History Department Writing Checklist           Student Name: ______________________

This checklist may help you avoid common errors. Please use it before you submit your paper. Your instructor may ask you to attach the checklist to your paper. If so, be sure to put your name on it.

As a help to students the Department has placed “Guidelines for Writing History Papers” as well as Jack Lynch’s writing guide and other research and writing resources on the Department’s web page (http://www.mscd.edu/~history/) under the heading “Student Resources.” Copies of “Guidelines” are also available from your instructor or from the History Department CN 211.

1.___ Is your name, the course prefix, number, name, crn number, the assignment designation, and the date on the first page or on the cover page of the paper? Unless your instructor indicates otherwise, you should put your name and other information in the upper right hand area of the first page of your paper. For example:

                                                                                    Jane Doe

                                                                                    HIS 1110 Colorado CRN 59043

                                                                                    Paper Assignment

                                                                                    January 15, 2009

                                    [Center the title of your paper]

Double space your paper with at least one inch margins right and left.

At the bottom of each page put your name, the course prefix and number and the page number. For example:

                                                Jane Doe HIS 1110                       page 1 of 5.

2.____Have you looked at the document “Guidelines for Writing History Papers” either by reviewing it on the Department’s web page, or by getting a hard copy from your instructor or the department?

3.____Is your paper stapled in the upper left corner?

4. ____Is your paper double spaced?    5. ___ Does it meet the length requirements?

6.____Have you kept both a hard copy and an electronic copy of your paper? If a paper is lost, the instructor will expect you to be able to produce another copy.

7.____Have you understood the assignment? For example, if the instructor has asked you to write a book review in which you answer certain questions about the book, have you done that, or have you merely written a summary of the book?

8.___Do your verbs agree with their subjects?

Plural subjects require plural verbs. Correct: “He and I were friends.” Incorrect: He and I was friends.”

9.___Have you carefully read your paper to catch errors that spell checkers miss. For example, have you used the words “there -- their,” “principal -- principle,” and “capitol -- capital” correctly?

10.___Have you cited your sources? You should supply a footnote or an endnote for anything that you quote directly. You should, of course, put quoted material in quotation marks. Your instructor may give you specific directions on how to cite sources.  Have you followed those directions?

11.___Have you used capital letters correctly? Have you capitalized names of states, cities, people, rivers and other geographical features? Have you avoided capitalizing words that do not need to be capitalized?

12.___Do all of your apostrophes indicate possessives? The only time you should use apostrophes in a paper is to indicate a possessive. All other grammatically correct apostrophes indicate contractions which should be avoided in formal writing. So, for example, write “it is” not “it’s.”

13.___Have you avoided capricious changes in verb tenses? Usually it is best to write consistently in the past tense.

14.___Have you either underlined or put in italics the names of newspapers and the titles of books.

15.___Have you taken care to avoid plagiarizing material? If you quote a source, you must put the quoted material in quotation marks and provide a footnote indicating the source. Taking a source and slightly revising it by changing a few words or the order of sentences is considered plagiarism.

16.___Have you avoided using abbreviations except in cases in which the abbreviation is extremely common. Mr., Ms., Dr., Sr., Jr. are common abbreviations, but Col. to indicate colonel or Gen. to indicate general are not. Although you should abbreviate names of states in bibliographic citations, you should not do so in the body of your paper. In bibliographies or notes do not use post office abbreviations for states. For example, Colorado is abbreviated Co. not CO.