(Last Revised: 5/18/04)

There are certain comments I find myself writing frequently on student papers. Here are some of them. Forewarned is forearmed!

            GENERAL

1. Avoid non-standard fonts. Everything should be in 12-point fonts and double spaced.

1.1 You must follow APA manuscript style. This includes a header on the upper-right hand corner of every page; the header should contain a short title and the page number.  Your textbook has a sample manuscript and a section describing some of the key elements of APA style.  Refer to them.

2. Students have a terrible time with affect vs effect. Here are examples of correct and incorrect usage. It's diabolical. Ask your English teacher for an explanation!

                    CORRECT                                                               INCORRECT

• Color had an effect on the test scores.                     Color had an affect on the test scores.
• Color affected [influenced] test scores.                     Color effected test scores.
• There was a strong effect of color.                           There was a strong affect of color

3. Maintain PARALLEL form. Here's an example of poor and good form.

POOR

We predict that women who talk fast will be viewed more negatively than a male would.

GOOD

We predict that women who talk fast will be viewed more negatively than men who talk fast.

4. People are WHOs and things are THATs.

            CORRECT                                                             INCORRECT

• The people who finished the                                     The people that finished the
      questionnaire left the room                                        questionnaire left the room.
• The computer that sorted the
      files was restarted.

5. NOUNS, PRONOUNS, ADJECTIVES, and VERBS must AGREE.

POOR

• Each participant will be asked to rate their opinion of the stimulus materials.

GOOD

• Each participant will be asked to rate his or her opinion of the stimulus materials.

GOOD

• Participants will be asked to rate their opinions of the stimulus materials.

6.  Learn the proper use of apostrophe!

• There were three essays.
• The essays were grammatically correct.
• The first essay’s writer was a man.
• The first three essays’ titles were too long.

        TITLE PAGE

1. There should be a Short Title Header and page number 1 in the upper right hand corner.

2. A title should be in the form of "The effect of Independent Variable X on Dependent Variable Y." For example, "The effect of color of paper on test scores."

        INTRODUCTION

1. THE HYPOTHESIS: In a well-thought out introduction, the hypothesis will appear inevitable; the previous arguments and evidence that you have laid out should make the hypothesis you state seem like the only one possible. Put another way.... Suppose that instead of the hypothesis, you left a blank and asked the reader to fill in the hypothesis that is implied by the previous arguments. If you've done a good job to that point, the reader should fill in the actual hypothesis you would have written!

2. QUOTATIONS: In general, you only quote an author if it is important for the reader to have the author's exact wording (which rarely occurs). Otherwise, it is your job to distill the key ideas from the author's discourse, and then to spell out those ideas as cogently as possible in your own words. My experience is that when students quote an author, it usually is because they correctly recognize that what the author is saying is important, but are unable to put it into their own words because they don't actually understand the author's ideas. Your response to that situation should be to work to understand the author's ideas, so you can explain those ideas to your reader.

        METHODS

1. Use only complete sentences.

            CORRECT                                                             INCORRECT

• The materials were a flashlight, con-                         Flashlight, construction paper, three pens.
      struction paper, and three pens.
• The participants were 32 students from                    Thirty-two students from an introductory
      an introductory psychology section.                           psychology section.

2. "Male" and "female" should be used as adjectives ("male subjects" or "female participants"). Use "men" and "women" as nouns, as in "the participants were 23 men and 27 women."

        RESULTS

Only tell the reader what he or she absolutely needs to know to understand and replicate your research. There is no need to mention that you are using SPSS to calculate your descriptive and inferential statistics and to draw your figures. SPSS is a tool for doing these things, and which tool you used is unimportant to the reader.

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