Guidelines
& restrictions
- Do not discuss the reading, writing assignment, or your essay with anyone.
- You are strongly discouraged from consulting any outside sources except
the reading(s) that you download from this site. Use your time planning, writing,
and revising rather than further researching the topic. The assignment is
designed so that you can write a substantial and appropriate essay without
any additional resources. (If you do consult any outside printed or online
sources, you must acknowledge in your essay each time you use an outside source
of information. In addition, you must either paraphrase the information in
your own words or enclose the language of the outside source in quotation
marks. You may use any standard reference style for acknowledging sources.)
- Plan to spend about three to four hours to produce your writing essay.
Give yourself time to plan the essay, to write it, to revise it for content
and style, and to edit it for grammar, spelling, and mechanics.
- Read the question carefully and review the readings. Identify what the
question is asking you to do. Failure to address the question specifically
will result in a significantly lower score.
- Your finished essay should contain between 500 and 1200 words. Long essays
do not necessarily receive higher scores than short ones. Be concise, but
write enough to answer the question fully, with appropriate evidence, examples,
and details.
- Use ordinary words that accurately express your meaning. Sometimes you
may need to use rare or fairly technical terms, but you should do so only
when those words are necessary.
- We encourage you to compose your essay on a computer. You may use a dictionary,
spell-checker, and writing handbook, but these tools should not substitute
for your own careful reviewing and proofreading. You may also consult a thesaurus
and grammar-checker, but we discourage their use, because a thesaurus may
lead you to substitute synonyms inappropriately and grammar-checkers are often
unreliable.
- Because you will be submitting your essay in "Text Only" or plain
text format, do not use bold or italic fonts, special characters, or underlining.
Indicate underlining or italics by enclosing the words in a pair of double
asterisks (e.g., **Brave New World,** by Aldous Huxley).
Continue on to honor code
