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Avoiding Mechanical Errors in Your Academic Work
Article Submitted by:
meangirl
September 04, 2009
It is a given: working on term papers is difficult. As if students do not have their hands full already, they need to do more than the actual reasearch and writing. There is still one crucial step they need to undergo before submitting their papers: editing.
There are several students and even professionals alike who neglect this stage of the process. This is just as crucial as all the other stages because if the term paper contains a lot of typographical or mechanical errors, it can seriously undermine the credibility of the paper.
Here are some tips on how you can avoid mechanical errors in your term paper:
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Be careful with the sentence construction. Sentence construction can create a confusion especially if it's run on. The key here is to discuss an idea per sentence only. Do not try to put all your ideas into a single statement and join them with all the conjuctions that you know. The simplier and the more straightforward your writing is, the easier it will be for people to understand what you wish to convey.
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Have a look at your pronominal referencing. Sometimes, in our hurry to write our term papers we make mistakes in our pronoun-antecedent agreement. Does the 'he' really refer to the subject that you would like to refer to? Before submitting the paper, check whether your pronouns really refer to he, she, it, they etc.
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Check the punctuation marks. Another common error students commit is using the wrong punctuation mark. Sometimes this is because they are often cramming and are in a haste to finish their papers. Hence, they do not have the time to proofread and check their punctuation marks.
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Run a spell check at least twice. Make room for error; a single spell check run might not cut it. As the wise adage goes, better safe than sorry. It would not take so much of your time to run the spell check the second time around so just do it to be sure.
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Get someone to read the academic paper for editing and proofreading purposes. Nothing beats re-reaidng the paper to ensure that you do not have mechancial errors. Better yet, have someone else go through the paper as he or she might have a new perspective and can easily detect the errors in your research paper. You never know, they might even have brilliant ideas that you can incorporate in your study.
While these do not ensure that students will get an A+ in their paper, it helps increase the chances of students in getting better grades. At the end of the day, it is not just about the ideas. In the scholastic world, presentation also counts as readers might have difficulty grasping your concepts if you do not make it clear what you want to say.
