The PowerPapers.com Guide to Understanding Your Grader’s Comments.

1. Citations

APA: Improving your in-text citations. Improving your reference list. Review the list on the left of the Web page for more details.

MLA: Improving your in-text citations. Improving your works cited list. Review the list on the left of the Web page for more details.

Turabian: The full guide has to be paid for. As of this post, the seventh edition from 2007 is the most recent. This is adequate guide basic reference and citations.

Harvard: This has two versions, in-text and footnote (sometimes called Oxford). This is a good, basic, guide to Harvard in-text citations and reference list. This is a good guide to the Harvard footnote and bibliography reference system, aka Oxford.

2. Bias

People often want to defend having writing bias into a paper by saying that it is their opinion. You are legally welcome to your opinion, but in an academic paper, your opinion needs to 1) be asked for by the grader and 2) backed up by relevant facts.

What is a relevant fact? If your paper is that there is never a good reason for abortion, using the personal story of one woman is not a reasonable stand-in for the experiences of the millions of women who had an abortion. It is true, it is a fact, but it is also bias because you are literally using one woman to explain the behaviors and experiences of all women who have abortions.

Any time you find yourself wanting to say something about a large group of people and use a single person or a few people as your evidence, that is bias. You are free to be a biased person, we all are, but it is not acceptable academic work. Here are some articles to help you avoid bias.

If you tend to think of bias as natural or that avoiding it is too precious, it’s time to get real about being a writer or an academic. If your ideas are good, they will have real support. If you cannot find support for your ideas, then admit that and describe why that might be. If all you have are defensive generalizations (they cannot handle the truth; I am the only who can see), skip them, you will look foolish and emotional. Include that there is little research to back up your opinions and suggest what kind of research might be done.

Here is some information on bias basics.

3. Generalizations

Using your writing program’s Find feature is a big help here. It is not a simple find-and-replace, though. Use the Find feature to see flaws in your writing, not just your choice. Look for the use of terms like all, never, always, everyone, forever, since the beginning of time, etc., and then verify whether they are correct (almost always they are not), but also check to see if you are engaging in emotional and hyperbolic writing that undercuts your point. This kind of writing can feel good, it can feel “passionate”, but it is bad writing, however much fun it can be.