Tips on writing a good paper, with thanks to Jim Gelvin and others from whom many of these ideas have come

1. General points
   1. How you write counts, both for communication and for your grade. Only a well-written paper will get an "A."
   2. While there are many ways to write, unless you are an accomplished writer, I strongly encourage you to aim for clarity.
   3. Generally, academic papers, unless otherwise noted, will make an argument. You do this by stating, usually quite explicitly, what you are arguing, as in: Thus, while Ibn X may appear to be more "factual," in his presentation of the facts, Abu Y is more authoritative in that he presents his facts in way that is considerably more meaningful." This argument may be right or wrong, but it is an argument.
   4. It is often in your best interest to write simple declarative sentences, rather than long, convoluted and obtuse sentences that lose the reader in details. Your younger brother or sister (or some such) should be able to read your paper and get the gist of what you are doing. If your sentences are too long and unclear, this won't be possible.
   5. Avoid chattiness and verbosity. This often shows in long introductory paragraphs that have nothing to do with the specific topic at hand. Conclusions often suffer from this as well. My response as a reader is to groan aloud and debate whether or not to continue. You are wasting my time, and this is not something to make a habit of doing to your readers! Use your introduction to get into the material. You can certainly start from the general to the specific, but it has to be done quickly and neatly.
   6. Be especially careful not to use impressive-sounding words that you don't really know well. Often, they mean something other than what we think. Colin Powell recently said that he had a wonderful, fulsome, conversation with the President. This wasn't pomposity, but it was certainly using a word incorrectly because it sounded somehow right. Click on the link to see just how wrong the Secretary was.
   7. Try to think clear thoughts, and, when you are done, outline your argument, so that you know very well what you set out to do, and then how you went about doing it. If you can't reduce your paper to a very brief outline, you've done something wrong and it will be reflected in my confusion and in your grade!
   8. Use hyphens, as in #F above, to indicate that two words go together as a single adjective for a following noun. Thus, I used "impressive-sounding words" because the two hyphenated words are in fact one adjective describing "words." If, on the other hand, you are complimenting your friend's band's performance, you can say, "wow, that was impressive sounding" without a hyphen, because in this case those two words are not describing a following noun.
2. Pet peeves:
   1. Apostraphes: Apostraphes are very commonly misused. Apostraphes perform two functions in English. One is to indicate possession, as in, "I read Renick's book over the summer." Another, very inelegant, way to say this same thing is, "I read the book of Tim Renick over the summer." The other use is to indicate a contraction between two words, as in "don't" which consists of the two words "do" and "not." This will be fairly obvious. Why are there so many problems, then? First, one of the most common problems is with the difference between "its" and "it's". This is genuinely a bit hard. However, you can solve all of your doubts on this by following the principle that only the contraction "it is" is marked by an apostraphe as in "it's a pleasure to meet you." There is no apostraphe in, "The United States moved its forces north into Baghdad over the weekend." Secondly, people mistakenly use apostraphes in plurals. We do not ever, no, not ever, use an apostraphe to indicate plurals.
   
   
   2. When you are quoting from another source for more than 5 five typed lines, you must indent and single space the quoted material. You do not, however, use quote marks to set off this form of quotation.
      
   3. different from/other than: this is a bit of a pedantic point, and one where usage has now probably changed permanently, but the proper usage is "different from" and "other than". In common parlance, we say "different than," and this is acceptable now, but I prefer that you use different with from, e.g., "Buddhism is different from Hinduism in its understanding of atman," or, verbally, you could say, "Buddhism differs from Hinduism in its understanding of atman."
   
   
   4. "Would of" v. "would have": this happens all the time, because we say, in spoken English, "I wooduv told him..." Of course, this should be "would have," not "would of," but it is a natural mistake to make. No longer...
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Resources
1. writing tips from Duncan MacRae(pdf)