Basic Guidelines in Style and Format for Academic Writing Style: Clarity.

. Always strive for clarity in your writing style because most of the time you will be trying to explain your ideas to someone who does not know what you have in mind. When you are choosing between a simple expression of your ideas and a complicated expression, start with the simple expression. You can always decide later whether you need to make the passage more complex. Do not try to make your writing style more complex than it needs to be. Lots and lots of super-sophisticated vocabulary and elaborate, long sentences will usually obscure your ideas and confuse your readers. Sometimes sophisticated ideas need to be expressed with sophisticated language, but it is often the case that sophisticated ideas benefit more from being expressed in simple and clear language. Always try the path of simplicity and clarity first. Sentence Variety. Simplicity does not mean simple-mindedness. The intelligence of your ideas will come through when you use a variety of sentence lengths. You want to avoid the two extremes: all your sentences are really short; all your sentences are very long. The first extreme makes your prose sound childish and choppy. The other extreme makes your prose sound long-winded and can become difficult to understand. A mixture of long and short sentences with a variety of structures will make your prose easier to read, will allow you to show off your writing style, and will help clarify your ideas. Longer sentences are important for expressing complex ideas and illustrating the connections among them. Shorter sentences help ensure clarity and can emphasize ideas through blunt statements. Grammar Check Warning. The grammar and style checking function on computers is terribly unreliable and even misleading, especially in matters of sentence structure and length. Grammar Check hates long sentences, even if they are well written and grammatically correct. Dont let the software bully you into writing lots of short sentences. You know English better than it does! High versus Low Style. Many student writers believe that they are expected to use the fanciest, most complicated language they can for their academic essays, but this usually results only in confusion and incorrectly used vocabulary. Of course this does not mean that you should confine yourself to the language of a fifth grader, but when you use more elaborate words that you are not in the habit of using, look them up. If you use a thesaurus for finding synonyms, always look up new or unfamiliar words in the dictionary

Comparative Literature, BE145/BE146, Style Guidelines

before you use them in your essay. Synonyms are not perfectly interchangeable.

Comparative Literature, BE145/BE146, Style Guidelines

Many instructors encourage their writers to use more familiar, conversational speech in their writing. This is a useful antidote to the needlessly complicated style described above. However, for academic and professional writing, one should avoid certain features of conversational language, such as obscenity and profanity, religious expressions, sentence fragments, and spelling that reflects casual pronunciation (use would have, not would of; use going to, not gonna). While your essays should not sound exactly like a conversation you would have on the sidewalk, your writing style should still sound like living, natural English. A Helpful Hint. As you draft your essay, read your draft out loud to yourself or a friend. If your English does not make sense or sounds weird, it will probably make that same impression on your reader, even when it is read silently. A really well written essay is a lot like an effective speech: clear and easy to understand, especially when explaining complex ideas. Format: Basic Punctuation and Grammar You will discover that instructors and bosses who are otherwise not concerned with English and who may be poor writers themselves will notice mistakes in these areas. The following is a short list of things to look out for when drafting and proofreading. Sentence fragments Misusing the apostrophe Dropping commas and periods outside of quotation marks Forgetting to put closing quotation marks on a quote Putting a period at the end of a question Spelling errors Missing words and phrases Confusing their/theyre/there, to/too/two, your/youre, whose/whos, then/than, lose/loose, its/its Subject/verb disagreement Careless typos Excessive use of adverbs like these: very, quite, basically, really Excessive capitalization Ending one sentence and beginning the next sentence with the same word or words Proper marking of titles: quotation marks or underlining/italics Repetitious use of a key term or name. Use synonyms for variety!

Comparative Literature, BE145/BE146, Style Guidelines

The Thesis Statement. A thesis statement is necessary for an analytical and persuasive essay. The thesis is a declaration of the main point you are trying to prove. The information and arguments you put into your essay are designed to support your thesis. Dont be worried if you need more than one sentence to explain it. In fact, you will probably want to use a whole paragraph to set up the thesis and the background for your subject. Paragraphs. A paragraph is not just a grab bag of random information and ideas with an indentation at the start. Each paragraph should have its own topic, and the contents should relate to that topic. It will also be useful to explain how those contents relate to the essay thesis, if that is not self-evident. The length of any given paragraph will depend on the contents, but there are some basic guidelines to observe. A paragraph that is more than a whole page in length is too long. This problem usually results from putting too many ideas and too much data under the same heading. The easiest way to remedy this is to divide the paragraph where it moves from one topic to the next. On the other hand, a paragraph that consists of only two sentences, for example, is not really a paragraph. An essay made up of such micro-paragraphs will look choppy, shallow, and poorly organized. Categorizing your information and ideas before drafting will help you avoid this. Conclusions. Many student writers have been taught to finish an essay by summarizing the main points of the argument, and for many instructors this will make an acceptable conclusion. For other assignments, however, you will be called upon to do something more thought-provoking. An above average essay will conclude by trying to answer challenging questions: what are the further implications of the argument you have just made; what new questions are raised by your investigation; what other issues does your topic relate to or cast light on; what are the consequences if the situation you have analyzed persists; what contradictions or paradoxes does your analysis reveal? Instead of merely repeating the main argument at the end of the essay, many writers use the final paragraph to present the thesis as the climax of their paper. Conclusions like these motivate the reader to think further about your personal take on the topic. You are demonstrating that you have thought about this topic in depth.