How To Eschew Weasel Words...

Abbreviations. Abbreviations are useful for note-taking and informal writing, but keep them to a minimum in formal written work. Their use often produces a casual, breezy manner that can either mock the seriousness of an essay or give it a twitch tone, with "i.e.," "e.g like nervous tics. To make matters worse, many students misuse "i.e." and "e.g." anyway. We won't discuss correct usage because we don't want to see any usage.

Anachronism. An anachronism is someone or something that is not in its correct historical or chronological time -- a particularly egregious error in historical writing. Although the word is associated with the use of the past in the present, endowing historical settings with contemporary objects, words, or attitudes is equally absurd. The following is from the paper of a student who couldn't understand how the teaching assistant knew she made up the quotation:

• "Democracy," John Adams declared, "leads inevitably to fascism or communism."

A solid grasp on chronology enables you to avoid such errors. Quick reference to an etymological dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary Based on Historical Principles can also be helpful.

Apostrophes. These are consistently misused. For a singular noun, indicate possession by adding an apostrophe and an "s." Some people use only the apostrophe when the noun itself ends with "s," but such is not preferred usage.

• CBS's fall lineup for 1988 was a commercial disaster: NBC's was not.
• Miles Davis's best recordings appeared before 1965. (Less preferred: Davis' best recordings...)

For all plural nouns ending in "s," add only an apostrophe. If the plural does not end is "s," add an "s." Examples:

The Mathers' greatest treasure is their collection of German operas. (Or you can write around the problem: The Mather family's greatest treasure....")

Do not use apostrophes for special cases such as decades or initials unless you are indicating possession:

• The 1970s were years of social stagnation; upheaval was the 1960's burden.
• JFK's greatest worry was the would-be FDRs running around the Senate.

Names like "PC's Unlimited" or phrases like "extra's: tomatoes and cheese" are incorrect even if they appear on corporate logos or in student cafeterias.

Students routinely confuse "it's" and "its," "who's" and "whose." "Its" and "whose" connote possession by an object or person. "It's" and "who's" are contractions of "it is" and "who is." Note this usage carefully.

Awkward. A word commonly scribbled in the margins of undergraduate essays. See "Overwriting" and most of the rest of this manual.

Definitions. Definitions are important because they are one of the ways in which you control (as best you can) how the reader understands your essay. Without them, you and your audience may have a radically different sense of the key terms of your argument. So define your terms -- but don't simply rely on the dictionary. Few things turn off a reader more completely than an essay beginning with something like "Webster's defines 'race' as...." A better way is to insert definitions gracefully into your own prose:

• Inherited physical characteristics -- what we normally think of as "race" -- are more a cultural than a biological construct.

Elaboration. Students are often frustrated by professors who write "be specific" or "vague" on one page of an essay, "too much detail" on another. There is, however, an art to making clear what or whom you are discussing. The trick is to elaborate, but concisely -- in a clause or a few sentences. Note how much a few additional words help the following:

• Jane Addams criticized the role of middle-class women.
• As rewritten: Jane Addams, a pioneer social worker, criticized the role of middle-class women as being purely decorative, rather than productive.

Frequently, students stop short of indicating either the cause or the consequences of something. Unless explained in subsequent sentences, "Slavery produced the Civil War" is less satisfactory than "Slavery produced the Civil War by creating two different societies, North and South."

Ellipses. These are the funny little dots that appear in the middle of at the ends of quotations. Three of them indicate that words are missing and four indicate that the omissions include the end of a sentence. (Think of the fourth dot as the missing period.) Take, for example, the following, totally fabricated quotation: "I am not a communist. Furthermore, I have never been one." A stylistically proper (though dishonest) way to use the first sentence would be:

• Under hard questioning, Joe smith declared that "I am...a communist." (The ellipses at least let the reader know that something was deleted.)

The two sentences might be used in the following fashion:

• Joe Smith declared that he was not "a communist....[and] I never have been one." (The four ellipses let the reader know that the two parts of the quotation do not come from the same sentence. The brackets indicate that the "and" was inserted by the author of the essay.)

Note that ellipses are not generally necessary at the beginning of the quotation. Instead, the lack of a capital letter reveals a deletion. In the last example, the lower case "a" in "a communist" tells the reader that the quotation begins in the middle of a sentence.

Evidence. Don't play God when you write. You won't be able to awe readers into belief through your authority and majesty, in the form of sheer assertion. when a writer props up assertion with phrases like "it is certain" or "we may assume," readers smell a rat. Avoid these forms of verbal flatulence.

In order to persuade, you need evidence, as well as logic and a well-constructed argument. an important first step in writing a paper is to determine what kind of data you need to prove your point. If, for example, you want to convince a reader that Victorian women were hostile to sex, you cannot rely solely on the writings of male physicians or authors of advice books. You need data from Victorian women themselves. Similarly, material from a Democratic party newspaper will not persuade critical readers that the Republican Party botched Reconstruction. Be certain that your evidence and argument support each other.

Also beware of justifying arguments by assuming an alternative that is not analyzed in your essay. (Our term for this is "the doctrine of the implied false alternative.") For example, "American workers chose the ballot box rather than revolution" implies that revolution was an alternative. If you make such a statement, you need to discuss it at length. Otherwise, it is merely a rhetorical flourish masquerading as an argument.

Footnotes. Footnotes are essential, but not as excuses for pedantry. Use them to let the reader know what you have drawn upon in making your argument. Footnote direct quotations and important ideas drawn from other scholars. Also occasionally use footnotes to discuss bodies of literature -- to guide the reader to the major references in a particular field.

Do not use them as a solution to problems in organizing your argument or a garbage bin for things you wish you could have put in the text. Nor should you footnote common knowledge; if one of your points is undeniably true, simply state the point.

Footnote at the end of sentences, not within them, and -- whenever possible -- at the end of paragraphs rather than at each citation within a paragraph. Keep your footnote form simple. We prefer using the full bibliographical reference in the first footnote. After that, use an abbreviated form. Avoid using the Latin terms, ibid., op. cit., and loc. cit. Odds are, you don't know what they really mean, and neither do most professors.