The purpose of this handout is to give you a set of simple guidelines for your three major papers. These are the absolute basics, and strong papers will do a superior job of negotiating these guidelines.

Things to avoid:

• Do not use contractions.
• Do not use first person pronouns such as “I” “me” “my.”
• Do not use second person pronouns such as “you” “your” “yours.”
• Do not engage in personal stories, meaning stories of your own life experiences, or the experiences of friends, family, and so on.
• Do not begin sentences with conjunctions: but, and, or, nor, for, so, yet.
• Do not pose any questions in any assignments. This means, quite literally, not to use questions. Make statements instead.
• Avoid any form of direct address to the reader, such as "think about the fact that . . ."
• Avoid too casual of a prose style, such as sentences that begin with words like "well, sure, now, yes, no."
• Do not use the phrase “a lot,” which can usually be replaced with one of the following words: many, most, much.

On the day that you are directed to bring this handout to class, you should also bring copies of the following handouts to class:

(Students should consider printing these in advance at a campus computer lab)

The Sentence Fragment

Shows you how to identify a sentence fragment.

Sentence Fragment Exercises

A few short exercises that will teach you how to fix sentence fragments.

Independent and Dependent Clauses (definitions)

This handout will help with sentence fragments and run-on sentences.

Run-ons - Comma Splices - Fused Sentences

These are also very common errors.

The Comma Splice

This goes quite well with the handout on independent and dependent clauses.