The purpose of this lecture is to give you a set of guidelines for all your written assignments, and I truly do mean ALL written assignments. These are the absolute basics, and no one will do well unless they follow these guidelines.

Formatting.

Academic prose, which is the prose style you must use for every assignment of the semester.

You must immediately review pp. 376-78 of Real Essays with Readings. There you will find examples of a student essay, and on p. 376, the first page of an assignment. You must format your assignments to look the same as those pages. Below I list some noteworthy points that impact the grade a paper can receive:

On p. 376 you will see four lines of text that are located in the upper left hand corner of the page. They include your name, my name, and other information as well. These four lines must be included on every assignment that you turn in, but they should be on only page one of your assignments.

On pp. 376-78 you will see that a document header is located in the upper right hand corner of each page. A document header is required for all your assignments. If you do not know how to create a document header, see the lecture "How to Create a Document Header." Once you create a document header properly it will automatically recreate itself on every

page of your assignment.

Notice that an MLA paper maintains strict double spacing throughout. In other words, you begin typing on the very first blank line of text that is available, and there is never an instance where it is acceptable to use your enter key an extra time, so that you create extra blank lines. Just maintain strict double spacing throughout your entire document.

For all course work use a Times New Roman 12 pt. font, or it will seriously affect your grade. In fact, turn in no course work until you have reviewed the "Formatting of All Course Work" section of the syllabus.

The even easier way to set up all your papers with the proper line spacing and font size and style is to do it once by following the steps below, and then each time you create a new document in MS Word, it will be set correctly in terms of line spacing and font:

Right click anywhere in a blank document. If the words "edit header" appear, try this step again, but click a bit lower down in the document.

Choose "Paragraph."

Locate "Spacing" and change the "Before" and "After" settings to "0 pt"

Change the "Line spacing" to double.

Click the "Default" button at the bottom of the splash box.

You will be asked if you wish to change the default settings. Click "Yes."

Right click a second time in the blank document.

Choose "Font."

Change the font to Times New Roman, and the size to 12 pt.

Click the "Default" button at the bottom of the splash box.

You will be asked if you wish to change the default settings. Click "Yes."

With these settings you will no longer have formatting problems.

However, if you are using Open Office, see the PowerPoint lecture "Setting the Defaults in Open Office," or the text-only version of "Setting the Defaults in Open Office."