By: Arthur Hall
Submitted: 2011-02-12 07:35:17 | Word Count: 527
This is not a list that is being provided to you to make your life difficult. However, if you go through the comments here your term papers would have a better chance of being mistaken as being professionally written research papers, and that is what every one of you would want.
Quotes
When you write a paper related to literature, current events, history, and many other fields, direct quotes may be important to be mentioned for a full discussion on any subject. In science, very rarely there is any call for a direct quote. On papers of students, direct quotes are not at all required to be included, except for the case where a student fails to understand the concept and might use the quote to have a better understanding. However, this doesn't go over that well with the grader. As per the rule, never use a direct quote in a scholarly technical paper. It's your own thoughts that should be expressed, not those of someone else's.
Verb tense
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It is always a bad idea to not check your work before sending it in. Using wrong verb tense is always irritating to read and it reflects poor writing skills of the student. At worst, the reader might get confused as to what facts were already known to him and what facts were newly discovered in the actual study that you have done. The tenses are the most important tool that analyses what you had already done distinguishing from what you actually found out while doing the study. You should always use past tense to describe events that have already happened. Such as the events that include procedures, that you have conducted and the results that you observed. Use present tenses to describe the generally accepted facts.
The references to the results of a specific study should also be written in past tense.
Imagine the difficulty a non-native speaker would face who learns to speak proper English and then reads local rags or tries to make the sense out of the reports by "talking heads" on the new shows.
Proofread!
Incomplete sentences, obvious spelling mistakes, redundant phrases, and any other symptoms of a hurriedly written paper can cost you big time. Please take time in writing your paper and begin to work on it at an early stage so that you do have time to proofread it in the end. Always remember to check the spellings of scientific names, the names of people, names of compounds, etc. Grammatical errors and any spelling mistakes can be embarrassing at any stage of writing. However, as many different terms have similar names, a spelling error can always result in a completely incorrect statement that might not even make sense to the reader.
Before you print your paper, make sure you don't split up the table's more than one page, the headings are not "orphaned", you do not submit the pages out of sequence, etc. Always remember, someone will have to read this thing! If the reader is a reviewer or an editor, you might just get away a rejection notice because you were too sloppy at some instances if not throughout.
