Bates College: CMS 285

Democracy and Crisis: Athens and America

Formal Paper Requirements

These requirements relate to the form of your paper. They are non-negotiable. The failure to satisfy any formal requirement will result in the loss of ten [10] points from your paper grade for each failure. Thus, a paper with 100 points without a title will receive no more than 90 points (A-); a paper without a title and without page numbers will receive no more than 80 points (B-).

Your paper must have a title that relates to the content of the paper. Thus, a paper with the title "Athenian Litigation Paper," or "Paper," does not satisfy this requirements. Conversely, a paper with a title like "The Circus Maximus," will satisfy the requirement. I have found personally, that spending time thinking of a good title actually helps you formulate and refine your thesis. Thus, a title like "Spectator Sport: The experience of the audience in the Circus Maximus," is significantly better than "The Circus Maximus."
Your paper must have page numbers. Your page numbers must be typed. Because I provide comments on papers, I need page numbers (e.g., the comment. "this section repeats the argument you made on page 3," is more difficult for me to make if you don't have page numbers.)
Length: Your paper must be between 1450 and 3050 words. This word count includes footnotes, but excludes bibliography. Don't bother messing with font type and size. Do a word count on your text and footnotes and put the word count on your cover page. Note, I penalize excessive brevity and excessive length equally. If you can only come up with three pages, you need to reformulate your thesis. If you can only say what you have to say in 30 pages you either need a) to edit some more; or b) reformulate your thesis.
Your paper must include a page providing citations for the works you cite in the paper. You may, but are not required to include material which you read, but chose not to include in your paper. For example, you might read 10 letters of Cicero or 5 articles about him, but only quote two letters and 2 articles in your paper.
- The Bates College Statement on Plagiarism contains excellent information about citation format. You should refer to it and ask me about any questions you have about citation form which the Statement doesn't answer. Other good sources on bibliography form to consider are Kate L. Turabian. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (University of Chicago Press) [this is what I used in college] and University of Chicago Press. A Manual of Style [this is what I used in grad school - either is great, Turabian is easier to use than the Chicago Manual].

Your paper must have a cover page which contains the following information:
- Your name.
- The paper's title.
- The paper's word count.

Unless I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I will assume that your failure to conform to the formal paper requirements indicates that you don't care about your paper. Since I do give care about it, this would be a rather unfortunate assumption for me to have when grading your paper.

Remember:

Cover Page
Page Numbers
Title
Bibliography
Your Name
Word Count

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