If you are just starting to write papers for college or are a graduate student, your instructors will include the style that is required for assignments in the assignment guidelines. In addition, they may require additional preferences (e.g, a different style to the cover page). Pay attention to these requirements because instructors will remove grade points if a student does not follow the formatting for approved grammatical and citation requirements.

It is recommended (strongly) that students study and learn the requirements of the style early on in their education career and keep updated as different editions are released by MLA (currently 3^rd edition) and APA (currently 6^th edition). Having good knowledge of the style will help the student write more efficiently. Another recommendation is to have the style book by your computer as you work so that you can check punctuation and citations as you write. Highlight the most commonly used punctuation and other information with a highlighter and post-it notes, because the answer surely will come up again.

Both APA http://www.apastyle.org/ and MLA http://www.mla.org/ have Websites and search engines that can help if you have a tough style problem. Also, most colleges have Writing Centers or online tutorials to help you with ensuring that your use of the style guidelines in your academic paper are perfect.

Here are some major differences in the two styles.

Reference Examples:

APA Style

Jelfs, A., Richardson, J., & Price, L. (2009). Student and tutor perceptions of effective tutoring in distance education. Distance Education, 30(3), 419-441. doi:10.1080/01587910903236551.

Mellers, B.A. (2000). Choice and the relative pressure of consequences.  Psychological Bulletin, 126, 910-924.

MLA Style

Jelfs, Anne, John T. E. Richardson, and Linda Price. “Student and tutor perceptions of effective tutoring in distance education.” Distance Education 30.3 (2009): 419-441. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 16 Feb. 2010.

Palmer, William J. Dickens and New Historicism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Print.

In-text Citation Examples:

APA Style This is the citation format when there is a quote:

According to Black (2009), “all clowns scare children to death” (p.3).

MLA Style

According to Kenneth Black, “all clowns scare children to death” (3).

Other Comparisons

Professional Editing

There is another option if you need help with academic writing, especially when you are writing a thesis or submitting a paper for publication.  Many editors, like the editors at FirstEditing.com, specialize in academic writing and will offer to edit a paper based on word count or pages and the type of editing required. Academic editing will cost more than a standard edit. These editors are professionals who have a lot of experience editing papers in different style formats. They can provide expertise for the difficult editing issues such as footnotes and endnotes, charts and tables, and citing references.

Most college essay questions are designed as a way for colleges to learn more about you.  So this is your chance to tell colleges about yourself.  The first step to writing a successful college essay is choosing the right topic.  Pick a topic that allows you to give colleges the best idea of who you are as a person.  What are your interests?  What are your dreams?  What is important to you?  These are all aspects of your personality that colleges are interested in.

Approach your college essay as you would any of your previous school essays.  Begin with an outline detailing the structure of your essay, as well as emphasizing the main points.  Think about your strengths and weaknesses, and then choose one or two positive aspects of your personality to demonstrate to the college committee.  You can structure your essay in several basic ways.  In your essay, you can focus on a single strength that you possess, elaborating on it in detail.  Or, you can choose two or three significant aspects of your personality to discuss, devoting only a paragraph to each aspect.  The narrative essay is also a common and effective format; in the narrative essay, begin with a short and engaging story about yourself, and then explain how that story relates to your personality. Illustrate your positive traits through the story, perhaps talking about an event that highlights your creativity, problem-solving skills, or your ability to help others.

When writing your essay, make sure to clarify the strengths of your personality, rather than simply stating things that you’ve done (ex. “I volunteered at an animal shelter”).  Go the extra step to demonstrate how your activities reveal your personality and values (ex. “All my life, I’ve been extremely passionate about animal welfare and animal rights.  While volunteering at the local animal shelter, I was able to put my passion into practice.”).  Talking about your strengths and values gives a much deeper insight into your personality than merely listing some of your activities.

Finally, proofread and edit your essay.  Make sure your writing reads smoothly, clearly, and is free from grammar and spelling errors.  It never hurts to send it to a professional editing service for polishing, such as FirstEditing.com.  Not only would a professional editor check for basic grammar errors, but an editor could also give you valuable feedback about the content of your essay.  Also, many college essays have word count requirements; a professional reduction edit could neatly trim your writing down to the required word count.

A college essay is a great chance for you to show colleges your strengths.  Approach it with confidence and dedication, and you’ll soon be off to a promising new future!

The em dash

Em Dash

The em dash is a longer dash that is similar to a hyphen. It is used to show a pause in a quote that is all one sentence, and it is also used to show when one sentence trails off and another begins.

For example,

“I hope that you have told me the truth – you don’t always.”  This quote is all one sentence, but there was a pause in between the words truth and you that are represented by the em dash.

OR

“He just walked right in through the – He didn’t even think to announce his presence!”  This shows that one sentence trailed off and another began – NOTE the capital letter to begin the second sentence.

When typing in Microsoft Word, you can prompt one of these dashes by placing a space after the last letter of the word, hitting the hyphen key (next to the zero) and then pressing your spacebar again before typing the next word. Most Microsoft Word applications use an auto format that will insert the em dash for you.

Ellipses

Ellipsis

In contrast, the ellipsis is used to show when a thought trails off and the sentence is incomplete. It is a series of three dots.

For example,

“I just couldn’t believe what he was…” she muttered, as if to herself.

These quotation marks most often trip up fiction writers, as they’re used often in dialogue. However, whether you are writing a fiction piece, or working on an academic submission, please remember that the professional editors at Firstediting.com are always here to assist you with your work.  Happy Writing!

Take a deep breath and relax.  While writing that thesis may not be painless, it’s not as difficult as you’d think. Below are six steps to make the process less intimidating:

1. Choose your thesis topic carefully. While original research is expected in a thesis, you want to be sure that your work isn’t so original that there are no sources for you to refer to for research. The childhood of A.A. Milne might be utterly fascinating and help explain why he wrote his series of Winnie the Pooh books, but if there are few sources that discuss his childhood; this might not be a good thesis topic. On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln’s childhood has been over-researched, and while plenty of sources exist, it would be difficult to add anything new to them, and so this might also be a poor choice for a thesis topic. You want to hit that middle ground, where sources exist in enough quantity to be helpful but not to give the impression that your topic has been over-worked by previous researchers.
2. Review your course papers. Look at your existing graduate and even undergraduate research papers for topics that might mesh with your thesis topic. If you’ve been wise and had the opportunity in your graduate courses, many of your existing papers should be in the same general area as that of your thesis topic. It’s not too difficult to revise a stand-alone paper on the Lend-Lease Act and make it a chapter in a thesis on American foreign policy during World War II.  For that matter, perhaps one of your graduate papers could be expanded into a full-blown thesis.
3. Break down your work into manageable chunks. Start with a very general outline or perhaps a short essay describing what you plan to do. This is for your own reference, so it doesn’t have to be perfect or even grammatically correct—free-associate, scribble, doodle—whatever helps you focus on the direction you want your research to go.  Then work on a chapter at a time, possibly following the same process for each chapter before you actually begin writing the final product.
4. Don’t procrastinate. While many passable undergrad—and maybe even some decent graduate-level—research papers have been written in the wee hours of the morning on the day the paper was due, this is not an advisable approach with something as major as your thesis. If you know the thesis committee wants to see a reasonably polished draft in three months, take the time to sit down and figure out how to have that thesis written in two and a half months. That way, if something comes up at the last minute, you’ve got a little time to spare.
5. Back that sucker up in several places! Don’t rely just on your hard drive: what if it crashes and takes two months’ worth of work down with it?  Copy everything you do, every day, to a flash drive, a CD, an external hard drive—some backup source (or maybe several sources) that will protect your work. In fact, there are those paranoid souls (and I’m one of them) who even suggest keeping a copy of your work in a safety deposit box at your local bank.  Hey, a little paranoia is a good thing when it comes to protecting months of hard work!
6. Hire a professional editing firm such as FirstEditing (www.first editing.com) to give your thesis a final review before you turn it over to the committee. Professional editing can save you much embarrassment by catching silly slip-ups that your spell/grammar checker missed and can also ensure that your citations and references are in the correct format, as set forth by your committee.

While these steps won’t guarantee a painless thesis experience or the instant approval of the committee, they can certainly make the entire process less daunting and improve your chances of approval for your completed thesis.

Vonda

Editor Specializing in Technical Research Editing Services for FirstEditing.com

But what sort of editing do you need, standard or technical?  What level of editing will ensure that the fruits of your labor are presented as clearly and accurately as possible?

For term papers, research papers, theses, dissertations and even journal articles, your best bet is technical editing. Why?

Well, let’s look at standard editing first: an editor doing a standard edit will check for subject-verb agreement and other grammatical gaffes, make sure verb tenses are correct in context, alert you to continuity problems and often suggest fixes, and so forth.

“But that’s what I need, right?” you ask, scratching your head in confusion.

Well, yes, you need that and more-and that’s where technical editing comes in.

When an editor does a technical edit, s/he does all of the above plus-and this is a very important plus-checks your citations/footnotes, references, captions, headings and subheadings for accuracy and adherence to the style guide required by your instructor, committee or journal, in addition to providing feedback on how the paper reads and alerting you to areas that might confuse the reader or that look as if they’re missing citations.

“Oh, nobody ever really looks at the citations and references,” you laugh, shrugging.

Trust me: they do.  Profs can be almost insanely persnickety about things like margins and proper in-text citations, and if your content is amazingly well-written but you used the wrong margins or the wrong style guide, what you’ve written won’t matter: the prof will fail you, anyway. After all that hard work, your paper could be rejected because of easily-fixable errors that a professional editor could have caught and corrected.

This is where technical editing can be a lifesaver…and maybe a degree-saver, too. Take the time to have your paper edited by a professional, and be sure to ask for a technical edit. Professional technical editing by a firm such as FirstEditing can make sure your glowing content isn’t obscured by glaring technical errors.

On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, you’re like the vast majority of the human race and have issues with the use of “who” and “whom” and are never quite sure where to properly place that comma—or should it be a semi-colon?

This is where a professional editor can be a lifesaver. Professional editors know the proper use of “who” and “whom.” Further, they’re familiar all the mystifying little rules of grammar and punctuation that befuddle the average writer. It’s not only their job to know these things; it’s also their passion. You see, professional editors are those annoying people who just can’t help themselves: grammatical and punctuation errors seem to leap out at them, even in published books or magazines. They’re the ones who will read a passage in a great work of literature and, instead of sighing over its perfection, mull ways it could have been differently worded. They think nothing of telling store owners—politely, of course!—that their outside sign reads “hear” when it should read “here.”

So what exactly does this mean for the aspiring novelist or the student with a paper due yesterday?

A professional editor can check your work for mistakes that your word processing program’s grammar/spell check missed. S/he can suggest ways to better word sentences and even move entire paragraphs around to make your work read more clearly and logically. Professional editors can help ensure your work conforms to the style guide your instructor or publisher requires. In short, a professional editor can take your unpolished manuscript and turn it into a polished gem, ready for submission to those who will decide its ultimate fate.

And isn’t the ultimate fate of your work what it’s all about? A research paper turned in with numerous grammatical errors or using the wrong style guide will receive a failing grade. A novel submitted to a publisher with run-on sentences and improper use of quotation marks will be tossed into the reject pile.

Don’t let your hard work be for naught: before turning in that term paper or submitting that novel to a publisher, take the time to hire a professional editor through a firm such as FirstEditing (www.firstediting.com). It’s worth the money spent to make sure your work is as perfect as humanly possible.

If you are submitting it to a publisher or agent, you really have to find out their requirements and follow them to a “T.” However, if who you are submitting your work to has no specific guidelines for submission, then you’ll just want to submit the clearest, cleanest copy you can. There are many books on the market that help with formatting—everything from query letters to manuscripts.

What your manuscript looks like says a lot about you as a writer. If you have several different fonts going on, some paragraphs are indented while others are not, or you flip-flop between capitalizing certain words it not only looks sloppy, but it shows that you don’t care much about your work and you may not be taken seriously. It also shows that you are an amateur. Whether you are a novice at writing or not, you can still present a clean copy. If this is something that you are submitting to a publisher, it can prevent your manuscript from even being read. Editors won’t waste their time trying to sift through a hodge-podge mix of formats.

The most important thing when thinking about your manuscript presentation is that consistency is key. If you start out putting your chapter headings in bold text, then continue throughout. If you start capitalizing a specific word or term in chapter one, then continue in that form. You get the idea. The inconsistencies can also be disconcerting to the reader; that is, if they continue to read it.

Obviously, a perfectly manicured and pristinely formatted manuscript cannot help you with poorly written content. So yes, the content is of utmost importance; but the appearance of your manuscript is what the reader, editor, agent, or publisher will see first, before they even read the first sentence.

Take the time to make your work presentable—it can make all the difference!

It’s not as mysterious a process as you’d think; in fact, it can be quite easy if the right steps are followed. Let’s take a look at the steps you should follow to give your article the best possible chance at publication.

1. Know—and follow– the submission guidelines of the magazine! Most magazines have submission guidelines in their hard copies and on their websites. If they require double-spacing and you send in a single-spaced article, guess what? Rejection slip on the way…Similarly, some magazines prefer that you send a query letter, just like you would with a book publisher, outlining your article, its intended audience and the reasons it’s ideal for their publication. Send in the article first, before a query letter, and you could blow your chances at publication with that magazine.
2. Make sure your article is as error-free as possible. There are several ways to do this, of course. Most word processing programs have a spell/grammar check function, so you can start there to catch the most obvious gaffes. Keep in mind, though, that these programs aren’t perfect and will miss errors that the human eye can catch—and they also sometimes suggest “corrections” that are, in fact, grammatically incorrect. So use your own eyes to read behind your spell/grammar check, and then have friends or family read behind you. A simpler and usually not prohibitively expensive means of proofing and perfecting your article is to hire a professional editor through a firm such as FirstEditing (www.firstediting.com).
3. Be prepared for the possibility of rejection: no matter how wonderful, well-written and timely your article is, there’s no guarantee that a magazine will pick it up. There are lots of talented writers out there who can attest to the mountains of rejection slips they received before that first article was published.
4. Finally, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, “Never, ever give up.” No matter how often your article is rejected, submit it to more magazines. Rejections aren’t necessarily a reflection on the quality of the article or the writing abilities of the author. It never hurts to ask the submissions editor why your article was rejected and how it could be reworked to suit their needs. You might not always get a response, but sometimes this sort of persistence and willingness to revise your article to meet the magazine’s current needs can result not only in publication but also in the formation of a long and fruitful relationship with that magazine.

There you have it: a quick and painless method for submitting your article to a magazine and ensuring that it has the best possible chance of being picked up for publication. Good luck!