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You should get into the habit of putting a cover page on every essay you write. It makes your essay look more professional, and it gives the reader practical information about you without distracting from the essay. If you go to college, they will think you are a hick from the sticks if your essay doesn't have one, and if you're in my class, you will lose points. The following format will serve you well...

• Everything is centered side-to-side.
• Everything is in the same Font and same SIZE (12 pt.) as the rest of the essay.
• Set the format for the page to one-inch margins.
• Title of Essay should be two inches from the top of the paper.
• Your Name and Name of Class should be in the exact middle of the paper, double spaced.
• Instructor's Name, Name of School and Date should be resting on the bottom margin, double spaced.

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The introduction of your essay is the worm-hole that leads your reader from the vast uncharted expanse of Quadrant Ignorance to the warm friendly planet of Understanding. Your reader comes to your essay with no idea about you are going to say--it is your job to guide them smoothly to the specific point you are trying to make. To do this effectively, your introduction needs to do three things:

• Catch the reader's attention and make them want to read more.
• Fill the reader in with enough background information on the topic to give them an idea of where the essay is going.
• Lead smoothly and logically to the thesis statement.

How do you interest your reader?

• Tell them a story. People love to hear stories. A short and interesting anecdote about your topic will hook the reader, especially if you come back to the story in your conclusion.
• Relate a startling fact or statistic. People also love interesting trivia, and if your fact is startling, shocking or unusual, your reader will become interested immediately.
• Ask them a thought-provoking question. Human nature says that when you hear a question, you want to know the answer. If it is a good compelling question, your reader will want to read more to find the answer ("Did you know Emily Dickinson is dead?" is not a very thought-provoking question).
• Share with them a quote from a famous person or a famous piece of writing. If the quote is familiar to the reader, or compelling and thought-provoking, it will give your reader an anchor for what they will learn from your essay.

Regardless of the technique you use, make sure your introduction makes sense and leads LOGICALLY to your thesis statement. The readers attention throughout the essay should be focused on the thesis statement, the claim you are going to prove--you don't want them distracted by an intro that confuses them or leads them in the wrong direction.

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If your essay is a boat, then the thesis statement is the rudder. If your thesis statement is well crafted and strong, your essay will go exactly where you want it to. If your thesis statement is weak and arbitrary, your essay will wander around in circles until you get dizzy and throw up, and then you'll look stupid and no one will want to read your essay.

A strong, well crafted thesis statement includes five elements:

• It tells the reader what the essay is about.
• It makes an objective statement that can be PROVED with facts, quotes and examples.
• It is focused and limited.
• It is a well written, creative and grammatically correct sentence.
• It is the last sentence of the introduction, leading the reader right into the essay.

Read each of the following thesis statements and evaluate them.

1. Who knows if Kurt Vonnegut will ever write again?

• Not a provable statement.
• A thesis should never be a question.

2. There are many great authors alive today. Steven King is not one of them.

• He's not great? He's not an author? He's not alive?
• Nothing provable here.
• Avoid subjective, unprovable words like "great."

3. In this essay, I will examine the life of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner.

• Not a provable statement.
• Provides no direction for the content of the essay to follow.
• Don't tell the reader what you are going to do, just do it.

4. Why do so many people think Emily Dickinson is a hack?

• A good question, but not a good thesis.

5. Edgar Alan Poe, man of suspense and terror.

• It's customary to begin with a complete sentence. This isn't one.

6. William Shakespeare is the most amazing playwright who ever lived.

• Go ahead. Try to prove this one. Of course you'll have to discuss every playwright who ever lived.
• Avoid using subjective words like "amazing."

7. This essay will show you why much of John Steinbeck's work was inspired by his experiences in the Great Depression.

• This one would be just fine if the first six words were chopped off.

8. Even though he didn't experience immediate success, Dr. Seuss became one of the most recognized children's authors in America.

• This one's good. It's provable and shows what the rest of the essay will be about.

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Get out of the habit of thinking that body paragraphs are little trash cans you dump information into. If all I wanted was information on a topic, I would go to the same sources you went to and read the same information. Instead, think of each body paragraph as an argument, a well-developed reason that makes me understand the claim you made in the thesis statement. In fact, every argument needs to tie the reader back directly to that claim.

Suppose you were to write a research paper on an author, and you have claimed she is the most popular writer of the decade. A whole paragraph about where the author grew up, where she went to school, and what her hobbies are will not help me understand why you believe she is the most popular author of the decade. Therefore, your paragraph may be filled with information, but not the right information to support your claim.

The way you tie the reader's attention back to the thesis is by starting each body paragraph with a TOPIC SENTENCE. Much like a thesis, the topic sentence tells the reader where your next argument is going, and how it will relate to your primary claim. For example, "Ivana Notherbagel's popularity as a writer is due in part to her use of very small words and simple sentences." This one sentence tells me two things:

• what the paragraph is going to be about, and
• how it relates to the claim you made in the thesis statement.

I would expect the following paragraph, then, to be filled with specific examples of the author's small words and simple sentences, as well as an explanation of how that makes her popular as a writer. Again, do not try to include every piece of factual information you can possibly find about a topic...

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The conclusion of your essay is an important element, because it helps the reader review what they have learned from your essay. Therefore it must include a restating of your thesis and a summary of your main points. The conclusion also needs to give the reader one more powerful shot, something memorable that they can take with them to chew on.

Keep a couple of things in mind:

• Don't just recopy your thesis statement. Restate it in different words.
• Try to avoid making your summary of main ideas sound like a list. It's boring and ineffective.
• Avoid obvious and unsophisticated endings like "In conclusion..." or "To summarize..."
• If you started your essay with an anecdote or a quote or a startling fact, refer back to it. This ties the whole essay together very nicely for the reader.

Here is one of the best strategies I know of for writing a smooth and effective conclusion. Try it. It really does work:

• When you have written your introduction and all body paragraphs, STOP.
• If you read more comfortably from a paper copy than from a computer, print out what you have written so far.
• Go to the beginning of your essay and read the whole thing, top to bottom. Don't make corrections or stop to add anything, just read.
• The moment you get to the end, immediately start writing your conclusion. With everything you want to say fresh in your head, you will find that your conclusion does what it is supposed to do, and that it flows much more smoothly this way.

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Many students tend to believe that research writing is a fun game in which you copies someone else's published work, and then attempt to fool the reader into thinking the work is yours. Change a few words here, cut out a sentence or two there, and voila! There is a word for this behavior: "plagiarism." Plagiarism is cheating, lying and stealing all in one nice package. Plagiarism is bad.

The way you avoid plagiarism is by simply giving credit to the person who did the work. This is called DOCUMENTATION--you make a reference in the text of your essay that will lead the reader to the Sources Cited page where they can find information about the original source. You owe it to your sources, your readers and yourself to give credit for the ideas you use, unless the ideas are widely accepted as "common knowledge" (the fact that there are 365 days in the year is common knowledge; the fact that Colorado had 306 sunny days in 1991 is not).

A common response I get is, "But that means I'll be documenting just about everything in my essay!" Well, yes. That is why it is called a Documented Research essay. By the way, you might as well tattoo this on your cranium too: there is no such thing as research WITHOUT documentation.

First, let's talk about quoting...

• Direct Quote:
  • Someone's EXACT words, in the EXACT order they were spoken or written.
  • Always set off by quotation marks.
  • Always documented.
  • If the quote is longer than three (3) typed lines, it should be blocked off, single spaced, and the whole block indented ten (10) lines from the left margin. Do NOT use quotation marks on a blocked quote.
  • Direct quotes lend credibility to your essay, but should not be overused.
• Indirect Quote:
  • Someone's exact MEANING, put into your own words.
  • Do NOT use quotation marks.
  • Always documented (yes they were your words, but not your IDEAS, remember?).
  • Not as strong as Direct Quotes--should only be used to simplify complex language.
• Summary or Paraphrase:
  • A brief synopsis of a longer work, like a story or a poem.

Second, how to document...

• We will use the Modern Language Association (MLA) format.
• MLA format uses parentheses around the author's last name and the page number the idea was taken from (Smith 17).
• Do NOT use commas or the word "page" (or pg. or p.). Just the name and number.
• Just put the page number in parentheses if you state the author's name elsewhere in the sentence:
  • According to Smith, people tend to enjoy nudity (17).
• If your source has no author, like an encyclopedia entry for example, use the book title and page:
  • Nudity is defined as "a lack of clothing" (World Book 245).
• Notice that the quotation marks go BEFORE the parentheses, and the punctuation goes AFTER. The only exception is when using a question, in which case the question mark goes inside the quotation marks and before the parentheses.
  • "Why are people so fascinated with nudity?" (Smith 17)
• You do not need to use the author's name in the citation if the previous citation uses the same author. Just use the page number.

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Right off the bat, you should understand the difference between a "Bibliography" and a "Sources Cited" page. A Bibliography is a list of sources you CONSULTED for your essay, some of which you may actually use in your essay and some of which you don't. A Sources Cited page is a list of sources you ACTUALLY USE in your essay. Each entry in a Sources Cited page should be referenced in the essay by in-text documentation.

The basic formula for any Bibliography or Sources Cited entry is: (1) author's name; (2) title and subtitle; and (3) place of publication, name of publisher and date of publication.

• Do NOT number or bullet the entries.
• single-space each entry. double space between entries.
• the first line of each entry should come all the way out to the left margin.
• indent the second and all following lines of each entry five (5) spaces.

Pay close attention to how each entry is punctuated and maintain those details (NOTE: because this is a website and formats differ according to server, each sample entry shown below may not be indented correctly). These are some of the more common types:

BASIC FORMAT FOR A BOOK

Rash, Iva. Billy the Bunny's First Time. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

BOOK WITH MORE THAN ONE AUTHOR

Huggenkis, Amanda, et al. Billy the Bunny Gets Arrested. Boston: Oxford UP, 1988.

BOOK WITH EDITOR

Wheels, Helen, ed. Billy the Bunny Pleads No Contest. Cambridge: Penguin, 1991.

ARTICLE IN A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Coholic, Al. "Billy the Bunny Gets Off on a Technicality." Smithsonian July 1991: 86-87.

ARTICLE IN A REFERENCE BOOK

"Billy the Bunny Makes Connections." Encyclopedia Americana. 1991ed.

CD-ROM ISSUED IN A SINGLE EDITION

"Billy the Bunny's Second Time." The 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. Danbury: Grolier, 1993.

ONLINE MATERIAL FROM A COMPUTER NETWORK

Powernap, Anita. "Billy the Bunny Goes to the Big House." EDUCOM Review 28.3 (1993): n. pag. Online. Internet. 7 Feb. 1993. Available: loser.cic.net.

WWW MATERIAL

Gohome, Ivana. "Billy the Bunny Gets a Girlfriend." Distinguished Artists. http://www.tfaoi.com/distingu/alvarez.htm. March 4, 1999.

AN INTRODUCTION, PREFACE, FOREWORD, OR AFTERWORD

Twit, Ima. Introduction. Billy the Bunny Makes New Friends. By Oliver Friendsmoke. New York: Macmillan, 1987. xv-xxvii.

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To be effective and powerful, all writing should strive for the highest quality in these six areas:

• 1. Ideas -- the heart of the message, the main point or main storyline.
• 2. Organization -- the internal structure.
• 3. Voice -- evidence of the writer behind the message.
• 4. Word Choice -- the vocabulary or terminology.
• 5. Sentence Fluency -- the rhythm and flow, how it plays to the ear.
• 6. Conventions -- the mechanical correctness of the piece--spelling, grammar, etc.

1. Rough Outline [Ideas, Organization]:

This is the first step of the writing process, and its purpose is to determine the direction of your essay. A rough outline consists of a complete Thesis Statement followed by the main topics of each paragraph, organized in the most appropriate order.

2. Detailed Outline [Ideas, Voice]:

When your rough outline is completed and satisfactory, you are ready to write a detailed outline. This consists of a complete introduction (including the Thesis Statement), and complete topic sentences for each main topic. The introduction is where you begin to establish your voice--the perfect balance between the formality of the tone and your personal passion for the topic.

3. Rough Draft #1 [Ideas, Voice, Sentence Fluency]:

The first rough draft is the first version of the complete essay. This draft should focus on developing and refining the ideas and content of your essay, and presenting them in a smoothly flowing way. Here, you make sure all your facts and assertions are accurate, and you work out how each idea or topic will flow into the next, aided by appropriate transitions.

4. Rough Draft #2 [Sentence Fluency, Word Choice]:

The second rough draft is the version in which the small details are worked out--picking just the right words for just the right spots, and maintaining that all-important smoothness. Any factual inaccuracies are eliminated, as well as any bad or feeble logic in your arguments.

5. Final Draft [Conventions]:

As its name would seem to indicate, this is the final, polished, perfect version. There will be no more time for decisions and revisions. Before you print your final draft, you go over it slowly and carefully to make sure everything is right--no spelling or grammar errors, no awkward sentences, no vagueness or confusion about facts or quotes or documentation, no formatting mistakes. You should take great pride in the final draft, as an artist with his or her masterpiece--printed cleanly, stapled carefully, turned in without wrinkles or coffee stains.

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