Learning to write often works best by example. The following are excerpts from nine first-year student essays. Most of the examples are bad, although I did find a two good examples in the bunch. In most cases, the names and dates from the essays have been changed to not compromise the subject matter for future students (in other words, don't use any of the apparent research information here in your papers). I have tried to categorize the errors as best as I could. Errors or bad portions are usually bolded to help you identify them.
Smith was a religious, Christian man. His notion of monads included contextual references to God. He believed that God controls the harmony of life through these monads.
The essay then goes on to discuss these monads in a Christian context. Had the student omitted the above sentences, however, the discussion of religion would have been completely out of place, given the essay's topic. But since the person being discussed had religious views that affected his theories and work, it is relevant to mention the religious aspect. Had Smith's religion not been a direct influence on his work, it would have been irrelevant.
Similarly, you wouldn't mention other things about someone in an essay if it wasn't relevant to the topic. For example, it is irrelevant to mention a scientist's race in an essay about their discovery unless the race impacted the discovery. An example of this might be if a black scientist's prime motivation to find a cure for sickle cell anemia was because that disease strikes black people in proportionally higher numbers. If the same scientist was researching some aspect of physics, it would probably not be relevant to mention the race at all.
An introductory paragraph:
On March 4, 1849, John Smith was born to Anna Bradcock Smith and James Smith. Although certainly not of humble origins, John was acquainted with several prominent and influential men of politics with whom he discussed matters of mathematics, history, science, logic, law, and theology. Smith was brilliant in each of these fields, but he became known particularly for his contributions in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and logistics. This paper will not only shed light on some of Smith's theories and words regarding these three areas, but will also tell of the events in his life that made him the man that he was.
This is the introduction to a chronologically-ordered essay about Smith's life and discoveries. As such, the choice to begin with his date of birth is a good one. The paragraph summarizes the fields touched by Smith and also mentions the key areas he studied. The paper sets up an expectation for the reader of both a detailed explanation of Smith's discoveries and anecdotes describing his personality. The sentence structure is grammatically sound and flows well.
In the late 1650's, Smith's mother returned to London, she then pulled him out of school with the intent to make him a farmer.
Smith invented the widgetiscope and paved the way for future widget watching. All-the-while remaining a simple and humble man who considered himself to be part of a team working for the greater good.
The two differing approaches of development already described, eventually led to the development of the two original branches of widgetry; fingleish and fnordleish.
This sentence is mispunctuated. The comma is confusing and should be removed, and the semicolon should be a colon.
Another of Smith's ideas was the method of differentiation. The university re-opened after the plague in 1667. Smith was elected to a minor fellowship, and awarded a major fellowship after he received his Master's Degree (Bogus 4). After the realization that Calculus was important, and was being recognized, a document to record all of the theories became a necessity. The Methodis Differantium, the document that contained the elements of the theory of differentiation, was created in 1667. Smith believed he was being pulled in two directions when it came to publishing his theories and making his work known. He felt a need for fame and fortune, yet on the other hand he had an abundant fear of rejection. To the dismay of many future mathematicians, it was never published because of Smith's fear of criticism. Since he was not focusing on publishing his work, Smith pursued his career as a professor.
This so-called paragraph is an utter mess. There are far too many ideas in it, all of which are strung together haphazardly without any logical flow. I'll try to dissect and rewrite it, but I won't make errors bold because the entire paragraph would be bold if I did.
First, let's pick out the different topics being addressed:
Now, if we replace each sentence with the number of the corresponding idea, we can see what a jumbled mess this is: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3.
Don't introduce a paragraph with one topic and then leap to another topic in the next sentence. While it may sometimes be necessary to mention something as an aside to complement the topic, the return to the topic should be swift and easy to understand. Don't bounce around within the paragraph as this student has done.
Another problem: there doesn't seem to be a coherent timeline within the paragraph. Did the university re-open in 1667, or was the plague in 1667? Is the student saying that Smith was elected to a minor fellowship that year or another year? Similarly, when did the major fellowship and Master's Degree come in? It's unlikely to have all happened in one year, though it is possible. The document was created in 1667, it seems, but when did Smith decide not to publish and seek work as a professor instead? Also 1667? It sounds like that was a very busy year for poor Smith!
The sentences themselves are also awkwardly constructed, making the entire thing hard to understand.
I'll make some assumptions regarding the confusing date information. Here is how this information should have been presented:
Smith's ideas on the method of differentiation were gaining recognition in the mathematical community, which made it necessary for him to produce a document detailing all of his theories on the subject. Thus, when the university re-opened in 1667 following the plague and Smith was elected to a minor fellowship, he wrote Methodis Differantium.
Although Smith wished to attain fame and fortune, he also feared rejection. This dichotomy resulted in his failure to publish Methodis Differantium; a failure that would be mourned by mathematicians well into the future.
Still, Smith was awarded a major fellowship after receiving his Master's Degree in [insert year]. Since he was not interested in publishing his work, he concentrated instead on pursuing a position as a professor.
Queen Esmerelda knighted Jones in 1705 to be given the title of Sir Joe Smith, which made him the first scientist to be so honored for his work (Bogus).
Jones had a main idea of analytic geometry.
What does this mean? Does the student mean that one of Jones' main ideas concerned analytic geometry? Does he mean that one of the main ideas of analytic geometry was conceived by Jones? Or does he mean something else entirely? This makes little sense and is very awkward.
Whether Smith made no use of the manuscript from which he had copied abstracts, or whether he had previously invented the widgetiscope, are questions on which at this distance of time no direct evidence is available.
Questions as to whether Smith made further use of the manuscript from which he copied abstracts or whether he had previously invented the widgetiscope are rooted so far in the past that it is impossible to gather sufficient direct evidence to provide answers.
This is still a bit awkward. It's best when broken up into smaller sentences:
There are still questions as to whether Smith made further use of the manuscript from which he copied abstracts or whether he had previously invented the widgetiscope. Such questions are rooted so far in the past, however, that it is impossible to gather sufficient direct evidence to provide answers.
Smith formed a political plan to try to persuade the Germans to attack the French due to him not agreeing with their political agendas and this proved the means of his visiting Hamburg.
Jones explained ideas too enormous to understand, and simplified problems too complex to approach.
Not only is this hyperbole, it's also logically impossible. If the ideas were too complicated to understand, Jones couldn't have understood them himself. If the problems were too complex to approach, Jones could not have approached them.
More samples of hyperbole can be found in the collection of items with several errors.
After marrying Elizabeth, Smith's father fell ill for several months. After no sign of recovery, a lawyer was summoned to the manor. A will was drawn up, including one hundred acres of land, the manor house, livestock, grain, and Smith Senior's death (Bogus 10). His mother gave birth to Smith three months after Smith senior died. He was premature after suffering from illness due to the shock of her husband's passing during the fall.
Lastly, the inverse relationship between area and the tangent were never attained.
"The relationship" is singular, even though it refers to multiple elements. Thus, the verb "were" should be singular as well, and changed to "was."
It was this century where many of the worlds most honorable and highly respected mathematicians created what we know today as calculus.
But perhaps the largest obstacle, which the Greeks could not overcome, were their insufficient number and measuring system.
"Were" is plural, but "obstacle" and "system" are singular. It should be "was."
Tragically at the age of six, Smith's father died.
This says that Smith's father died at the age of six. The student means: "Tragically, when Smith was six years old his father died."
Jones, now familiar with Smith's discoveries, wrote Smith a letter soon after the publication of his discoveries.
After the publication of whose discoveries: Jones' or Smith's?
Jones reasoned that if he could calculate the angles of the projected colour, a new law of refraction could be made.
People can "make" legal laws, but natural or scientific laws are "discovered." To "make" a new law of refraction, Jones would have to alter physics.
During the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of England did not realize the importance of scientific advancement.
At the current time, the dominant belief was that light traveled in wave.
Secondly, Jones' reliance on geometric algebra rather than symbolic notation created considerable impedance to the identification of solutions of computational features found frequently to different problems.
Here is an example of a student not knowing the proper meaning of a word. Impedance means opposition to the flow of electric current. It does not mean the same as to impede, which is to be an obstacle. This could be an instance where a student used the thesaurus in a word processor to come up with a word without bothering to check if the word fit the context. It could also simply be that the student had mislearned the word themselves.
Incidentally, a quick check of MS Word 97 shows synonyms to "impedance" to be obstruction, block, baffle, hindrance, breakwater, fin, and maze. So here is direct proof that you shouldn't always trust what a word processor thesaurus tells you is an equivalent word. Be diligent and look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary before using them in your essay.
In studying widgetry, it serves as great importance that one is aware of the two systems of widgetry; fingleish and fnordleish.
Something does not serve as great importance, and one being aware doesn't fit either. This is a student trying to sound fancy but instead making no sense. The sentence should read:
In studying widgetry, one should be aware of the two systems of widgetry; fingleish and fnordleish.
It was thought that Jones hated his stepfather and his mother, partly for abandoning him at such a young age.
Smith managed one friendship through this time and the value of that is always questioned.
...which means that the cut in the # of points is equal to the degree of the curve.
Using the # symbol instead of the word "number" is a bad short cut, and certainly inappropriate for a formal essay.
Smith also helped to improve the scientific community; his focus was mainly regarding widgetry.
How does a focus on a subject help to improve a community? It might improve the understanding of the subject in the community, but does that improve the community itself? This is a badly worded assertion. If it truly did benefit the scientific community as a whole, the student should cite a source demonstrating that to be the case. No attribution was present.
In one day, John's attitude towards school changed for the better. A boy ranked just above him kicked him in the stomach. At the end of the day John challenged the boy to a fight. Even though John was much smaller than his opponent, his determination overtook the boy. Winning the fight was still not enough. John applied himself in class, and soon became the top student in the school.
During this time, Smith constructed a water clock. He constructed the clock out of an old box.
This is choppy. It could be easily combined into one sentence.
Jones became began to study motion.
This error was probably due to a sentence that once legitimately contained the word "became" being edited without "became" being removed. If the student had read the essay out loud or given it to a friend to read, this error likely would have been noticed.
Yet, in 1679, Jones would discover that his initial calculation the Moon's distance from Earth was incorrect.
Here is another example of a simple error of omission that could have been caught if the student had read the essay aloud or given it to a friend to read. The word "of" should be between "calculation" and "the." That one small error makes the entire sentence awkward and confusing. If the instructor has to reread the sentence to try to understand its meaning, the flow of the essay is interrupted. If this happens often enough in the essay, it gives an overall bad impression on what otherwise might be a very good paper in terms of research.
More examples of errors that could have been caught if the students had bothered to read their essay:
According to hi diary...
One of Smith's main contribution was his use of...
Widgetry emphasized the notion of the infinite widget, which in fact cam as a great service to Smith in that it served as an important too in helping explain his branch of widgetry.
Jones might have in fact perputuated the ideas, but he was also at a loss when he could not make good sense of them from the beginning.
Admiration for Smith grew in the filed of widgetry.
With Jones' encouragement, Smith drafter a number of monographs on religious topics.
Smith considers out universe to be a gravitational system...
On August 10, 1777, Jones was ent a letter from...
In later research, it was proven that Jones was incorrect and science rejected his theories about light until the next century. Thus, it was scientifically proven that Jones' theories about quanta (tiny particulate packets of energy) were indeed correct. The wave formulation was also correct.
Regardles of whether...
It's disappointing to see such sloppiness as this in an essay. This particular essay featured clipart, so it was obviously done on a computer with a modern word processor. It clearly wasn't spell-checked. Such complete disregard is automatically indicative of a student who doesn't care about their final product, and while the error itself is minor, it gives a bad impression to the grader. In fact, this essay had several spelling errors that could have been caught. That's inexcusable at the university level.
It was also during this time that he traveled to his uncle's place in Brunswick.
"Place" is colloquial. Use "home," "apartment," "residence" or other such appropriate word instead.
Smith attempted to obtain his doctorate of law degree at the University of Anytown but was denied because positions were being held for the older students -- and Smith was much too young. Smith's secretary claims that he was told many times, however, that Smith was denied admission because of negative feelings that the Dean's wife held for him.
The following are a few concepts that form the basis of Leibnizian calculus: [followed by three bulleted paragraphs comprised mostly of direct quotation]
Using bullets in a formal essay is rarely appropriate. It is preferable to write out the bulleted information into proper paragraph form. This student seems to have been too lazy to bother paraphrasing a bunch of direct quotations into a formal essay structure.
Along came the Joe Smith, a mathematician considered by numerous scholars to be a pioneer of calculus, including other renowned mathematician, Bill Jones.
The first page of the essay starts with:
have been developed (5).
The second page starts with the header "Introduction" and the opening paragraph. Clearly, the student stapled the pages out of order. What a sloppy mistake! Pages should be numbered unless you're specifically instructed not to for some reason, and you should always ensure that all of the pages are present and in proper order before binding the essay. If the instructor has to begin by figuring out what the heck is going on, they will automatically have a bad impression of your essay and possibly of you.
Jones was quite a busy man in that along with his position in the Court of Mainz, he also managed to serve as Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg as secretary, librarian, lawyer, advisor, assistant, and most importantly, friend.
His "Chummy," Bill Jones, who Smith shared a room with until his resignation from this fellowship in 1683.
Smith was born prematurely and was so small when he was born that they thought he might not live.
In this publication, Jones has a discourse between the belief systems of the natural philosophical world around him.
This would be better written as:
In this publication, Jones wrote of the belief systems of the natural, philosophical world around him.
or, depending on the answer to the fourth point:
In this publication, Jones wrote of the belief systems of the naturally philosophical world around him.
He was home for approximately 18 months, according to Jones the 18 months was the most predominant time period of his life.
Simpson was content after his ability to reproduce Smith's experiment. Jones was not that easy, the two men fought constantly.
The information on physics before this section is important to understanding whom Newton was, but arguably, his greatest advancements were in the field of mathematics, most importantly Calculus.
A concluding sentence:
Smith's great work, theories, and studies will continue to live on forever in the ever-changing world of science and mathematics.
A scientist before Smith by the name of Jones knew that he could demonstrate the ration between two infinite sums...
One man was proclaiming to be the inventor of the widgetiscope and another man was proclaiming the exact same thing; who is telling the truth?
Two men proclaimed to be the inventor of calculus, but only one could be given the credit.
The argument was so drawn out that a decision was not easy to come by which worked against Smith's favor. Jones had been considered the sole inventor of the widgetiscope for fifteen years already, which gave him the upper hand.
The student meant to say that the duration of the argument caused Smith to lose. But because the student failed to put the necessary comma between the bolded words, this sentence actually says, by means of a complicated string of multiple negatives, that it was not easy to come to a decision against Smith, meaning he won. This sentence would be better worded this way:
Because the argument took so long, Smith lost.
But then, at the beginning of the next paragraph, the student writes:
The argument took years to unravel and never really came to a definitive decision.
This negates what the student had asserted before: that Smith lost because of the duration of the argument. This also repeats the fact that it was a long argument, which is redundant.
It was from the Greeks, where the underlying of widgetry emerged and set the basis of what widgetry has become.
Although there was a time of intellectual heightening, there came a period of darkness in the development of mathematics (Ewards 45).
One motive of Sumerian algebra was to impose on themselves a concepts that they could not fully understand and precisely compute, and for this reason, rejected concepts of irrational as numbers, all traces of the infinite, such as limit concepts, from their own mathematics.
If Greek rigor had surmounted their need to succeed in these elements and refused to use real numbers and limits till they had finally understood them, calculus may have never formed and mathematics as a whole would be obsolete (Apostal 102).
Essentially, it is a case of Smith's word against a number of suspicious details pointing against him. He acknowledged possession of a copy of part of one of Jones' manuscripts, on more than one occasion he deliberately altered or added to important documents before publishing them, and a material date I none of his manuscripts had been falsified (1675 had been changed to 1673)(Bogus, 78)
[Point being made]:[proof 1];[proof 2];[proof 3]; and[proof 4].
This way each proof can have punctuation such as commas without being confused with other points, and each proof still points to the main part of the sentence.
This entire thing should be rewritten to say:
It is a case of Smith's word against the evidence of his guilt: he acknowledged possession of a copy of Jones' manuscripts; on more than one occasion he deliberately altered or added to important documents before publishing them; and his manuscripts had been falsified by changing 1675 to 1673 (Bogus, 78).
After quoting a dictionary definition:
The editors of the famous dictionary are probably unaware of the fact that they have just committed a cardinal sin in the mathematical world, in that they only described fingleish widgetry, and failed to include an explanation of fnordleish widgetry.
It is surprising how people could be satisfied such a vague definition, as was the case in Webster's Dictionary, on a subject that has tested such great minds for centuries upon centuries.
Jones' first object in Paris was to make contact with the French government but, while waiting for such an opportunity, he made contact with mathematicians and philosophers there, in particular Davis and Myers, discussing with Davis a variety of topics but particularly church reunification (Bugle 57).
Jones' first objective in Paris was to make contact with the French government, but while waiting for an opportunity to do so, he made contact with mathematicians and philosophers such as Davis and Myers. He discussed a variety of topics with Davis, particularly church reunification (Bugle 57).
Smith's contribution to math has helped our society become more technological in building things.
Undoubtedly, Jones was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived and this paper will demonstrate that, starting from his childhood until his death.
Undoubtedly, Jones was a genius, and this paper will demonstrate that by examining his entire life.
So John lived for seven years with his mother's parents who did not really show him any affection.
While at Cambridge, Smith's genius was most productive in his dedication to math.
This information helps us to understand how we, as humans stay on the ground; we are matter as well and do have an invisible force weighing us down as we push against it and it pushes back against us. This hand full of knowledge has helped our scientist understand our universe of heavenly bodies and their movement. It has also allowed scientist to delve further in exploring our galaxy.
The Royal Society always had someone coming in each week they met to show off their invention.
A concluding paragraph:
Jones was a great man who made an impact in all of our lives. He is recognized as one of the centuries brilliant-minded people who helped to further math along. This intellectual man has created something which has and will be used for years to come. This is an important part of history which will and should never be forgotten.
Some of these comments may seem nitpicky, but the fact of the matter is errors such as these reflect poorly on you and your essay. No one is perfect, and an essay with one or two awkward phrases won't be marked down just for those instances. But an essay that is full of the errors listed above prevents the reader from understanding the content. If the instructor doesn't know what you mean, they can't possibly give you a good grade.
Last updated in August 2004.
Copyright © 2000-2004 Kimberly Chapman. All rights reserved.
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