What Your Teacher Really Thinks When Reading Your Work
Welcome back to school, kids! In just a few weeks – or even sooner – you will have to return to your favorite pastime in the late evening: writing papers. I struggled with writing as a student, but one day I became an instructor and had to read this nonsense. Damn guys.
Starting paragraphs with quotes means you are intimidated by the idea of writing.
I know there is deep psychological insight here. But if you’re just stringing quotes together – and students who start paragraphs with quotes tend to end with quotes as well and fill them with quotes in the middle – you’re not really writing anything. I understand that this is why you are doing this. But this practice results in an unreadable article and poor judgment, even if the information is accurate and correctly cited.
Why? Well, imagine I asked you to bake a casserole for lunch. But you’re not sure if you can actually do it, so spend your days procrastinating, worrying, and flipping through recipe magazines. And then, on dinner day, you come with a casserole that has a torn magazine page with a photo of a beautiful casserole. The same, right? Nope.
Quoting the definition tells me you don’t understand what it means
If you knew what this means, you would simply explain it in your own words.
If, for some reason, specific words in the definition were so important that you had to quote them, then you would certainly discuss what is so surprising about the choice of words in this source and why you give them such special attention. But no, you just quoted the definition and then moved on to another sentence that had nothing to do with it. I see what you were doing here.
It’s the same with lists. Why are you listing ten diabetes symptoms in the first place, and why the hell do you think you need to put that list in quotation marks? When you find the list in your research papers and you think, “Oh, okay, these are ten words I don’t need to write,” just stop . Pick a few things from this list and use them as examples. Explain what the hell they have to do with everything, and now look at you! You are really writing!
You don’t think I’m going to check your sources, do you?
You can’t write your article from WebMD and Livestrong pages and then list a few dusty books on your art citation page. Yes, I saw the students pull it.
Guys. I also have google.
It only takes a few minutes to find real-world sources, and thanks to the magic of Google Books and Amazon Look Inside, I can confirm that you haven’t gotten any quotes from these books about dead trees. Nice try, but you’re in big trouble right now.
You don’t know the difference between an introduction and a conclusion
In fact, they are different! But I don’t blame you for that. I blame any idiot teacher who told you the format was, “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” This apocryphal quote is a joke about a scientific essay format. It could be a mnemonic, if you suddenly forget, wait, which part will be the first? This does not mean a literal indication.
This is the difference. Your introduction explains the question you are about to ask , including who needs it and why. And then your conclusion is about the answer : you explain how all the materials in the middle of the article fulfilled your promise and answered the question in detail. So, structure is a question, a testimony, an answer. Good? Come up with a catchy mnemonic for this, please.