Proseminar (Spring 2010)

Checklist for Essays and Research Papers

General:

1. Include your name

2. Please paginate

3. Include a title; the title should be succinct (no more than one colon allowed) and should effectively sum up any type of point you are trying to make.

4. Double space the main part of your paper.

Citation rules and conventions:

1. For technicalities, the Chicago Manual of Style has a good website:

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

1a. Or if you're using MLA try this:

http://library.williams.edu/citing/styles/mla.php

2. Remember that direct quotations are not the only places that it is imperative to cite your source. If you are taking an idea or concept directly from another source, that must also be cited.

3. Whenever you need to cite a source, it is good practice to acknowledge your source in the body of your prose as well as in a footnote. This frequently helps to avoid any confusion on the reader’s part about who is saying what. This can usually be accomplished by helpful formulas such as “According to Kerman,” or “as Dahlhaus observes in his book Nineteenth-Century Music,” or similar. Please take this last point seriously; although lack of doing so does not necessarily constitute plagiarism, it can make for a much clearer and therefore better paper.

4. Smaller quotations, especially sentence fragments, should be incorporated into the body of your prose. Longer quotations should be set off via indentation and single spaced. Take care that longer quotations don’t become so long that they overwhelm your own voice.

Use of scores and musical examples:

1. Whenever you cite a musical passage in your prose, try to figure out a way to

incorporate a musical example that makes the point clear.

2. Describe the musical example at a level of detail (including measure numbers) that makes your point explicit, and include the example in the body of your prose

3. Label each musical example with a number [Fig. 1 or similar] and a short label, and then use that as a reference in your prose description.

4. Other non text portions of your paper (images, tables) should be treated in a similar fashion

General:

1. Have a point or major claim; this need not be earth-shattering, but it should be something that merits further discussion and that effectively organizes your written work, enabling you to marshal your evidence effectively towards a conclusion

2. Have an opening paragraph (possibly two) that summarizes your paper, ideally hinting at but not entirely giving away your conclusion. In this opening material list the evidence that you will mention to support your conclusion. Having this makes a paper easier to write but, more importantly, it also makes it much easier to read. It is much more considerate to your readers to supply signposts to guide them through your points.

6. With each piece of supporting material, explicitly tie it back to your main point. Again, this is much more considerate to your readers, who cannot read your mind and may not immediately be able to make the same connections that you have (because they have not thought about it for as long).

7. Between each piece of evidence or supporting argument, write something that links one to the other. This need not be a separate paragraph, but may merely be the end of one section and/or the beginning of another.