A Professor's Words of Wisdom

Dr. Nancy Tuten
Professor of English
Director of the Writing Program for the Pearce Communication Center

If you are writing a paper for one of the classes I teach, here are some suggestions:

• Drop by my office to discuss your paper topic and specific thesis before you start writing.
  
• Schedule at least one conference with me to discuss a *finished* draft of your paper--well in advance of the due date.
  
• Before you bring it to me, have someone else read your paper aloud to you so that you can hear the awkward phrases and sentences. (This person should be a good reader who has not seen any drafts of your paper.)
  
• Follow MLA style carefully—including the format for the title (there is no separate cover page, for example)—and for the list of works cited.
  
• Consult your copy of Using Sources Effectively to be sure your paper provides adequate boundary markers to indicate clearly which ideas are yours and which ideas belong to someone else.

Certain sentence- and word-level writing weaknesses seem to crop up often in student essays. Here are a three you will want to avoid:

1. The use of the word “this” with no clear reference, as in “This proves that the poem can be read on at least two levels.” I will write “this what?” in the margin. Write, instead, “This evidence proves . . . .”

2. The use of the pronouns “which” and “that” with no clear reference, as in the following example: " The protagonist places the quilts in her younger daughter’s arms, which causes Dee to storm off in anger.

Because “which” and “that” are pronouns, they must have clear, one-word antecedents (either nouns or pronouns). Here is a better phrasing of that sentence: "The protagonist places the quilts in her younger daughter’s arms, causing Dee to storm off in anger."

Or, if you simply must keep the “which,” be sure it has an antecedent: "The protagonist places the quilts in her younger daughter’s arms, an act which causes Dee to storm off in anger."

3. Inserting quotations into a paper without explaining to the reader who is being quoted. When your reader encounters a quotation, it should have some sort of lead-in phrase or sentence that clearly identifies the source for that quotation.

Using Sources Effectively by Robert Harris offers several pages of suggestions for how to introduce quotations. Here is one example:

Weak: Hamlet suffers from his inability to make a decision and act on it. “He is paralyzed by indecision” (Doe 24).

Better: Hamlet suffers from his inability to make a decision and act on it. As Jane Doe points out, “He is paralyzed by indecision” (24).

Best: Shakespearean scholar Jane Doe notes that Hamlet suffers from his inability to make a decision and act on it. She points out that the prince appears to be “paralyzed by indecision” (24).