College Essays. Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well. The Times has recently published a few features that we consider gifts to English teachers everywhere, including a summer “How To” section of the Sunday Book Review, and a new series, called “Draft,” on the art of writing, which features essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others. Below, we collect some “rules” we’ve derived from these features and from other pieces on the Times site, along with links and related activities we hope writers at any stage will find fun or useful — or both. Before you go, please note Rule 10, in which we ask for your writing advice.
Rule 1: Listen to the Voice Inside Your Head In a post for Draft, Verilyn Klinkenborg notes that he is often asked what his “writing process” is. “My answer is simple: I think patiently, trying out sentences in my head,” he writes. Mr. You almost surely have a voice inside your head. Try Mr. Rule 2: Learn From the Masters What are your favorite bits of advice? Rule 3: Read Like Writers Ms. Use Mr. Sense, Sensibility and Sentences: Examining and Writing Memorable Lines. Overview | What can a single sentence accomplish? In this lesson, students share favorite sentences, look closely at what makes them great, paraphrase them, then evaluate the results.
They also work with sentences that are “mini-narratives” and write some of their own, before writing full-fledged short stories based on other students’ sentences. Materials | Student journals, computer with Internet access (optional), index cards. Warm-Up | Several days before teaching this lesson, ask students to spend the next few days on a hunt for excellent sentences, according to their own standards, which they will explain when they share.
They should jot down these sentences in their journals or in a commonplace book. Tell them anything is fair game, including literature and one-liners from movies. On the day you start the lesson, have students each choose one or two of their sentences and write them on the board. Ask: Why does each sentence “work”? How does Ms. Activity | Point out Ms. Open-ended Questions for AP Literature. Open-ended Questions for Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition, 1970-2013, to be used with Independent Reading Project Book Choice List IMPORTANT: ALL of the questions below, implicitly or explicitly, ask you to Show HOW what you’re discussing relates to the work’s over-all significance Avoid mere plot summary 2013.A bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, recounts the psychological or moral development of its protagonist from youth to maturity, when this character recognizes his or her place in the world. 2012. 2011.In a novel by William Styron, a father tells his son that life "is a search for justice.
" 2011B.In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following: At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. 2010, Form B. 2009. 2009, Form B. 2008. 2008, Form B. 2007. 2007, Form B. 2006. 2006, Form B. 2005, Form B. 2003.
What Good Writers Know | Yale College Writing Center. These suggestions combine specific techniques for planning, organizing, and revising your texts with advice about the habits that distinguish experienced from beginning writers. Although they’re written with academic papers in mind, nearly all of these suggestions will also enhance your creative writing and the essays you write for fellowship and graduate school applications.
Begin writing before you’re ready to write a draft. Even students who know about the importance of revising still sometimes wait to write until they have the text planned out in their heads. Instead, use writing throughout the process of working on a text to discover and deepen your ideas. For instance, as soon as you get the assignment: jot down notes about what interests you and what concerns you have. Write while you’re doing the reading and initial research: how does this reading differ from others you’ve looked at? Get feedback on work in progress. Make sure your thesis has news in it. Emulate good writing. Using Sources | Yale College Writing Center.
When you cite a source, you show how your voice enters into an intellectual conversation and you demonstrate your link to the community within which you work. Working with sources can inspire your own ideas and enrich them, and your citation of these sources is the visible trace of that debt.Why Cite? When you cite a source, you show how your voice enters into an intellectual conversation and you demonstrate your link to the community within which you work. Working with sources can inspire your own ideas and enrich them, and your citation of these sources is the visible trace of that debt.
To Become a More Mature Thinker When writing an essay, it can sometimes feel as if you’re including quotations merely to back up your argument or to fulfill a requirement to use a certain number of sources. Each of these motives can lead you to drop sources into a pre-set argument, with little real interplay between the sources’ ideas and your own. To Give Credit Where It’s Due. What am I supposed to do with all these sources? « The Barker Underground. By Sophia Angelis It’s research paper season again. We see a lot of students at the Writing Center at this time of year who have questions about how to make sources work in their research papers.
The scenario often looks like this: You’ve picked your topic for your research paper and you’ve collected all your sources. Maybe you have a novel or two, a scholarly article, a book of history, a biography of an author. Now you have to put your paper together, and you’re wondering what you’re supposed to do with all of those sources. My Expos preceptor gave me some excellent advice that I still remember whenever I write a research paper. So how do you do that? Here are five ways you can join the conversation: Agree: You can agree with what one of your sources has already said. Extend: Your second option is to extend an argument that someone has already made. Complicate: Your third option is to complicate someone else’s argument. Disagree: This one’s pretty straightforward. Like this: The Four Parts of a Lens Essay Argument « The Barker Underground. By Emily Hogin One of the most common prompts I see at the Writing Center is the “lens essay.”
A lens essay brings two texts in dialogue with one another in a very particular way. It asks you to use Text B – the lens – to illuminate something you didn’t already know about Text A. How Not to Argue a Lens Essay A lens essay is not a list of differences and similarities between two texts. Even though one is philosophy and the other is a novel, both Text A and Text B talk about the imagination. This first thesis statement notes a similarity between the two texts that will likely be obvious to readers of the text. While both Text A and Text B argue that human nature is unchangeable, Text A asserts that humans are inherently good and Text B asserts that humans are inherently bad. This thesis makes a claim about each text but doesn’t say anything about them in relation to each other.
Here is an illustration of what an effective lens essay will look like: (1) I read Text A (2) I read Text B (my lens) APA Formatting and Style Guide. Summary: APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (6th ed., 2nd printing). Contributors: Joshua M. Please use the example at the bottom of this page to cite the Purdue OWL in APA. To see a side-by-side comparison of the three most widely used citation styles, including a chart of all APA citation guidelines, see the Citation Style Chart.
You can also watch our APA vidcast series on the Purdue OWL YouTube Channel. General APA Guidelines Your essay should be typed and double-spaced on standard-sized paper (8.5" x 11"), with 1" margins on all sides. Major Paper Sections Title Page Running head: TITLE OF YOUR PAPER. APA format citation generator for books. Overview of this guide: This page provides you with an overview of APA format.
Included is information about referencing, various citation formats with examples for each source type, and other helpful information. If you’re looking for MLA format, check out the Citation Machine MLA Guide. Also, visit the Citation Machine homepage to use the APA formatter, which is an APA citation generator, and to see more styles. Being responsible while researching When you’re writing a research paper or creating a research project, you will probably use another individual’s work to help develop your own assignment. Plagiarism? The word plagiarism is derived from the Latin word, plagiare, which means “to kidnap.” All about citations & references Citations and references should be included anytime you use another individual’s work in your own assignment. APA style citations are added in the body of a research paper or project and references are added to the last page. Here’s an acceptable option: and Example: