By Ronald Walters and T.H. Kern

Ronald Walters is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. His co-author, T.H. Kern '92, is now completing a BA/MA thesis in history about the last year of Malcolm X. In '90-'91 he was co-editor of the undergraduate News-Letter.

Found on an office door in the history department, this document is a superb review of how to write a college paper -- or a memo, or report.

We have designed this manual to help head off basic problems that haunt student papers. Following a sketchy primer on writing as a whole, we list particular offenses against language and logic. These are in alphabetical order so that comments in the margins of written assignments may easily be checked against a fuller explanation of the error.

In some place we draw inspiration from William Zinsser's On Writing Well, James J. Kilpatrick's The Writer's Art, or The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White. For the most part, however, we rely on several thousand pages of undergraduate and graduate prose for ideas (and many examples). We are not grammatical or stylistic purists, an we are certain that readers will spot -- and inform us of -- errors in this text. We simply want clarity.

Our tone is chatty, but our purpose is serious and selfish. It is a pain to keep writing the same comments in margins, paper after paper, semester after semester, year after year.

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Outlines	Paragraphs	Sentences	Hearing the language
Reading Prof's comments	Abbreviations	Anachronism	Apostrophes
Awkward	Definitions	Elaboration	Ellipses
Evidence	Footnotes	Gender-Specific prose	Get
Hyphenation	It's and its	Jargon and slang	Misplaced modifiers
Names	Overwriting	Passive Voice	Plagiarism
Proof	Punctuation	Quotations	Rhetorical questions
Split infinitives	Style	That/which	That/who
The	Verbs	Verbs and causation	Verb tense
We/I	Weasel words	Which	Final words

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