Some Guidelines for Academic Writing/Common Pitfalls[1]
to Avoid
1. Underline or italicize (be internally consistent) titles of books and journals in the body of your text and in your footnotes/bibliography. Put titles of articles in quotation marks.
If you are unable to decipher bibliographical citations or
describe what you are reading using common scholarly conventions, you need to
learn to do so. Ask your instructor for
help.
Do cite your sources copiously and obsessively even in
“exercises.” The purpose of the exercise
is to practice for the real thing so the real thing becomes, in some ways,
natural and reflexive. Err on the side of too much citation rather than too
little.
2. Don’t use bold, just don’t.
3. Do not use contractions.
(Number 2 on this list is a negative example of all sorts.) There are some exceptions to this but
generally you should avoid contractions in formal writing.
Also: “it’s”= “it is”; “its”
is the possessive of “it.”
4. Figure out which are your independent clauses and which are
your dependent clauses, and do not separate independent clauses with a
comma. This is called a run-on. (See number 2 again.) Use semi-colons if you want the two items
joined closely together, or divide your clauses into two sentences. If you are set on using a comma, then you
will need a conjunction. [2]
5. Do not separate your subject and verb with a comma:
Good: “Adam went to the park.” Bad:
“Adam, went to the park.”
6. Set off phrases with commas when appropriate.
Good: “Adam, the obsessive copy-editor, went to the park.”
Bad: “Adam, the obsessive copy-editor went to the park.”
Ok: “Adam the obsessive copy-editor went to the park.”
This is best when you have been talking about two Adams--one who
is an obsessive copy-editor and one who is not.
7. Think about capitalization and try to be consistent. Pay attention when you read and try to follow recent publications as models.
8. Use third person (“one can see”) rather than second person
(“you can see”) when talking about the abstract or impersonal subject. Using second person makes it sounds like you
are directly addressing your reader (as I am doing here).
9. When summarizing arguments of authors, do not assume that
your reader has read what you have. This
may seem silly when you are writing for an audience of one (your instructor)
but it is good practice to write for an imagined audience of well-educated
readers who are not expert in the subject you are addressing. Most of the time when you write in the “real
world” this will be the case.
10. Avoid stating the
obvious. This will be a judgment call of
course but it is worth thinking about as you can avoid a lot of excess verbiage
this way.
Resources
Writing Center: http://www.wac.pitt.edu