Mark R. Hatlie

Standard Policies and Advice on Research Papers

In cases where the terms described here vary from those described in the course syllabus, the course syllabus has priority. That will rarely be the case, however.

My Grading Rubric for UMUC

(The grading rubric for APUS classes is in the online classroom.)

When I grade a research paper, I divide the grade into three basic parts. The first part is worth 30% and it covers the formalities: Is there a complete title page? Is there a bibliography? Is the formatting reasonable? The greatest weight here is on the citations. Are there citations? Are the citations correct in form? Are the sources cited scholarly in nature? You can learn more about these criteria below.

Then, while reading the paper, I make note of the writing style, spelling and grammar. That is also worth 20%. I offer some tips on how to improve your writing below.

50% of your final grade on the paper is the "whole thing". Is the student following the assignment? Has he or she presented an argument, good evidence, and a conclusion in a coherent fashion? Is it appropriate for the class, accurate, and scholarly? Has the student used good sources to piece together something original? Is it interesting? Do I learn from it? Would this student's fellow students learn from it and be interested in it?

Note that failure to properly cite will have a dramatic effect on the grade in that it will kill points in two of the three categories.

Each of these three pieces of the grade, especially the last and most important, contains a large dose of subjectivitiy. That is hardly to be avoided in a writing assignment. It is, in the end, the instructor' call. But hopefully, the descriptions on this page will give students a better handle on what is expected.

Choosing a Topic

The topic of a good term paper is a research question or is centered on a thesis statement. That means that the paper is not just a collection of information about a "topic," but an argument. You seek to answer a question or prove or disprove a claim about the matter at hand. A good test to see whether you have a clearly formulated program of research (a research question or thesis statement), is to say the following: "In my paper, I argue that..." If you can't finish that statement, then your paper probably doesn't have an argument. Rather, it is probably a collection of facts going nowhere.

You do not necessarily have to have a set thesis in mind going in. But you should be looking for questions. By the time you are revising your final version, a central thesis or question or argument should be recognizeable.

The title of the paper does not need to take the form of a question, but a research question should become clear to the reader in the introduction. And the writing in the paper should be focused on answering that research question. Data and ideas presented should contribute to the answer. This will be a major criteria when I grade the paper.

Avoid "spooky" topics such as the so-called "Bermuda Triangle", "Loch Ness Monster", or the "Curse of the Mummy". If you insist on doing them, you must show use of critical sources on these phenomenon (such as the JREF, to name just one example). Scholarly material is even better. These topics are good, however, as topics one step "back". Belief in the mummy's curse or belief in the Bermuda Triangle are legitimate subjects of inquiry - more so than the alleged truth behind the phenomema themselves.

Avoid embarassment and choose a topic within the subject matter of the class. If you are taking a class on ancient and medieval history, don't submit a paper on scietology or World War One. If the course is about the Middle East, don't do a paper about the Reformation in Norway.

I now include a discussion group on the term paper as a standard element of all my online classes. Use that group to get a doable topic. Use it to bounce ideas and problems off of me while doing your reading and research. I am there to teach.

Formal Requirements

Length

The paper will have a title page and a complete bibliography. These are included in the assigned length. So a requirement of ten pages, for example, means you will have at least eight pages of text. Generally, I assign 7 page papers for 100-level classes and 10-12 page papers for 300-level classes.

Formatting and Citations

Submit your term paper online as a Word, rtf or pdf document, if possible. Use a standard sized font (like 12) and margins that are reasonable in size (like 1" or 2 cm). I will notice if they are unusually large. If you cannot submit your paper as a Word, rtf or pdf document, please get in touch with me in advance. If that too, should prove impossible, submit the paper to me as the body of an e-mail (not an attached document in some non-Word format).

UMUC history students and all APUS/AMU students should use Chicago style, otherwise known as Turabian style. UMUC government students should use MLA. Both systems are described in the UMUC online library. See here for examples of these and other styles. A great reference for MLA is here. If you already undestand how to use citations but just want a quick and dirty guide to the formatting, this is an elegant short guide.

Organizing Your Research

If you haven’t written a research paper before or have had difficulty doing so, it is suggested that you consult my Research Guide. That will give you a good system for organizing your notes and make it very easy for you to properly cite all the information you use. But you may also consult with me directly or contact a university librarian. We will be more than willing to help.

Be sure to also have a look at my Policy on Plagiarism.

Writing and Style

Strive for accurate and clear grammar

With one to two extra hours, tops, you can make a mediocre paper a lot better.

First, look up all the words you are not 100% sure how to spell. The spellchecker on the computer will catch you if you write "laff" instead of "laugh," but it will not differentiate between "there" and "their," nor between "conscious" and "conscience." "Idol worship" is not necessarily the same thing as "idle worship." I get a lot of papers that mention a king and his "thrown." That should take about 10 minutes.

Next, look up the meaning of all the words you do not use in your everyday speech. Then look up those you are not 100% sure you really know the meaning of, especially words you just got from a thesaurus. Improper use of words is embarrassing and awkward for the reader. A real, 3-D, paperback pocket dictionary is quick and easy to use and can be very enlightening. That should take about 10 more minutes.

Now: Read the paper aloud into a tape recorder and play it back. Better yet, have someone read the paper aloud back to you. Incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, awkward punctuation, and other bad grammar may jump out at you. Reading it will take five to fifteen minutes, making corrections - that depends. This will take a few minutes, maybe an hour. It cannot replace English comp, other writing classes and experience, but it is a good quick fix before submitting an assignment.

Good writing takes time, training and practice. College is the best - and often last - place to take that time and get that training and practice.

Write for the public, not for the prof

Write for a large, anonymous audience that does not care why you are writing, but only about your subject matter. In other words, do not mention that the paper you are writing is an assignment, that it is difficult, that you checked this or that source. Just report on what you found and credit your sources. Just imagine picking up a newspaper and seeing an article entitled, "Flood engulfs New Orleans." When you read the article, however, it goes like this:

I wanted to do a story about something exciting, so when I heard about the hurricane, I thought I would write this newspaper article about the flood in New Orleans. It was hard to get information on it, but the librarian helped me. Finally, I decided to travel and see the damage for myself. You can imagine what a sight it was!

You would throw the paper down in disgust. But I get papers like that every term. Try to write with the tone of a textbook, scholarly article, or a journalist from a history magazine. Your reader cares about the subject at hand and your informed understanding of it, not about "you" as such.

Good: The British historian Haldane claims that King Arthur never existed. He maintains that Arthur is a legend pieced together by later storytellers over a long period of time. Some researchers, including Knox and Matsui, disagree with this interpretation, however.

Poor: While researching this term paper, I found that different articles give different interpretations of where the King Arthur legend comes from. At the library I found at least two authors who disagree with what Haldane says.

Sources

Only use scholarly secondary sources. What a "sholarly source" is cannot be precisely defined. But these attributes are a must:

an identifiable author
citations (footnotes or endnotes, at least a bibliography)
stability (a reasonable expectation that the source will be the same in 10 years)

Many print sources on history and all academic journals (online or not) have these attributes. Blogs and most webpages don't. "Wikis" such as "Wikipedia" change every several minutes and usually have anonymous authors and are very hit and miss on citations, so they are NOT scholarly.

The following attributes are desirable:

a university publisher
an author affiliated with an institution of higher learning or other indicator of content expertise

Articles retrieved through the online library databanks at both UMUC and APUS / AMU are the best place to find material online. My colleague Bruce Hull has a great webpage resource for using the databanks available to UMUC students. Online encyclopedias are often useful, but they can be questionable. You can use resources like Wikipedia (see below) for orientation and background, but I do not consider it a scholarly source as I would, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Do not be afraid to actually use a real, 3-D library with real, paper books if you have to! Indeed, I strongly encourage it.

Now, you are also encouraged to use primary sources. They do not need to be scholarly. However, it is often the case that you will need to be using secondary sources to provide context and background to fully understand the primary sources you may want to use.

(If you are unclear as to the difference between primary and secondary sources, see this link.)

Wikipedia

Students are very good at using technology, but not very savvy about learning with technology. This is in evidence by the massive reliability on sources such as Wikipedia or answers.com. I would make the following recommendations for using Wikipedia and other similar sources:

Use it for names and dates, but don't admit it.
Use it to get a first impression of a topic, when looking for some detail on a name you stumble across, for example, for general background.
Never quote it, never cite it.
Never build an argument on interpretations found there.
If you find facts there that you want to build your argument on, use that knowledge to find those facs elsewhere. Check them.
Use the links and photos, but do so with caution. There are often links to "official" or scholarly sites at the Wikipedia article. Those are quite useful.

I had so many students trying to build their college education around Wikipedia that I tried an experiment, just to see how effective the self-correcting there was. I made Abraham Lincoln into a Catholic. That was corrected within 30 minutes. But I changed Simon Bolivar into a communist, and that stayed up for three weeks. There was a scandal a few years ago because defamitory material about a journalist stayed up on Wikipedia for four months.

The policing on Wikipedia is done not necessarily by experts, but by other interested parties. Anybody can post anything. I recently discovered at an historians' conference that it is a common college assignment to have students write articles for Wikipedia. The "truth" comes out in Wikipedia the way truth emerges from a jury trial: by the consensus of whoever is present. That is not bad, but it is not necessarily the consensus of experts or even the informed opinion of a single expert. One place to look for a short but thorough summary of the problems involved with Wikipedia is an article on "Criticisms of Wikipedia at Wikipedia itself. A good article about lazy, non-expert history writing, that also includes a few broadsides against Wikipedia, is The Blog of War, an article for the New Republic by Anne Applebaum.

The best part of Wikipedia are the links: to images, to primary sources, to scholarly material, etc.

So while I would argue that it is an interesting experiment and useful resource, it should be used in academic pursuits with great caution. Keep a link to it on your desktop; refer to it for quick general info; but don't build much on it, don't cite it except when you have to (for an image you find there, for example), but make every effort to not have to.

Common Mistakes Students Make on Term Papers

As a kind of summary of some of the ideas already presented, I offer you my take on common mistakes that students often make on their papers. The point is not to give students the impression that writing a paper is a minefield, where errors are lurking. In each case, I offer a "how to do it right" suggestion.

Punctuation errors. Apostrophes are a special problem with many students. Hopefully, you didn't sell the textbook you used for English 101. Look up the punctuation, don't just assume you know it. It comes across very badly when there are constant errors, not just the occasional typo.
Starting off with errors. Make sure your title and your first sentence are perfect. Having a spelling error in the title or an opening sentence that is a grammatical trainwreck spoils the mood from the beginning. Spend an extra 90 seconds on the beginning.
"Winging it". This is when students simply type onto the page what they think about the subject. Sometimes this happens when students have recently seen a History Channel documentary or visited some historic site. This also happens when students assume that what they learned about history in Sunday school is the same as what scholars think about, say, early Hebrew society. They start writing up their "impressions." The offering up of vague, general impressions is especially common when making general statements about the nature of mankind, such as, "for centuries, men have turned to religion for comfort in times of need" or "ancient monuments have always fascinated people." One problem with these kinds of statements is that they address real historical issues that have been studied and written about for decades or centuries. In an academic context it comes across as odd to make sweeping statements about these issues without demonstrating even a cursory familiarity with that literature. I do not expect undergrads to know the literature. I usually don't even know it myself. But be aware that some generalizations that are "common knowledge" or which seem obvious are simply popular assumptions.
This also happens when students start passing moral judgements: "I think the Crusades were unjust because lots of innocent people were killed." The resulting statements are empty and banal. An alternative is to delve into the historical issue at hand and see what scholars are writing about the issue and borrow from them: collect information, recount it in your paper, weigh it against alternatives. Then you can use your informed understanding to evaluate the evidence and the arguments. That is not "winging it."
Another variety of this problem is to simply take standard, usually patriotic, narratives of history and report them as fact. A real example from a student paper on the American home front: "To support the war over in Europe and the Pacific, the citizens at home in both the United States and Great Britain gave everything they could to support the war effort. It was their patriotic duty." Reality is always more complicated than that. There were pacifists, draft dodgers, race riots, speculators and even spies in the United States. Consider critical and alternative history. Don't assume you know. Ask the professor for tips. In a case like this, there are ways of making some determination about how supportive of the war the population was.
Claiming things are "unknown" or "widely known." There is almost always a huge difference here between common knowledge (or the student's impression of common knowledge) and what is known in the field, in this case among social scientists. This is especially embarassing in situations such as this: "When we think of Egypt, we think of pyramids and mummies. What is less commonly known is that Egypt today is a modern society..." or "Sparta conjures up images of toppled ruins and brave warriors. But it was more than just a militarist death cult..." People interested enough to be reading an academic paper about something already know these things or can at least be assumed to not be shocked by the revelation. A term paper is not an inflight travel guide tucked into the seat in front of you.
Centering the paper on an abstraction or moral evaluation. Papers about whether Hammurabi's code was "fair" or whether Alexander the Great was "truly great" or whether Cleopatra was motivated by "patriotism" are saddled with a lack of sources. Trying to answer these questions without thorough knowledge of the relevant primary sources or without finding scholarship that addresses these issues (which it rarely, if ever, does) will result in a mushy paper. You'll have to "wing it." Instead, consult early and often with the instructor about a solid topic, ask for help, and, while doing your research in the scholarship, look for the kinds of issues that historians address. Those are issues that researchers have found good evidence about and you can follow them there.
Writing the paper about yourself and not about the subject at hand. The reader is not interested in your opinion, your beliefs, your feelings, or the difficulties you experienced during your trip to the library. The reader wants your informed understanding of the topic at hand, not a recounting of how you chose the topic or how interesting you find it or how your aunt first told you about it.