The most important attitude adjustment most students need to make about writing is to regard it as a process, not a product. You must expect to write multiple drafts and to rewrite and revise extensively. For example, it can easily happen that you write a draft, and only at the end of the draft do you realize what your thesis really is. When that happens, you may need to throw out the entire first draft and start over with the new thesis. Of course, revision is not always that radical, but you need to be willing to be that radical if need be. You should not approach revision as a simple matter of checking for obvious spelling and grammar errors. That sort of editing is vital, too, of course, but what most students need to work harder on learning is the higher level revision. Ask yourself questions like this: Do I have a clearly defined and clearly stated thesis? Does each paragraph have a clear topic? Do the paragraphs follow each other in a logical order that builds an argument in support of my thesis? Does everything in my paper belong there? Have I left anything out that I should include?
At all stages of revision, but especially in your last revision, of course, you should be alert to details of grammar, style, and spelling. Computer spellcheckers will catch lots of errors, but you can't rely on them completely. For example, if you've written "be" when you meant "bee" or "there" when you meant "their," your spellchecker will not notice anything wrong. Grammar checkers are even worse, in some ways, because they usually find a lot of errors that aren't really errors, and they work with rather stupid instructions about style. (They don't want you to ever use the passive voice, for example.) But they will catch gross grammatical errors and stylistic sins, and they may be useful.
In a way, I feel like the basics of formatting should be obvious and I shouldn't care about anything but the basics. But nothing is obvious if you don't know, so here are some instructions. The most important thing is that papers should be double-spaced, in 12 point type, with one-inch margins on both sides and at top and bottom. Your word processor will probably set one-inch margins automatically--just don't change them. Twelve point type is pretty standard, too. You can get a lot more on a page with 10 point, but it is harder to read, harder to write comments into, and it completely changes the number of words to a page. So please use 12 point.
I don't care about any standard form for headings and/or cover sheets, but be sure to include your name, the title of the paper, and the date. You really don't need to tell me my name, or the name of the course, but if you like putting that stuff in your heading or on your cover sheet, go ahead. Start the first page more or less at the top. Skip down a few lines if that looks better to you, but not half the page.
Please include page numbers.
Be sure to use a title that describes and, ideally, creates interest in your paper. Don't just call the paper "Assignment 4."
Medieval names ending in "von" or "de" or "of" or the equivalents in other languages are not regarded as consisting of first names and last names in the modern sense. Thus, the convention is that we write "Wolfram von Eschenbach" or "Chrétien de Troyes" on a first reference, and "Wolfram" or "Chrétien" on subsequent references. By the late Middle Ages, last names in the modern sense do exist, and Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, should be referred to as "Chaucer." If in doubt, look at some standard scholarly reference like the MLA Bibliography, and see what they do. Or ask me. By the way, indexers, librarians, and book store clerks don't always do it this way, although they should.
Some students always suffer from "overwriting." This is excessive striving for lofty tone, abstruse vocabulary, and/or complex sentence structures. Clarity is the most important thing: in expository writing, you should always strive to emulate Gottfried, not Wolfram. Sometimes clarity and precision of expression demand highly specialized, technical vocabulary. Certainly, too, you do want a somewhat formal and academic tone. But don't fall victim to thesaurus-itis. Don't create sentence structures that are too complex to be easily understood. Above all, don't use words unless you are sure you know what they mean and how they are used, and don't create sentence structures that are too complex for you to keep control of.
In using the word "thesaurus-itis" above, I don't mean to say that you should never use a thesaurus. And in saying a little more about thesauruses here, I don't mean to suggest that you should use one. But since I know that some students do use them, let me say this. A thesaurus can be a valuable tool, but if you use one, be careful: true synonyms are rare. Different words usually have slightly different meanings, slightly different connotations, slightly different usages, slightly different tones. If you are using a thesaurus to learn new vocabulary--as opposed to using one to find a word that you already know, but can't think of at the moment--you probably need to use a good dictionary along with the thesaurus.
Grammar and style manuals always talk about "misplaced" and "dangling" modifiers, but other sentence elements can be misplaced as well. Linguists call these things "garden path sentences," because they lead a reader "up the garden path" to an incorrect understanding (see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, 207-214).
I saw a classic example the other day in the caption to a large photograph displayed in Reading Terminal Market. It read something like this: "A quality butcher shop for over 75 years, this photograph shows Harry Ochs Sr and Harry Ochs Jr in a scene from 1947." Here's an example from a book on style (Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line, 21): "Lightweight and packable, Mom will find this comfortable, flattering robe indispensable for travelling." In really ludicrous cases like these, you can figure out pretty easily what is really meant . Your knowledge of the world allows you to recognize that since Mom isn't lightweight and packable, the robe must be. The sentence about the butcher shop is really horrible, because not only has the photo obviously not been a butcher shop for 75 years, neither have the two men in the picture: they owned the shop, or managed it, together or separately, for some part of that time. The dangling phrase really modifies "the butcher shop," which does not even appear in the sentence, but in the title or headline that accompanies the sentence. Still, in the full context, you don't really have much trouble understanding what is meant. The problem is that when you write this way, you make your readers work harder than they need to, and this detracts from the flow of your argument. Sometimes these garden path sentences aren't really "wrong," in any way, but they are genuinely ambiguous, as in these examples (from Pinker, 209-211): "My son has grown another foot." "I saw the man with the binoculars." "The judge sentenced the killer to die in the electric chair for the second time." AVOID THESE THINGS! Try very hard to catch misplaced elements and garden path sentences in your editing. Try not to write them in the first place, of course, but it's almost inevitable that you will write some. Often, you can solve the problems simply by moving a sentence element. (Modifiers should nearly always come right before or right after the thing they modify.) Sometimes, you may have to rewrite and say things a different way.
Seminar papers are supposed to be objective, scientific attempts to analyze and understand a subject matter. Don't include your own spontaneous reaction to the text, or your personal, subjective opinions, as opposed to your rational, careful analysis. The question is not whether you like Parzival or think Gawain is a jerk, it's whether you think Wolfram wants us to like Parzival or think Gawain is a jerk. Don't include your feelings, your , impressionistic, or emotional response to a text.
On the other hand, of course the ideas in the paper are yours, so there is no need to artificially avoid saying "I," as some people are taught in school. There's nothing wrong with an occasional "I think" or "I would argue," and such phrases are often better than the absurd passive circumlocutions that some students use to avoid saying "I." But avoid "I feel," because these papers are about your ideas, not your feelings.