it is absolutely necessary. Can’t should be cannot; don’t should be do not; who’s should be who is, and so on. The only apostrophes should be those that denote possession.

8) Remember that some words sound the same or close to the same but have different meanings. Make sure that you write the right word. Here are some very common examples: to, too, and two; there, their, and they’re; your and you’re; then and than; its and it’s; and who’s and whose. If you avoid contractions, you will also avoid most of these problems. Relatedly, avoid using “of” when you should have used “have.” A great number of students, accustomed to hearing rather than reading the words “should have” or “would have,” write them as “should of” or “would of.” Do not make this mistake.

9) You must write in complete sentences. Sentence fragments are groups of words that do not contain a subject and a verb, but the writer treats them as sentences. Like this group of words. Incorrect punctuation and spelling as in this sentence often muddles, the meaning of words in addition your sentence will tend to Ramble on; and will lose it’s force like this one which though it has subjects and verbs is a run-on sentence. Note how in this sentence I have used a semicolon to combine two clauses that could stand alone as sentences; this informs the reader that both clauses convey one basic idea. If you want to string several clauses into one sentence, you must use proper punctuation. This is not the place to go over all the rules concerning the combination of clauses, but if you are unfamiliar with them, I suggest you buy and use one of the manuals listed below. Until you improve, you can avoid these mistakes by writing simple sentences. You do not have to be Faulkner. You should start by being Hemmingway. If you do not know who I am referring to, see the introduction to this guide.

10) If you have written something once, try not to write it again. This is redundant. Sometimes, to make yourself clear, you will need to re-state something from the introduction, but such re-statements should provide some important clarification of the original idea, not merely repeat the previous line. You should avoid repeating what you have already written. Try not to repeat things as I have done in this paragraph.

11) Do not quote the dictionary. The only exception to this rule would be a paper about different dictionaries’ interpretations of words. I understand that many people quote the dictionary, but they should not do it. I do not care what Webster thinks. I care what you think, and I assume that we both know the meanings of words. That said, a good dictionary is a wonderful reference tool to keep next to you as you write. If you are unsure that the word you are using conveys exactly what you mean, then the dictionary will help you find the correct word.

12) If you use a dictionary, you will find that synonyms are not interchangeable. You should circumvent consuming the wordlist task on your chat workstation save you identify the detailed implications of the terms you aspiration to barter. The previous monstrous sentence is the result of using the thesaurus to re-write this: You should avoid using the thesaurus function on your word processor unless you know the precise meanings of the words you wish to exchange. If you are unsure of the exact meanings of similar words, look each word up in a dictionary and use the one that most closely expresses your meaning.

13) Avoid the passive voice. Sentences are made lifeless when the thing that is acting is not identified. The previous sentence is an example of the passive voice scourge. Who or what is making, acting, and not identifying in this sentence? The sentence should read: Authors write lifeless sentences when they do not identify the actors. Historians, especially, should avoid the passive voice. Identifying actors is an important part of our job. “The law was passed” provides half as much information as “Congress passed the law.” In addition, the passive voice sometimes hides our assumptions. In the above example, rewriting “the law was passed” as “Congress passed the law” should encourage the historian to dig deeper and ask more questions about actors. Perhaps the statement should read: “Officials of Standard Oil bribed Congress to pass the law.” You can get rid of the passive voice by searching your document for forms of the verb, to be (is, are, was, were), and then trying to eliminate them. The verbs “was” and “were” hardly excite the imagination anyway. You will not rid your paper of all occurrences of this word but trying often helps.

14) Avoid some prepositional phrases. “He wore jeans of blue” should read, “he wore blue jeans.” “He ran over the roof of the house under the bridge with the cars on the road over the river” is an awkward sentence.

15) Avoid clichés. They are substitutes for original and insightful comments. We all hear quite a number of clichés every day. They are the language of advertisers and business in general, and in government, they are the language of propaganda, which encourages a dangerous unthinking kind of patriotism. When authors use clichés, they assume the reader already understands their meaning. In fact, these phrases, precisely because of their repetition, lack any definite meaning. They have no explanatory power. For instance, the statement, “striving for excellence in history gives me a well-rounded education,” sounds like a straightforward statement until we realize that the phrases “striving for excellence” and “well-rounded education” are exactly the terms that require explanation. You should always ask yourself exactly what you mean; if you cannot answer clearly, perhaps you have used clichéd language to hide your own confusion. I cannot emphasize this enough. Check especially the beginning and end of your paper and ask yourself if you are using clichés.

Relatedly, avoid “filler” phrases like “not to mention” or “it goes without saying.” If it really did go without saying it, or if it truly did not need to be mentioned, why say or mention it? With that being said, it’s hard to believe, but in many ways, there are many more filler phrases.

16) Boring is boring. It is not a very descriptive word, and it stops discussion exactly where it should begin. When you feel the urge to write this word, ask yourself what you mean by the term and why you feel that way, and then write your answer.

17) Avoid slang, vulgarity, and conversational language. Many students write statements like: “I mean really!” or “That’s bullshit!” These expressions of exasperation are perhaps acceptable, if not very illuminating, in conversational English, but they should not be used in written English. Really, what do you mean? And what was so unconvincing about that “BS” statement? I want to know. Written English follows more formal rules than conversational or e-mail or text message English. Your personality can still come through in your writing, but you should follow those rules.

18) Do not abbreviate terms. Do not use etcetera, or etc.

19) Avoid making circular statements or statements of the obvious. Circular statements merely restate that which needs explanation, as in statements like “JP Morgan was rich because he had a lot of money,” or “slaves were exploited because their masters exploited them.” These statements and others, like “history is history,” or “history is the study of the past,” do not add much to your paper. “Since the beginning of time” or “throughout time” do not add to your paper either. These phrases explain nothing. Everything happens “throughout time” so the statement is meaningless. These are a special category of those clichés you should be on the lookout for. (By the way, I stand with the late David Foster Wallace, notorious grammar “snoot,” in ignoring the rule forbidding the ending of sentences with prepositions.)

20) Do not tell me that the historical explanation for an event is “human nature.” This is not very meaningful. In the past, appeals to human nature have justified just about every kind of atrocity. Usually, when students appeal to human nature, I disagree with their understanding of the term. We can have a philosophical argument about human nature, but it does not help us understand history. Appeals to human nature should be especially suspicious in a history class. We discuss differences and changes over time. How can something that is presumably unchanging (human nature) be an explanation for change over time? How does something common to all human beings explain differences between them?

21) Do not tell me that without “X,” we would not be what we are today. This is literally true of every event and person in history, no matter how trivial. Everything has made us what we are today, so the sentence is not helpful. I suspect that students put such a construction on events in an effort to excuse some crime or atrocity in the past, as if to say that everything had to happen as it did in order to have the good life we have today. If you want to make an argument about the necessity of some bad event to get some good thing today, make that argument. When you consider that nothing in history had to happen, you may find it very difficult to defend that argument.

22) Be certain that your adverbs (these are usually the words that end in “ly” and precede verbs) convey necessary meaning. Basically, you should really rarely use the words “really,” or “basically.”

23) Make your subjects and verbs agree in number. If your subject is plural (people), then your verb should be plural (were, not was). To avoid the awkwardness of using the generic “his/her,” I try to make my subjects plural, or I alternate the use of his and her. For instance, instead of writing “a historian loves his books,” I write “historians love their books.”

24) Use “literally” correctly. “I literally died of boredom,” conveys exactly the wrong impression. If you wrote that, you stated that you are, literally, dead. You mean to say, “I figuratively died of boredom,” which is awkward and probably an overstatement of your condition, but it is at least the correct use of the word.

25) When mentioning an author, you should use her full name when you first introduce her, but only use the last name thereafter. Also, be sure to spell authors’ names correctly. They are always written on the documents and books I assign. To misspell something so important and so easy to get correct reflects very poorly on your entire paper. Need I remind you that you should also spell your own name correctly? Considering the number of papers I have received with students’ names spelled incorrectly, yes, I do need to remind you.

26) There is no excuse for spelling mistakes. You will get rid of the vast majority of spelling errors by simply using the spell-check function on your computers. There will still be some correctly spelled words that are the wrong words, so you must re-read your paper too. I will give zeroes to papers with spelling mistakes that could have been caught with spell-check.

27) Outline your ideas. If you are like me, you will need to write a bit before you definitely know how you want to answer the question. This may help you think about your ideas more clearly. But once you have figured out the direction you want to take, you should start over with an outline. A good writer arranges her ideas in paragraphs that clearly lead the reader through her thought process.

28) There are almost no occasions when “downfall” is a useful word.

29) Follow all directions and answer the prompt. Do not summarize the reading.

30) Do not cheat. Most students who plagiarize probably do so because they are pressed for time. Do not be that student. Turn the paper in late, or don’t turn it in at all, but do not cheat. If you think that your GPA or degree is the most important thing, and that taking others’ ideas and presenting them as your own is the way to get that GPA or degree, then you do not know what college is and you are wasting your time. I do not care what others think. I care about what you think. If you do not care about what you think, then you should quit and come back when you do.

31) Finally, you should take much more time than you think you need to write a good paper. You should proofread and revise several times. I write quite a bit and it took me over ten hours to write this guide. There are probably some unintended mistakes still in it. Perfection is the goal, but I will never get there. I am not mean, but I need to see evidence that perfection is your goal as well.

The Three Questions

Once you finish your first draft, you are not even half finished with the paper. When I write papers, I go over it again and ask three questions of every sentence.

First, is this clear? Your paper is a vehicle that conveys ideas in your head into your reader’s head. If something is not clear on the page, it may not be clear in your head. Your writing should be a conversation with yourself before it ever becomes communication with your reader. Try to understand your own ideas exactly, and then precisely write what you think on the page.

Second, does this lead anywhere? Your sentence may be a clear expression of an idea, but that idea may have absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of your paper. Your readers should be able to follow your argument. Your sentences are crumbs left for your readers on a path to your ideas. Do not lead them astray.

Third, can it be written in half as many words? Asking this question will bring you around to the first question and start the process over. I have often found when I am writing that that which once was fairly clear can be made even clearer with fewer words. Fewer words often clarify things.

Here are some reference works that every student should own or have access to: The Chicago Manual of Style or Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers, and a good dictionary. If you are not a particularly strong writer, you should seek help at the Writing Center in the library today.

The Code Book

Here is a list of some abbreviations I may write on your papers and what they mean.

! – a particularly good point

? – I don’t understand your point or your sentence

^ – insert what is written above the arrow

AWK – awkward phrasing – re-word your sentence

C – a cliché

CON – conversational – the writing is too conversational – avoid

INC – incorrect statement

MR – a misreading of the author – you misunderstand the argument

NS – not a sentence

PV – passive voice

RED – redundant

RO – run-on sentence

SF – sentence fragment

SIG – significance? I do not see why this is significant.

SOLID – exceptionally excellent work

SP – spelling mistake

SUM – you are summarizing too much

SVA – subject and verb do not agree in number

NN – not necessary

Unclear – your statement is muddled – I do not understand

Vague – your statement is not definite or specific

WC – word choice – you have used a word that does not quite fit here, or does not mean what it

appears you think it does

By the way, Harvard has a good site on all of this stuff: https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/strategies-essay-writing