university

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.

Universities are complex. Needlessly complex. The modern university represents an accretion of over a thousand years of tradition – why else do you think you are expected to dress like a medieval scribe for graduation?

This is the first of a multi-post series I'll be putting together over the summer. The goal is to accumulate a collection of tips that can be compiled into a guide for college and university students. If you have any good advice for students that you'd like to share, please contact me.