EDITING CHECKLIST FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS

Here is a list of subtle mistakes many Grinnell students make in their writing.  Most of these errors are relatively trivial, but educated readers tend to notice such lapses and to think less well of erring writers.  You can do yourself a favor by learning to recognize and avoid these errors. 

PUNCTUATION PROBLEMS

P1. COMMA BETWEEN SUBJECT AND VERB
P2. COMMAS WITH NONRESTRICTIVE CLAUSES
P3. SEMICOLON, DASH, AND COLON
P4. COMMA SPLICES AND "HOWEVER" OR "THEREFORE"
P5. PLACING THE APOSTROPHE
P6. USING A SLASH
P7. HYPHENS WITH COMPOUND ADJECTIVES
P8. USING ELLIPSES

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SYNTAX (Arrangement of words in sentences)

S1. DANGLING MODIFIERS
S2. WORDINESS—"IT IS" OR "THERE ARE"
S3. WORDINESS—EMBEDDED CLAUSES
S4. UNCLEAR REFERENT FOR "THIS" OR "THAT"
S5. USING "ACTIVE SUBJECTS" WITH ACTIVE VERBS

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DICTION (Selection and use of words)

D1. AFFECT/EFFECT
D2. COMPRISE
D3. A LOT
D4. NUMBERS IN TEXT
D5. EVERYDAY/EVERY DAY
D6. FEEL
D7. IMPACT
D8. AMOUNT/NUMBER and LESS/FEWER

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CITATION DIFFICULTIES

C1. INCLUDING NAMES (OR NOT) IN IN-TEXT CITATIONS
C2. PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS
C3. USING ITALICS WITH TITLES
C4. HANGING INDENTATION

PUNCTUATION PROBLEMS

P1. COMMA BETWEEN SUBJECT AND VERB
Never put just ONE comma between the subject and verb of a sentence.  Two commas, to set off an inserted phrase like this one, are acceptable.  Be especially careful when one subject has two verbs not to put a comma before the second verb.  If you have used a long and complicated phrase as the subject of your sentence and are then tempted to set the phrase off with a comma, you should instead rewrite the sentence to make it less complicated. 

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P2. COMMAS WITH NONRESTRICTIVE CLAUSES
Nonrestrictive clauses are set off from the rest of the sentence by commas, but restrictive clauses are not.  How do you tell the difference between a restrictive and a nonrestrictive clause?  Either one may be a "relative clause" and thus begin with "who" or "which," but the restrictive clause restricts the meaning of the noun it modifies in order to tell the reader just which one of a number of possibilities you are talking about.  "The person who stole my Walkman should be drawn and quartered!"  Here the restrictive clause ("who stole my Walkman") tells exactly which person deserves torture.  A nonrestrictive clause gives some additional and perhaps interesting information about the noun it modifies but is not essential to the meaning of the noun.  "Kleptomaniacs, who are all too common around here, must be watched every moment."  Note the commas around the nonrestrictive clause.  If you were to cut out the nonrestrictive clause, the sentence would still make sense.

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P3. SEMICOLON, DASH, AND COLON
The semicolon is a tricky little punctuation mark with two uses; it can be a weak period or a strong comma.  Used as a weak period, it separates two independent clauses, that is, two groups of words that could stand alone as sentences.  The semicolon, in place of the period, emphasizes the close connection between the clauses.  A semicolon acting as a strong comma separates the items of a list which includes phrases that contain internal commas.  For example, you might write a story about Spot, a dog; Puff, a cat; and Hercules, a ten-ton spider.  If you just want to set off a phrase from the rest of the sentence, do not use a semicolon; use a dash--like this.  Note that the dash in type script is represented by two hyphens with no spaces.  Some computer fonts now provide dashes—like these—which are twice the length of a hyphen.  You should feel free to use them if your font provides them, again without  any spaces before or after.  While the dash is mainly used in informal writing, in formal texts writers prefer a more formal punctuation mark:  the colon.  Its usual purpose is to separate an item or list of items from the rest of the sentence, with the part before the colon pointing to the item or list which follows.  The trickiest thing about colons is that they only go at the ends of independent clauses.  In other words, you should insert a colon in text only if you could end the sentence with a period at the same spot.  Another tricky thing is that colons, like periods, should be followed by two spaces, not one.

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P4. COMMA SPLICES AND "HOWEVER" OR "THEREFORE"
"However" and words like it are not conjunctions; they cannot be used to link two independent clauses (groups of words that could stand on their own as complete sentences).  Here are some fix-ups:  1) replace the comma splice with a period and start a new sentence with "however" or another conjunctive adverb near the beginning; 2) insert a semicolon between the two clauses; or 3) use an acceptable conjunction (and, but, or yet).

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P5. PLACING THE APOSTROPHE
In most cases the apostrophe indicates letters left out.  The possessive form, apostrophe s, is a shortened version of the Middle English use of "his" to indicate possession; "John his house" became "John's house" when the "hi" was dropped.  Eventually that same "'s" came to be used with female nouns and plural nouns as well.  Possessive pronouns, of course, have never needed an apostrophe.  Thus, the possessive pronoun "its" has no apostrophe; the word "it's" stands for "it is" not "it his" (?!).  The other use of the apostrophe is in forming the plurals of single letters, abbreviations, or numbers written as numerals.  "Ph.D.'s always get A's on tests, unless temperatures are in the 90's."  One common exception to this second rule is that most modern writers omit the apostrophe in referring to decades.  "College students in the 1960s were more radical than students of the '90s."  Note that the apostrophe in "'90s" comes at the beginning and indicates letters (numerals) left out.

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P6. USING A SLASH
The slash, or "virgule" as grammarians call it, is unfriendly to readers.  I counsel students to avoid slashes if possible in text, unless they're quoting lines of poetry.  Slashes slow the reader down and make your text look like a questionnaire or (horrors!) a government document.  In our PC age, many writers are tempted to make a statement by using "he/she" or the like.  A better way to get around the awkwardness of having to refer to unspecified individuals by gender is to make your subjects plural.  Or else you can pick a gender arbitrarily the first time you refer to an unspecified individual and then switch the next time.

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P7. HYPHENS WITH COMPOUND ADJECTIVES
When you string together two or more words to make a longer-than-usual adjective, you should connect the words with hyphens (as above).

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P8. USING ELLIPSES
Ellipses are the three little dots for words left out of a quotation.  Ordinarily, ellipses are typed as space-dot-space-dot-space-dot-space, like so:  "My quotation . . . left something out."  Don't run the dots all together, and don't use the three-dots-crushed-together character from some computer fonts.  If the phrases you quote are from two different sentences, use four dots instead of three to warn the reader that the omitted material includes a period. 

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SYNTAX (Arrangement of words in sentences)

S1. DANGLING MODIFIERS
A participle is an "ing" or "ed" form of a verb that acts as an adjective or, in other words, modifies a noun.  Sometimes the participle is the first word of a whole phrase that modifies a noun.  The tricky thing about participles (and adjectival phrases in general) is that they need to be placed in the sentence as closely as possible to the noun they modify.  If the noun being modified is left out of the sentence, or if another noun interposes between the participle and its noun, the sentence can be ambiguous and often very funny:  "Walking down the street, a house appeared."  "Coming into the kitchen in the morning, breakfast was the first thing seen by my father, cooked by my mother, sitting on the table."  (This second example was crafted by a Grinnell student several years ago.)

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S2. WORDINESS--"IT IS" OR "THERE ARE"
Sentence starting with "It is . . . " or "There are. . . ." tend to be wordy.  One can almost always find a way to rewrite such sentences more clearly using about half as many words.  For instance, "It is all too commonly seen that there are a wide variety of processes by which certain groups adjust and coordinate their members' behavior . . ." becomes "Groups find many ways to change their members' behavior."

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S3. WORDINESS—EMBEDDED CLAUSES
To make your writing more concise, get rid of little clauses—noun-verb or pronoun-verb combinations—embedded in longer sentences.  For instance, you can rewrite "The sentences which he wrote were ones that were pretty hard to read." as "His sentences were hard to read."  The tell-tale words "which" or "that" often introduce embedded clauses. 

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S4. UNCLEAR REFERENT FOR "THIS" OR "THAT"
Starting a sentence with the word "this" or "that" used as a pronoun often forces the reader to stop and backtrack to see what exactly in the previous sentence you are referring to. While you as the writer know exactly what you're talking about, the reader may have to guess. To avoid any confusion, turn the "this" or "that" into an adjective. In other words, insert a word after the "this" or "that" to indicate your meaning more precisely. For example, instead of saying, "This is easy," say, "This change is easy."

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S5. USING “ACTIVE SUBJECTS” WITH ACTIVE VERBS
English teachers have often told you, no doubt, that verbs in the active voice are stronger than passive verbs and that you can make your prose more vigorous by using active verbs. While that’s great advice, you also need to pay attention to the subjects of your sentences if you want your prose to be vigorous.  Active verbs do their best work with active subjects, that is, with subjects actually capable of performing the action of the verb.  Human subjects are particularly good for this purpose.  Many times, students start their sentences with abstract, inanimate subjects—things or concepts or possibly even vague ideas that are no more capable of performing a vigorous action than a bowl of spaghetti would be.  (Unless you threw it at somebody, I guess!)  Especially when you’re writing about the social world, people are the actors, and they should get pride of place as the subjects of your sentences. 

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DICTION (Selection and use of words)

D1. AFFECT/EFFECT
"Affect" is almost always the verb and "effect" the noun.  "X affects Y.  X has an effect on Y."  Rarely, "effect" is a verb meaning accomplish—"X effects a change in Y."  Even more rarely, "affect" is used as a noun, psychological jargon for emotion—"In response to the intense electrical stimulation the subject displayed an elevated level of affect."  (Translation, "He got mad when we shocked him.")  As a synonym for emotion, "affect" has the same root as the word, "affection."

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D2. COMPRISE
The whole comprises the parts, not vice versa.  "Grinnell College comprises North Campus, East Campus and South Campus."  Do not use "comprise" as a synonym for "compose" or "constitute."  You probably have seen the opposite usage in print—where the parts are said to comprise the whole—so the correct usage, as the dictionary defines it, may sound a little strange. 

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D3. A LOT
In most academic contexts the slang phrase, "a lot," is too informal.  Avoid it!  Writers who go so far as to make it all one word—"alot"—are betraying ignorance.  There is an English word "allot" (with two l's), but it means "to distribute or parcel out."

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D4. NUMBERS IN TEXT
Numbers under twelve, like "three" or "seven" should be spelled out in text.  Use numerals for large numbers, like "17" or "1,368,432."  Note the following exceptions, however.  Use numerals for small numbers you compare to larger ones:  "Only 5 percent of elderly people now live in nursing homes, although 40 percent will spend some time there before they die."  Write out any number that begins a sentence:  "Sixty-one percent of males but just 42 percent of females voted Republican."

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D5. EVERYDAY/EVERY DAY
Everyday is an adjective that describes a person or thing, not an adverb that tells us when things happen.  If you want to designate a daily occurrence, you need two words:  every and day.  “I wear my everyday clothes every day and my fancy clothes on special occasions.”  

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D6. FEEL
In ordinary speech, we often use the verb feel when we don’t want to be too definite about what we’re saying:  “I feel something or other about this complicated thing I’m talking about that I don’t really understand very well, etc., etc., so don’t quote me, but . . .”  In academic prose, such diffidence strikes entirely the wrong note.  Your object is to convince your readers that you actually do know what you’re talking about.  My advice is to avoid feel entirely unless you are speaking of either physical sensations or matters of feeling and emotion.  By all means, tell us what you are feeling if it’s relevant to your argument, but don’t use that word as a substitute for “think” or “argue.”

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D7. IMPACT
Writing-style curmudgeons, and I guess I’m one of them, often object to the use of impact as a verb, because they associate it with the speech of government bureaucrats, advertising executives, and other distasteful sorts of characters.  Personally, seeing impact as a verb always makes me think of impacted wisdom teeth, and then my painful memories of the dentist’s chair seem to transfer themselves to the paragraph I’m reading.  . .  Anyhow, I’d avoid using impact as a verb, unless you want to have a painful impact on some readers.

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D8. AMOUNT/NUMBER and LESS/FEWER
All these words refer to quantities, but in choosing between them you need to make a distinction between things that can be counted and things that can’t.  If the thing you're talking about comes in countable units, use "number" or "fewer."  "The number of m&m's you gave me is fewer than you gave my sister.  No fair!"  If the thing referred to is an infinitely divisible substance, use "amount" or "less."  "And the amount of marshmallow fluff I got was less, too.  I'm telling Mom."  If the thing might be countable in principle, but not for practical purposes, like the hairs on your head or the sand on a beach, just use "amount" or "less."  For the mathematically inclined, we make a similar distinction between discrete and continuous variables.

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CITATION DIFFICULTIES

C1. INCLUDING NAMES (OR NOT) IN IN-TEXT CITATIONS
In all of the most commonly used forms of in-text citation, a complete citation consists of (at least) an author’s last name together with the page number from which you have drawn the quotation or other information.  Some citation forms (like that of the American Sociological Association) also require you to include the year of publication of the book or article from which you have drawn the information.  (Titles of books and articles are almost always omitted from citations, because the idea of a citation is to provide the minimum amount of information necessary to allow the reader to find the correct source in the reference list at the end of your paper, where the title and all the reset of the bibliographic information will, of course, be displayed.)  The components of the citation—the author’s name and the page number (as well as the date, if necessary)—are usually enclosed in a set of parentheses in the text following the quotations or ideas that you have drawn from that source and page, like this:  (Name, page) or (Name date:page).  However, if the author’s name already appears in your text, you should not repeat the name in the citation.  I like to think of the parentheses around the citation as a kind of fence.  Of the various components of the citation fenced in by the parentheses, the author is the only one capable of jumping fences.  And if the author has jumped over the fence into the text, she or he will no longer be found inside the parentheses.  (It has a screwy kind of logic, right?)  By putting the author’s name into your text at the start of the material drawn from a source, together with the citation at the end of it, you can bracket the material drawn from that source and so help readers to separate your voice from that of your sources, which is the whole point of giving citations. 

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C2. PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS
When information that you use in your paper has come from your conversation with another person, you can’t just stick that person’s name into your reference list along with sources like books and articles.  Reference lists are only for publicly accessible sources that your readers might be able to find in a library or on the Internet.  When your source is a private conversation with or letter from another person, it’s customary to use a footnote to the text rather than an in-text citation or reference-list entry.  So a footnote citing your personal interview with President Bush might look something like this:  1. George W. Bush, telephone conversation with author, April 1, 2004.

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C3. USING ITALICS WITH TITLES
Many students are confused about when to use italics for a title, and when to use quotation marks.  The general rule is that italics are “stronger” than quotation marks, and when a titled work stands on its own, you put the title in italics.  When the work is just part of a larger work, its title only gets quotation marks.  Thus, titles of books, plays, magazines, newspapers, CD’s, TV shows, and movies, are all customarily italicized.  Titles of stories or chapters within books, articles from magazines or newspapers, songs from CD’s, and episodes from TV shows get put in quotes. 

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C4. HANGING INDENTATIONS
Many citation styles call for hanging indentations of entries in reference or works-cited lists.  In other words, each entry is a separate paragraph, and rather than beginning the first line of the paragraph to the right, you keep the first line of the paragraph at the left margin of the page and move the beginning of each subsequent line in the paragraph to the right.  If you try to perform this feat with line-feeds and tabs, your page is likely to come out looking pretty funny.  Most word processing programs make it easy to set up a hanging indentation, often just by sliding around the little indicators on a ruler at the top of the page.  In Microsoft Word, you can also get a hanging indentation by opening up a dialogue box for “Format Paragraph,” looking under “Indentation” for “Special,” and selecting “Hanging.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several of the dogmatic statements and some of the examples I use here are adapted from The Borzoi Handbook for Writers, by Frederick Crews and Sandra Schor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). I also consulted the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1981) and The College Writer's Reference, by Toby Fulwiler, Alan R. Hayakawa, and Cheryl Kupper (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1996). Finally, I'm grateful to Judy Hunter and Mathilda Liberman for comments on earlier versions of these notes, but they are in no way responsible for any errors that remain.