Grading Criteria for Essays
All written work will be marked for the quality of your research and sources, content and analysis, as well as grammar, clarity of writing, and organization.
The following will be considered:
Your paper should have a clearly stated thesis that is supported by thorough evidence. Be sure to include an introduction and conclusion. All of this should be done in 2,250 – 2,500, double-spaced, in 12-point font.
The following will be considered:
Strive to write clearly and concisely. Avoid generalizations. Where necessary, define your terms.
Eliminate irrelevant and repetitive information.
o Remember that this is a history paper; use the past tense to describe events that happened in the past (i.e. the Stock Market Crash of 1929 signalled the beginning of a decade long Depression in the United States).
o You can, however, use the present tense when discussing the work of another writer or historian (i.e. in The Grapes of Wrath, writer John Steinbeck depicts the living conditions of rural Americans who lost their land during the Great Depression).
In academic writing, all borrowed material must be cited. Improper referencing of material is considered plagiarism. Thus, references should be presented in properly formatted footnotes or endnotes (not APA or MLA reference style). Footnotes and endnotes are exactly the same, but footnotes come at the end of each page, while endnotes come at the end of the paper, but before the bibliography. You can choose either format.
For detailed information on formatting, and bibliographies, please refer to the online version of the Chicago Manual of Style at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. The numbered examples are footnotes/endnotes, while the examples directly below them are bibliographic entries. Purdue University also has an excellent website on Chicago Style citations at
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/
The following will be considered:
Divide your bibliography into primary and secondary sources if necessary. Have all the sources used in the paper been included in the bibliography, and vice versa?
Chicago Manual of Style
Below are some examples of how to cite sources and list them in your bibliography. Note the differences between the two. The major difference is that there are periods instead of commas! Also, the first time you reference a source you must provide the full citation AND the page number you are referencing. All of your subsequent references are abbreviated.
Book
Citation
1.Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99–
Bibliography
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006
Chapter or article in a book
Citation
Bibliography
Kelly, John D. “Seeing Red: Mao Fetishism, Pax Americana, and the Moral Economy of War.” In Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, edited by John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton,67–83. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Article in a journal
Citation
Bibliography
Weinstein, Joshua I. “The Market in Plato’s Republic.” Classical Philology 104 (2009): 439–58.
Article in a newspaper or popular magazine
Citation
Bibliography
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “But Enough about Me.” New Yorker, January 25, 2010.
Website
Citation
http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/about/factsheets.html
Bibliography
McDonald’s Corporation. “McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy Safety Facts.” McDonald’s Corporation. Accessed July
19, 2008. http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/about/factsheets.html