Every semester, I spend a lot of time explaining the term paper assignments to students. I talk about them when I hand out my syllabus, I spend a good half-hour discussing the assignment about 3 weeks into the course, and I revisit the topic several times up until the last week before the due date.

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. "Does it have to be typed?" "What size margins should I use?" "What style do you want the references in?"

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas -- which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

I've never once, in 5 years of teaching, been asked a question about ideas.

Ideas are not more important than content, any more than respiration is more important than circulation -- formatting is part of the expression of ideas. A reference is a piece of data -- it helps answer the question, "how does the author know what s/he claims to know?" A section heading or a footnote is part of the process by which an argument is structured and developed -- they aren't extras.

At the same time, students' (and teachers'?) emphasis on form seems to miss the point that good presentation without ideas isn't any better than good ideas badly presented. Is it any wonder that much of what we read is a vapid rehashing not of the course materials but of Wikipedia entries. I mean, if the quality of ideas doesn't matter, what does it matter where they came from - as long as it's nicely formatted and search-engine friendly?

Here's my advice for students: consider formatting not as something separate from your ideas, but as a part of them. Your entire paper is a presentation of ideas -- and your design choices are one of the ideas being presented. Every reference, every footnote, even the margins and line-spacing should serve that end.

That doesn't mean to ignore the standards -- APA for a psych paper, MLA for a lit paper, etc. Those standards exist because they are tried-and-tested ways for ideas to be expressed well. But learn them as ideas, not as meaningless frills.

And ask a professor how to write a persuasive argument in your discipline once in a while. That matters, too.