Aaron Krug

1/20/05

Writing Formats

            A common occurrence amongst college freshman is to be given the task of writing a paper. These freshman, being new to the college experience, give this paper the attention it deserves, doing extensive research and writing draft after draft until they get it perfect. Finished with their paper and happy in the knowledge that this is one of the better papers they have ever written, they turn it in, only to get it back with a less than satisfactory grade because of improper format. Crushed, they learn the sad truth about papers at the college level; format is far more important than content will ever be.

            I want to begin by sating the arguments of all those well-meaning professors and administrators who support writing formats because they think it actually makes writing easier on students. Sadly this is not the case, but you have to understand, these people mean well. Many professors will tell you that writing formats allow students to write what they will without the worry of that dreaded word, plagiarism. The law of the land in writing is that if someone else already wrote it, don’t write it again, quote it, then give the author, the page number, and the first two words of the title in brackets after the quote. Follow that up by listing the publication in your bibliography, giving all the information you have already given, as well as the version number of the publication, the publisher, the year it was published, and other generally useless information that few ever look at and even less ever use. I mean really, who ever searched for a book by the year published? If you have the author, the title, and the page number of the quote, I think you’re pretty much ready to go as far as staving off plagiarism goes. Oh, and don’t forget the short description of the book required in annotated bibliographies, as if you couldn’t figure out the subject of the book from the paper you just read, now you need a paragraph at the end?

            Other professors will tell you that it allows for all papers to be written in generally the same manner, making them easier to understand and categorize. This may be true, but do I really want my newly finished paper, my opus on whatever subject I have been assigned to care about that week, to look like every other paper out there? I think it makes it easier for the people who have to grade my paper to give it a grade without actually having to look at it, understand it, or digest what I was trying to say; thereby disclaiming all those higher notions of why they said the writing format was good in the first place.

            Still more professors will tell you that writing formats give you the responsibility of really understanding what you are reading and researching for your paper. This is yet another excuse for maintaining the status quo. The fact of the matter is, the content of your paper will much more easily tell the reader if you understood the material than will a perfectly executed bibliography. Unfortunately, once again, the format takes precedence to the content.

I would like to point out that although I feel like writing formats today are a waste of time, the idea itself is not a bad one. The fact of the matter is, all of these professors tell you these things and they are right, but only if you are talking about a more relaxed sort of format system. I have heard horror stories about how if you don’t have the proper format in your paper some professors will throw it in the trash, and although I can’t prove or disprove that, I think the result would probably be less stringent, though the fact of these rather harsh punishments for not following format remains. By harsh punishments I mean a rather large portion of the grade set aside for format, opening the way for possible failure of a great paper. This all leads me to my point, and that is that the formats themselves are not the problem, but rather the close attention they are given and the high regard in which they are held. This problem is not just in one class or in one college, but in all colleges and most of academia. The problem is that once you put that much attention on the format of the paper you take away from the content, and isn’t the content supposed to be the point of the paper? I agree that bibliographies need to be included with every formal paper, because they do have their uses and they are necessary and helpful. I’m not calling for a complete abandonment of the format system, but rather a large reduction in importance and detail. I don’t think that my paper will be any better or any worse whether or not I include the period in the underlined area after my title in my bibliography. These are the types of things that I think take us away from what we originally set out to do, and that is to write a paper that is not only interesting but also understandable and easily gradable. I guess my whole deal is just that writing formats are ok, as long as they are kept in the secondary position to the content of the paper. Because once the point of the paper becomes the format, there is no point in writing the paper.