An incomplete list of high school habits to avoid
Contributed by David Mansfield on 21 September 2005 at 23:56The writing experience with which most people arrive at Case comes mostly from high school. Unfortunately, high school English teachers most often focus thier composition lessons on how to write specifically for high school. The hard fast rules they offer frequently fail to hold up to the increased scrutiny of the college environment.
Here are two habits I've seen from writers that simply will not work in a college environment:
The 5-paragraph format: It remains useful as a way to think about organizing a paper, but so many of its tenets don't work for a paper over two pages or so. For example, most of the time, you will not have three supporting points for your thesis. You will have two sometimes, more often four or five in a long research paper. And the support for each subordinate point will vary in length, so breaking the paper into even sections becomes infeasible.
Likewise, in longer papers, the introduction can be longer than a single paragraph. Crazy, you say? I thought so, too, because I was thinking like a sophomore in high school. Rules are different here.
Restating the thesis, word-for-word, in the conclusion: Wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't like to offer categorical stands such as this one, but seriously, I cannot imagine a professor tolerating this unless he or she just doesn't notice.
Restating your thesis in the conclusion at all can be a risky proposition; after all, the thesis is meant to introduce your argument, not conclude it. Simply pasting it from one section to another just heightens the risk by adding repetition to an already volatile and toxic brew.
Of course other negative habits exist, and I hope my fellow Crew members (basically Nicole for blog purposes) will contribute their own lists.