Tips for writing papers This is a list of tips based on the most common errors I’ve seen in undergraduate papers over the years. Most of these tips also apply to all your other course papers. These are mainly technical rules designed to help you edit a paper before submission, but if you're looking for a guide to structuring a political theory or any sort of textual analysis paper from the ground up, Professor Alison McQueen at Stanford has an excellent one at her website, available here. Also, for guides to mechanics and usage, Purdue OWL has excellent resources.
Spaces after periods People have irrationally strong views on this issue. Here is mine: Do not put two spaces after periods! Back in the age of typewriters, it was necessary to put two spaces after a sentence break. That was because the typewriter could not tell the difference between punctuation in the middle of a sentence and punctuation indicating the end of the sentence, and our eyes require an extra space to understand that the sentence is over. However, word processors automatically insert a space and a half after the end of a sentence. Putting in an extra space manually only creates an unnecessarily long and visually useless gap in the text. Did dead authors write in the past or present tense? Locke definitely wrote the Second Treatise, but he both writes in the Second Treatise that all men are free and equal in the state of nature, and wrote in the Second Treatise that all men are free and equal in the state of nature. When you describe past events, like the writing of a book, use only the past tense. When you describe the content of a text, you can use either past or present to describe its contents (e.g, “The Second Treatise says/said X” or “Aristotle says/said X”), just stay consistent.
Did dead authors write in the past or present tense? Locke definitely wrote the Second Treatise, but he both writes in the Second Treatise that all men are free and equal in the state of nature, and wrote in the Second Treatise that all men are free and equal in the state of nature. When you describe past events, like the writing of a book, use only the past tense. When you describe the content of a text, you can use either past or present to describe its contents (e.g, “The Second Treatise says/said X” or “Aristotle says/said X”), just stay consistent.
Thesaurus abuse Do not use the thesaurus function in MS Word to select synonyms that you think sound more formal or sophisticated than the word you have in mind. If you can’t think of the synonym in your own head – even if you know the definitions of the word the thesaurus offers – you may not have a strong grasp of its usage yet and are likely to use it incorrectly and destroy the meaning of a perfectly good sentence. Err on the side of caution and use the word you know, even if it doesn’t sound fancy. Good writing is clear and straightforward, not ornate and cumbersome.
Sub-point on thesaurus abuse specific to the word "said" Sometimes people come to believe that the word “said” to indicate verbal expression is too childish or basic. These people turn to baroque synonyms like “stated” or “expressed the opinion that.” This is deeply misguided. In all non-fiction writing, “said” is a beautiful and short word that gets the point across. “Stated” is clunky and draws attention to your desperate and unnecessary effort to find a synonym for “said,” and the only people who actually “state” things are criminals and lawyers who “state on the record.” The rest of us just “say.” Want to test my claim? Try narrating a dialogue to your friends in which you replace each “he said/she said” with “he stated/she stated” and see how silly you sound.
Common words that confuse students Affect/effect: Affect is the verb, and a noun meaning how emotional your face looks. It’s probably not the noun you’re looking for. Effect is a noun meaning the result of a cause. Emigrate/immigrate: You emigrate FROM a place, and immigrate TO one. Precedent/precedence: A precedent is the first use of something that creates a rule, like a legal precedent. Precedence is being better than other people, as in, “I take precedence over all the other students applying for this award because I am the best.” Precedence is NOT the plural of precedent. That is just precedents. Tenet/tenant: A tenant lives in a place he does not own. A tenet is a principle, as in, “One of the core tenets of my philosophy of writing is to use words correctly.”
Useless phrases Certain turns of phrase in the English language are widely-used despite having no purpose or even meaning in most cases. Examples of such useless phrases include “in regards to,” “on account of,” “serves as,” and “in order to.” Each of these phrases can be reduced to a single word (“of,” “is”) or can be replaced with a single word (“because”) with no loss of meaning and a great gain in clarity and directness. For example, consider: “Congress passed the War Powers Act in order to restrain the President” vs. “Congress passed the War Powers Act to restrain the President.” See how the second version conveys exactly the same meaning with the same clarity and fewer words? Concision is always better. Useless phrases are signs that you are desperately trying to fill up space.
Citation format For papers which only require you to cite a course reader, my preferred citation format is parenthetical, as follows: (Author, pg#). The page number should come either from the course reader, or the page of the photocopied or real book. So, for example: "Hamilton argues that the United States should foster domestic industry (Hamilton, 297)." For my courses citing texts we used in class, I also do not want or need a separate bibliography page. But this only applies to my courses. In the real world, and for research papers, use these guides: MLA formatting guide Chicago Manual of Style (abridged)
Final thoughts: Are you inadvertently promoting totalitarianism by writing badly? Read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and find out.