Common Mistakes

Run-on sentences: Billy went to the grocery store and he bought milk. – You have to have a comma after “store” because you have two independent clauses. They can only be held together by a comma and coordinating conjunction or a semi-colon. Introductory information and appositives: Billy my brother went to the store. – “my brother” is an appositive, and must be set off in commas. According to World Book Encyclopedia F. Scott Fitzgerald was depressed. – You have to put a comma after that introductory material.

Punctuation of Titles - Any time you use the title of a work in your paper, it must have the correct punctuation. Novels, books, movies, and journal titles are always italicized. Poems, articles and short stories are always put in quotation marks. Parenthetical Citations – If you have an author’s name for the work you’re citing, you always use it in the parenthetical citation! Only use the title of the work if you don’t know who wrote the source. Parenthetical Citations – Do not put the author’s name and source title in the parenthetical unless you have two sources by the same author.

If it is a print source, always put the page number. The only reason a parenthetical citation should not include a page number is if it is a website source. Punctuation always goes after the parenthetical citation unless you are citing a long quote. You do not need more than 2 long quotes in a five page paper. You should not have more than 5 quotes total! Anything you did not know before you started researching or reading the primary source must have a parenthetical citation!!! Otherwise, you are committing plagiarism. That will result in an immediate grade of “0!”

On your works cited page, you need to cite your primary source with the author’s name in the citation. It is a poem, not a website. All quotes must be followed by a parenthetical citation.

1 inch margins! Header: Last name and page number Do not hit the space bar more than once after a sentence. Long quotes are indented twice. Double spacing – too big or too small Font must be 12 pt! I don’t care if you have a mac and can’t figure it out – Fix it!

Subject verb agreement – Subject and verb must agree in number. Pronoun antecedent agreement – number and gender! Sentence fragments – make sure it’s a complete sentence. No personal pronouns!!! No first person!!! No contractions…I don’t like them…