SOME COMMON GRADING SYMBOLS

Individual instructors may use their own versions of some of these marginal abbreviations. Any standard handbook of English will contain simple correctives for the various kinds of errors and poor usages they denote.

AGR
Error in agreement of number, such as between a singular noun and a plural verb or a pronoun and its antecedent.
ANTE
A pronoun lacking an antecedent noun has been used.
AWK or K
Awkwardness: usually a confused, wordy, or misleading phrase, clause, or sentence.
C
Capital letter needed.
Dangle
A dangling participle or similar structural error. ("Crossing the street, the car ran me over.")
D
Diction: the language used is stylistically inappropriate.
FRAG
Sentence fragment.
GG
Gobbledygook: a lot of confused words, often full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
jargon
The inappropriate use of special ized or professional words, phrases, or styles in non-profes sional writing.
lc
Lower case instead of capital letter needed.
Non Seq
Non sequitur. ("It does not follow") Indicates an error in the logic of an argument, usually a faulty claim of logical consequence.
P
Punctuation error.
Par or //
A failure to keep parts of a sentence in grammatical parallel with each other.
PASSIVE
Poor or unnecessary use of the passive voice.
RUN-ON
Run-on sentence.
SP
Spelling error.
Split
Split infinitive.
STR
Structure: there is an unspecified grammatical error in the marked passage.
T
Wrong or inconsistent use of verb tense.
VAGUE
Unclear, overly abstract, or blurred meaning.
W
Wordiness.
WW
Wrong or inappropriate word used for the meaning that was intended.
!
The reader's expression of dismay, unpleasant astonishment, or disgust.
?
Unclear or confusing statement.
P
New paragraph needed.

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is passing off another person's work as your own. It is a violation of the Honor Code and can lead to serious disciplinary action by the Honor Council.

Some plagiarism is intentional. All that needs to be said here about intentional plagiarism is that, aside from the fact that it is a form of cheating and lying, it is usually detected and always self-defeating. Your assignments, after all, are meant to teach you something; the intentional plagiarist learns nothing at all.

More problematic are those forms of plagiarism which are unintentional. Plagiarism of this sort usually involves a failure to supply the proper documentation for language and ideas derived from your reading and research. There are two primary ways that you may commit inadvertent plagiarism:

1) By failing to take clear, well-documented notes when you do research or background reading. Always be sure in your note-taking that you clearly distinguish words that you copy from your source from words that you paraphrase from your source. When the former (generally, five or more words) appear in your papers, they must receive quotation marks. Also, be sure not to confuse notes that contain your own ideas with notes derived from your readings.

2) By failing to separate clearly in your own mind, as you write, the ideas you derived from your reading from the ideas that are your own. All of the former, whether quoted or paraphrased, must be attributed. When in doubt, document.

On the other hand, there are limits to what must be documented, and going too far in the other direction sometimes leads to silliness. Common knowledge ("Plato was an Athenian") does not need not be documented unless you are quoting directly. Things you learned in high school ("Athens was the place where philosophy began") generally do not need to be documented. Broad ideas arising out of a class discussion ("Plato's ideal state is a form of utopia") usually do not need to be documented.

Various disciplines have their own rules for what constitutes common knowledge or general background, and you would do well to clarify these matters with your individual instructors when you receive your first assignment.

The proper form of citation is treated below.

Representatives from the Honor Council visit every Freshman Studies section to explain the Honor Code and answer questions about it. Pay attention to what they say.

CITATION

The form of citation used in Freshman Studies, and in most Lawrence courses, follows the MLA Handbook for Writers of Researcb Papers (second edition, 1984). It replaces older and more elaborate forms of citation. In most of the writing you will do for Freshman Studies (which will be based essentially on your reading of the primary sources), it will be sufficient to list the works you are using in a bibliography and to cite particular passages you are referring to in a parenthetical note. Thus, if you are quoting or paraphrasing Engels, your bibliography should contain:

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific New York: International Publishers, 1985.

and the parenthetical notes would follow the quoted or paraphrased words, thus:

"...the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is... sooner or later reaches a limit" (Engels, 47).

Or:

Engels characterizes common sense (the root of metaphysical reasoning) as a stuffy, respectable, and inherently limited middle-class trait (Engels, 47), and thus prepares us to go beyond it.

Observe that the parenthetical note comes before the final punctuation of the sentence or clause in which it occurs, and that it points the reader to the bibliography as a source of further information, thus eliminating the older system of elaborate footnotes. Observe also that in the second example the parenthetical note follows the clause that contains the paraphrase of Engels rather than the entire sentence because the last clause is interpretative and does not need to be documented.

Further examples of citation forms can be found in your handbook of English and in the class handouts that you will receive in your Freshman Studies sections.

Various disciplines may have their own special rules of citation; check with your instructor before you begin.

TYPICAL WRITING PROBLEMS

Among the books you will be asked to purchase for Freshman Studies are a handbook of English and a dictionary. Between them they contain everything you need to know to avoid grammatical, spelling, and word usage mistakes in your writing. You are expected to use them to overcome ordinary mechanical weaknesses in your writing - those little errors that come between you and your reader. Writers who believe in what they're saying strive to say it correctly. Writing that is studded with misspellings, sentence fragments, misplaced modifiers, agreement errors, erratic punctuation, and so on, can only be attributed to laziness, carelessness, ignorance, or indifference.

There are, however, a few general problems that recur often in Freshman Studies papers.

The following should help you keep them out of your writing:

"This"

Probably no word is more often misused by students than the pronoun "this," which requires, but seldom receives, a direct and specific antecedent. Generally, "this" just waves vaguely at some general notion developed in the previous sentences or paragraphs: "This shows that Plato was an authoritarian. .." or "This demonstrates Bach's mastery of..." Such usage produces hazy, unclear writing and is a sign of hazy, unclear thinking.

One simple way to force yourself to produce better prose and clearer thinking is to give up the word "this" altogether. If you never use it, you will never misuse it, and the exercise of finding an alternative way of expressing your thoughts will be wholly beneficial.

The Perpendicular Pronoun

Many students are told in high school that it is always wrong to use the word "I" in a formal essay. That is nonsense. True, there are occasions, such as in writing lab reports for science classes, where, in the name of objectivity, the first-person singular pronoun is inappropriate and the passive voice rules. It is also true that many thoughts and feelings in formal prose can be conveyed directly, without an introductory "I think" or "I feel." But in much discursive writing, in which the writer is mixing matters of fact with matters of interpretation, some means of indicating the different categories of statement is required. In such writing, telling the reader what the writer thinks, feels, believes, etc., is often necessary and useful. A failure to use the first-person singular in those circumstances can lead to absurdity. Do not say "It is thought that. . ." when there is no clear indication of a thinker. If you are doing the thinking, then it is all right to say "I think. . ."

The Pernicious Verb

It is a well-known truism in the writing of strong, interesting prose that there exists a simple hierarchy among the parts of speech: verbs are better than nouns, nouns are better than adjectives, and adjectives are better than adverbs. (Most adverbs and many adjectives can be removed from your writing without any loss of sense and with a great gain in clarity and vigor.) From that truism it follows that you should build your sentences around good, active verbs, which take as their subjects and objects clear, concrete nouns.

The pernicious verb is the verb to be in all its corollary forms (is, are, was, bave been, etc.). It undermines clarity, induces vagueness, and acts as a soporific. Though at times indispensable, it should be transformed wherever possible into one of its livelier relatives.

Forms of the verb to have should also be treated with suspicion.

Being Concise

Never use a sentence where a clause will do; never use a clause where a phrase will do; never use a phrase where a word will do. Conciseness - a self-evident virtue - follows from this simple rule.

The Irresponsible Passive

We live in a world in which people do things. Sometimes they would rather not take responsibility for the things they do, and so, like the child who breaks the cookie jar, they pretend that the things have happened all by themselves. The grammatical equivalent of this evasion is the passive voice, in which the object of an active verb becomes the subject of a passive verb and the actual subject, the doer of the deed, vanishes. (Thus, Mommy, I broke the cookie jar! becomes Mommy, the cookie jar is broken!) Since passive verbs have no real subject, they are inevitably vague; they obscure the performer of the action.

Bureaucrats, middle-level managers, and military people favor the passive because it renders them invisible: It was decided to close the factory. The village was bombed at five a.m. Their example over the years has loosed the plague of the passive upon us.

The passive voice has its appropriate use in circumstances where the performer of an action is unimportant. Scientists, for example, use it to suggest that any experimenter should arrive at the same result (Two measures of sulphur were mixed with three measures of oxygen), and writers of college catalogues and handbooks sometimes find it useful for describing institutional regulations (see the section on "Logistics" above). However, people who merely want to lend their prose an air of pseudo-scientific or -legalistic objectivity also favor passive constructions.

In addition, the use of a passive construction can mask the writer's uneasiness about, or unwillingness to be committed to, a statement's content: It is thought that Plato was too harsh on artists.

For all of these reasons, the passive voice has increasingly infected ordinary discourse, blighting prose and thought with vagueness and irresponsibility.

Learn to recognize the plague of the passive for what it is and avoid it whenever you can.

The Eternal Tense

Things that are eternal are always referred to in the present tense. As a convention, works of art, the characters and actions of fictional narratives, and the writers of some important non-fictional works are generally granted immortality. Thus, it is customary to use the present tense to describe literary characters and events ("After Lear divides his kingdom, his fate is sealed.") or the thoughts of important writers ("Plato uses Thrysamachus to introduce in concrete form an unjust man.").

For various reasons, you may sometimes want to choose a different tense form in your writing, but whichever tense you decide to use, use it consistently.

Abusing Dictionaries

Dictionaries are wonderful books because they tell you what words mean in their ordinary senses. But dictionaries offer little help in comprehending some of the most vital words - words like justice, love, tragedy, reason, science, socialism, and so on. To inform us, as a dictionary does, that justice is . "moral rightness" or "fairness" is of little use, since what we really wish to know is what constitutes moral rightness and how one must act to be fair. These are questions to which, for example, Plato devotes the entirety of The Republic, and thus to include a dictionary definition of justice in writing about Plato's conception of it is a kind of nonsense. Similarly, a dictionary definition of socialism will hardly help you explore what Engels means by that history-burdened word. So skip the dictionary definitions when you write. At best, they offer only a rhetorical handle on your subject; at worst, they are downright misleading. Besides, thcre aren't many typical writing ploys that instructors find more high-schoolish and annoying.

Quoting

When you are quoting portions of a sentence, the quoted words must fit grammatically into a complete sentence of your own. For example:

Engels argues that metaphysical thinking, though it is "justifiable and necessary" in some ways, ultimately fails because "in the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them."

Or:

Engels thus demonstrates that the metaphysical mode "cannot see the wood for the trees."

In the writing you will do in college, it is permissible to add or subtract, without notation, capital letters or minor punctuation from a quotation to make it fit the sense and form of the sentence.

Titles

All titles of large, complete works (books, novels, plays, symphonies, paintings, movies, television programs, etc.) should be underlined (or italicized) when they appear. Thus, one writes about Plato's Republic or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. The titles of shorter works (stories, poems, articles, etc.,) should receive quotation marks. Thus, one writes about Blake's "Song of Liberty" or the chapter in Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific entitled "The Mark."

It is customary to mention the title and author of the work you are discussing in your opening paragraph.

The Semicolon

The most often misused form of punctuation is the semicolon. Its primary use is as a conjunction between related clauses of equal grammatical weight; it may also be used to separate lists of items which contain commas. It is not correct to use it as a random substitute for a comma, a colon, or a dash. If you are not sure how to use the semicolon correctly, read the appropriate chapter in your handbook of English; if you are still not clear about its function, don't use it at all. You can get along just fine - indeed, write whole papers - without it.

The Ellipsis

The ellipsis consists of three, and only three spaced periods (...) and is used to indicate that words have been omitted, usually in the middle of quotations. It should not be used in place of the dash - which is indicated in typing by two hyphens - for inserting parenthetical material, nor should it be used, in discursive prose, for the vague emotional effect of a broken-off thought. Generally, it is not necessary to use the ellipsis at the beginning or end of quotations. If the omitted portion of the quotation follows the end of a sentence, then four spaced periods are used, one to mark the sentences completion, and three for the ellipsis.

Major Annoyances

The following common illiteracies drive your teachers up the wall and your grades down the tube. Commit them only when that's the result you're after. Otherwise, memorize the correct usages and use them.

* The word alright, which is a barbaric form of the correct all right.

* The inability to insert an apostrophe correctly in possessive nouns.

* The improper use of its and it's. The one with the apostrophe is always equal to it is. The one without the apostrophe is the possessive form of the pronoun. Example: "It's a shame that paper had its grade lowered for such fixable mistakes."

* Related to the above, the confusion of their, the possessive pronoun; there, the indicative; and they're, the contracted form of they are. Similarly, the confusion of your with you're and whose with who's.

* The misspelling of proper nouns, particularly names and titles, and especially the name of the author you are writing about or the instructor who is reading your paper. Also, the failure to capitalize proper nouns.

* The word lifestyle, except when applied to social modes of contemporary Californians and adolescents.

* The words optimistic and pessimistic when they become a substitute for thinking, as in: "King Lear ended up with a very pessimistic attitude toward life."

Individual instructors, of course, will have their own pet peeves to add to this listing.

Proofreading

Of all the minor skills involved in writing, none is as easy, as important to the finished product, or as often neglected as proof-reading. With word processing, proofreading has become even easier and involves far less effort if major corrections have to be made, but many students still turn in work filled with typos, commonplace spelling or punctuation errors, missing words or lines, pages out of order, and other symptoms of neglectful proofreading. If you can't take the trouble to re-read, slowly and carefully, what you have written - if, as it often seems, you can't bear the sight of your own work - then why should you expect anyone else to want to read it at all?

A NOTE ON GENDER AND SEXISM

A word about the use of gender pronouns: a battle is currently raging between linguistic purists and some proponents of social justice about the use of gender-specific pronouns (he, him, his) when a person of an unspecified gender is meant, as in sentences such as: "A student should avoid sexism in his writing."

What to do with such a sentence, how to deal with the offensive "his" is the issue, and no obvious resolution is in sight. Some, the linguistic purists, argue that established usage condones the masculine pronoun where a person of unspecified gender is meant. Others, arguing that established usage is a product of the old sexist attitudes of English-speaking societies, insist that a change be made, either to "his and her" or "his/her" or even some altogether new pronoun. Still others, particularly in speaking, are prone, either consciously or not, to commit a grammatical error and make the pronoun "their" in order to sidestep the dilemma. In fact, this error has become so commonplace in speech that one can imagine a future world in which "they," "their," and "them" have all become singular pronouns. That time, however, has not yet arrived, and one should write for the here and now, not posterity.

Your problem is that different teachers have different opinions when it comes to this question. Some will find "his or hers" unnecessarily wordy and inelegant, and "his/hers" a barbarism. Others will find the masculine singular culturally offensive. What to do?

The best solution, as it is for every problem in prose, is simply to recast the sentence in such a way that the dilemma is avoided. In the case of avoiding singular gender words, simply recast the sentence into the plural, thus: "Students should avoid sexism in their writing."

For the few occasions where such a recasting is not possible or fruitful, you may wish to ask your instructors which usage they prefer.

Related to the above is the use of gender-specific nouns, especially "man" and "mankind" when the entire human race is meant. (In naming occupations, most people nowadays usually try to find suitably gender-neutral terms, so that, for example, "fireman" becomes "fire fighter.") Again, the issue is still under debate, but good sense dictates that substitutions be found. Instead of writing "Mankind must strive toward social equality!" make it "People must strive toward social equality!"

CORRECT SPELLING OF SOME OFTEN MISSPELLED WORDS*

* This listing is derived to a large extent from a class handout prepared by Professor Anne Schutte.

(1) Affect is usually a verb meaning "to influence"; effect is usually a noun meaning "consequence."

(2) Bourgeois is the masculine singular noun and the adjective form of the word: "Engels accuses the British of bourgeois attitudes." Bourgeoise is the feminine singular noun; "She was a bourgeoise from Paris, educated at the Sorbonne." Bourgeoisie is the collective noun, the class of bourgeois people: "Engels believed the bourgeoisie were doomed to vanish into the dustbin of history."

(3) Cite is a verb meaning "to refer to"; site is a noun meaning "a place"; sight is the common verb and noun meaning "to see" and "the things seen."

(4) Precede means "to come before"; proceed means "to go ahead."

THE CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

Lawrence's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), located on the first floor of Briggs Hall, provides peer writing tutors to assist students at any stage of the writing process--from the development of ideas, to polishing drafts, to on-going work with fundamental writing skills (organization, grammatical accuracy, correct punctuation, citation of sources, and so on). Students may be recommended to the CTL by their course instructors or they may choose to seek its services on their own. Each Freshman Studies section has at least one CTL peer writing tutor assigned to it whom students in that section may contact for writing assistance. Students may also choose to work with any other writing tutor by requesting an appointment as described below.

Additionally, the CTL conducts workshops in various kinds of writing problems and techniques, and makes available an assortment of guidelines and explanatory handouts on topics such as accurate citation of sources and various writing mechanics and grammar issues.

To schedule an appointment with a writing tutor, you may contact the tutor(s) assigned to your section of Freshman Studies directly or you may request an appointment with another peer writing tutor by contacting the CTL via phone at x6767, via e-mail at ctl@lawrence.edu, or dropping by during CTL walk-in hours (Monday-Friday from 1-5pm and Sunday-Thursday from 7-11pm).

WORD PROCESSING

Lawrence makes available to students (in the library, residence halls, and classroom buildings) a number of microcomputers, both Apple Macintoshes and IBM- compatibles, and offers workshops in the use of these computers for word processing. It also is possible to perform word processing on the campus's main-frame computer. Many students find that writing on a word processor is far more efficient than on a typewriter. Some have computers of their own. Among other things, word processors facilitate outlining, re-drafting, and proofreading. Thus, you are encouraged - though certainly not required - to learn the use of a computer for writing. For Freshman Studies assignments, a knowledge of one of the simpler word-processing programs is sufficient.

If you are going to use a word processor, keep in mind that the loss of your work through some mechanical glitch is always possible. Save your files often as you work and back them up on a second disc after each work session. Also remember that the campus computers are most heavily used during the last two or three weeks of a term, and plan your work schedule accordingly.

For those who choose not to use a word processor, handing in typed, rather than hand-written, papers is strongly urged, and, at the instructor's discretion, may be mandatory.

Whether you are typing your papers or printing them out from a computer, always double-space the lines, number the pages, and leave adequate room in the margins for your instructor's comments.

A CHECKLIST

What follows is an attempt to help you through the agonies and uncertainties of writing papers for Freshman Studies as well as your other courses. It consists of a series of questions you should ask yourself as you write. I am not offering a magic formula or even a prescription for good writing. If anything, I mean to suggest that good writing, or even the avoidance of bad writing, consists mostly of hard work. These questions should help focus the hard work of those of you who want to write well, and also suggest the standards your professors expect of you.

For example, before you even approach a piece of paper, you have to deal with questions such as these:

What is the assignment? What does it mean? How can I find something to write about in the assignment? In short, what is my subject?

What in particular do I want to say about the subject? Can I sum up what I want to say in a sentence or two? Is what I want to say the right size for the length the paper is supposed to be? If my thesis is too broad, how can I narrow it? If it's too narrow, how can I broaden it? Is it perhaps part of some larger problem? Should I toss my thesis out and start all over again?

Is my thesis reasonable? Is it valid? What will I have to do to prove its validity?

Do I know enough about what I'm saying? Do I care about what I'm saying? If not, how can I fulfill the assignment (which might very well be a poor one) and still say something worth saying?

Having gotten this far, do I still like my thesis? Or should I start all over again?

Notice that this line of questioning gives you two opportunities to can your project and start all over again. Persistence is not necessarily a virtue - if you find yourself knee-deep in a swamp of uncertainty, you would be foolish to push on.

Of course, you can afford the luxury of a fresh start only if you begin thinking about your paper somewhat nearer the date it is assigned than the date it is due.

Having decided you have something to say, you draw up an outline. People tend to overemphasize outlines, as though they were the real stuff of writing, and the words mere padding. Nevertheless, an outline is essential for organizing your thoughts. A person who writes without one is either a fool or a genius. Judge thyself. Here are some questions you can ask yourself about your outline:

Is my outline complete? Does it contain all the important points? Have I properly subordinated supporting ideas to major ones?

Do the parts of my outline grow out of each other in some logical fashion? Can I truly state the logic of it? (If you can't, you'd better try again.)

Will my conclusion indeed conclude? Or will it merely restate my introduction? In short, does the outline lead somewhere?

Your outline, let us assume, is satisfactory. You now write a first draft. I said a first draft. I advise three drafts of any paper you write. That takes time, and you can't write three drafts in one night, but if you want to write decently, you have to work at it.

The first draft will be rough; that does not mean, though, that you should make it rough on purpose. Write as well as you can always. The roughness will emerge all by itself.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you re-read what you have wrought:

Is my diction (the kinds of words I used) suitable to the subject and the occasion? Have I been too flippant or too pretentious?

Is my vocabulary correct? Am I sure I know the meanings of all those big words? Am I sure my reader will give my words the same meaning I do?

Do my sentences make sense? Are they all sentences?

Are my paragraphs coherently organized? Do the sentences follow logically? Have I supplied the necessary linking words?

Have I included all the necessary pieces of my argument?

Have I followed my outline? Was my outline adequate?

Have I said what I wanted to say? Having said it, do I still consider it worth saying? (If not, do I still have time to start all over again?)

Your second draft should be written as though it were the draft you intended to hand in. Use good paper for it. Nevertheless, if you ask of it the following questions, the need for a third draft is likely to be apparent:

Have I committed any grammatical crimes? Are there any comma splices, sentence fragments, dangling modifiers, misspellings, constructions out of parallel, pronouns without antecedents (particularly the word 'this,' which always is misused - try to live without it for a while)?

You are advised to read the paper a second time, asking these questions:

Have I avoided cliches and dead metaphors? Have I avoided the passive voice? Is there variety in my sentence structures?

Have I relied on weak connectives such as "It is" in beginning sentences?

Have I avoided jargon? Have I used the least number of words possible to express my various thoughts?

Do my adjectives outnumber my nouns and verbs? (If they do, you're not writing well.) Have I used big words where small ones would do?

Have I avoided pretension and preciousness?

Now read the paper still one more time, asking these questions:

Are my thoughts logically arranged? Are my sentences clear? Have I actually said what I meant to say? Have I contradicted myself? Have I generalized without supporting evidence? Have I supplied a lot of information without coming to any conclusion?

The third draft should be subjected to these questions also. You should, if you are now satisfied (if you are not, I recommend the salutary experience of a fourth draft), read the paper one more time, looking just for typographical mistakes.

One final test: give the paper to your roommate to read and then make your roommate tell you what you said in it. If what you hear surprises you, well, hopefully there will still be time to start all over again.

THE FRESHMAN STUDIES WRITING PRIZE

Each year a cash prize is offered for the best paper written in Freshman Studies. Papers are chosen by instructors from the various sections and submitted to a committee of the Freshman Studies staff, which makes the final selection. if you have a paper you believe is worthy of consideration (generally a paper that not only has received an A, but is also in some way exemplary of the finest kind of Freshman Studies writing), you may wish to consult with your instructor about having it submitted.