4) The Presentation (during the last weeks of classes): The presentation should be about ten minutes long, and should be both informative and interesting. Again, it should be designed to communicate the logic of your main idea. It should also explain why your topic is important, i.e., why scholars, including your fellow students, should care about it.
5) The Final Version: (Monday., Dec. 12) This should reflect the best writing and argument you are capable of, and should show that you have thoroughly researched your topic and thoroughly understand it.
Tips for final drafts
1) In this and in all your courses, carefully read and follow instructions, in detail and to the letter. These days, we’re all bombarded with all kinds of complicated stuff all the time: legal boilerplate, advertising, etc. etc. It’s understandably hard to figure out what deserves to be read very carefully and what should just be skimmed or deleted. The stuff your professors give you on syllabi and handouts should be read carefully. It’s not fluff. It is typically very carefully thought out with you in mind. Your professors generally take you seriously, so it’s worth your while to take them seriously. If there’s something that’s unclear or that you don’t understand, don’t just let it breeze by; ask for clarification.
2) If your paper is about science fiction stories -- films, novels, and the like -- you MUST find and write about what is called “scholarly critical literature” on those stories. That means articles and books written by academics about those stories or stories like them. You can agree or disagree with what those academics have written, but you cannot ignore them.
3) When in doubt, cite all ideas and facts that come from other sources (not just direct quotes) in the body of your writing. It should be absolutely, completely clear which ideas are yours alone and which came from somewhere else, and where exactly ideas and facts come from — down to the page. Not doing this can get you accused of plagiarism, which is very serious, but more importantly it’s part of the ethic of scholarly interaction. It’s being a team player in the process of reason and truth-telling.
4) Include a bibliography (or list of works cited) at the end of your paper, which lists all sources alphabetically by first author’s last name. Use a standard system of citation.
5) For journal articles, include author’s name(s), title of the article, title of the journal, date, volume #, issue #, and page numbers. Do NOT include the university, publisher, or online database name; these do not help. If you can’t find a date, do not write N.D.; either there is a date of publication somewhere, or the piece is not peer reviewed and should not be included in your paper. Do not say “web”; that’s pretty self-evident these days. And do not include URLs (web addresses) unless it is short and an open link, that is, not via one of the library databases.
6) For scholarly books, include author’s name(s), title of the book, publisher, and date. In references to books in the body of your paper, always include a page number.
7) For scholarly books that are edited collections, where each chapter is written by a separate author, citations should be for the individual chapters, not for the whole books. Look up how to properly list a chapter in an edited collection in your bibliography.
8) Where do quote marks go? In American usage, the quotation mark goes after the comma at the end of a phrase or after the period at the end of a sentence. (The British do it differently, so you may see it done differently in British publications.) http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html
9) Paragraphs: generally, a paragraph should be shorter than a single page. Paragraphs represent the basic unit of composition: one idea, one paragraph. However, to present a clear, unified train of thought to your readers, you must make sure each paragraph follows the one before it and leads to the one after it through clear, logical transitions. Keep in mind that adequate transitions cannot simply be added to the essay without planning. Without a good reason for the sequence of your paragraphs, no transition will help you.
10) Revise, revise, revise. When working on your final draft, do not just open up your original document, look at my marginal comments and then go through and fix each thing I flagged. My marginal comments point to problems that are typical, but not to all the problems. Read my comments as suggestions for how to improve your writing generally, and then set out to thoroughly revise your paper to make it better. Put yourself into it, and plan to make several passes through the paper, making it slightly better each time you go through it. In some cases, you are best off opening up a completely new, blank document, and writing a completely new version of your paper, and only once you’ve done that go back to your draft and see if there are things that can be brought in by cutting and pasting.