Telling your reader what to think

This is the issue-analysis report, not the I-know-all-the-answers-about-this-issue report. Your job is to go and research all of the information available regarding a difficult-to-answer question and report what you find. That’s it. Let the reader figure out what they think about the issue after reading your report. You have smart readers. Trust me. They’ll figure it out all on their own. Present the information objectively, hide your real feelings, and you’ll be fine.

If you find yourself writing things like, “This is clearly the better option,” “That is obviously right,” or “That other thing is terrible,” then you haven’t understood the assignment. The point of the report is to gather good information and give it to your readers and allow them to decide what to do with it.

Not stating your driving question in the introduction

Typically, you want to put your main idea—your thesis statement—at the end of your introduction, just like you did in the last two essays you wrote. However, for this report, you won’t be providing your readers a main idea^[1] because you’re not giving them your opinion about anything. So, instead of including a thesis statement in your introduction, you’ll want to make sure that you write your driving question there instead. The driving question for your essay is the question that you are trying to answer through your research, so it serves as a good central, controlling idea for the paper, just like a thesis statement usually does.

You’ll want to make sure that you format your driving question correctly. One way this can go wrong is to not write your driving question as a question. Some students make the mistake of writing their question like this:

Did you see that that wasn’t a question? There’s not even a question mark at the end of it. Use a question word^[2] and phrase it in the form of a question. Here’s a better version of the same driving question:

See that question mark at the end of that? If you don’t have one at the end of your driving question, it’s not a question. If that question is not written in the introduction, it’s not where it should be.

Putting your driving question in the title of your essay

Using your driving question as a title is not the worst sin in academic writing, so don’t sweat it too much. However, I do want you to come up with a more engaging title than just the question you’re trying to answer. What usually happens when students put the driving question as their title is that, when they write their introductions, they don’t put the driving question there.^[3] And as we just read, that’s really where we want it.

So, for this assignment, for me, please come up with a more engaging title that’s related to your issue and save the driving question for the introduction.

Using a boring hook

Remember that the point of the hook^[4] is to grab your reader’s attention and pull it away from whatever they were thinking about before reading your essay so that they want to focus on your topic. In order to do that, you have to give them something that will actually distract them, and the worst way to get someone’s attention is to tell them that the issue you want to talk about is old and already talked about.

What does that look like? It looks like this:

What’s the problem here? In each of these examples, what you’re telling your reader is that your topic is old and therefore not interesting. If it’s been around for a long time or it’s been discussed for a long time, then by definition, it’s not new, fresh, or interesting. Using these kinds of hooks does nothing to get your reader’s attention.

Instead, find something unique, engaging, startling, funny, frustrating, or even descriptive that you can use to start your paper with. Here are some possible revisions for the bad hooks above:

See how those are much more interesting ways of starting to talk about the topic? There are surprising facts, short anecdotes, and shocking statistics. Please find a good hook for your essay. It takes some work to find them, but good hooks are out there.

Not hiding your own biases

This might seem repetitive, but this mistake is actually different from stating your opinion in the introduction and trying to persuade the reader that you’re right. In this case, you can ask a driving question, research good information from both sides of the issue, and present that to the reader, and still do it badly.

We all have biases, feelings for or against certain people, things, views or cultures. They are developed over our lives unconsciously and are influenced by all kinds of experiences, people, places, cultures, and so on. The problem here is not that you have biases; the problem only exists when you allow them to influence how you write about the issue and the information being presented by each side. If you feel very passionately about the issue you’ve chosen to write about, then it could be much more difficult for you to write sincerely about the side you disagree with, and that is key.

Let me give you an example of how not to write about an issue you feel passionately about. Consider a student, a woman, who feels strongly about women’s rights and the issue of the increasing number of bans on abortions being enacted throughout the country. She chooses abortion as her issue and asks the question, “How does the Texas abortion ban reduce the number of abortions?” She includes information about what the bans are, as well as quotes from the author of the bill^[8] and from opponents.^[9] The issue of bias arises in the choices the student makes with regard to vocabulary. She uses words and phrases like “harsh,” “unconstitutional,” and “over-the-top” to describe the bill and its defenders without using similarly negative words when describing the feelings of its opponents. This is a result of her biases coming out unconsciously in her writing. Biases could similarly be revealed by using positive words^[10] to describe the side you believe in and neutral vocabulary to describe the side you disagree with.

This is the sort of thing you have to avoid in writing your report. You need to be able to write objectively about each side’s views of the issue. If you feel so passionately about the issue that you can’t do that, it might be best to choose a different issue to research and write about.

Not properly citing information you got from sources

Plagiarism is probably the worst academic sin you can commit, but it’s also super easy to avoid. All you have to do is cite your sources. That’s it.

Both MLA and APA^[11] have guidelines about what is required each time you use someone else’s words or ideas in your paper. For this paper, you will pick one of those styles^[12] and apply its formatting rules in your writing. Every time you quote, paraphrase, or summarize someone else’s words or ideas, you must provide the reader with a citation.^[13] Different styles format their citations differently, so you’ll need to look up the rules for how to do them and then apply those rules to your specific situation.

Basically, every style uses a two-part, tag-team combination of notations to provide the reader with directions to find the information in the source it came from. APA and MLA both use in-text parenthetical citations (like this) combined with full citations at the end of the paper, but that’s not the only way to do it: Chicago-Turabian, another common citation style used largely in writing about history, uses footnotes that lead to the full citation information at the bottom of each page.^[14] If you don’t have both parts of the citation, you’re not adequately citing your sources, which can lead to plagiarism.

There’s no way to get around the requirements of the style you are following. You can’t just put a lot of information in your paper without indicating where it comes from and then just put a big list of links at the end of your paper. That’s no good. It would be impossible to tell which piece of information in your essay comes from which link at the end, and it’s not the reader’s job to chase all that down. It’s your job, as the writer, to make it super easy for your reader to find the original source of every word or idea you bring into the paper.

Not correctly following MLA or APA citation style

Look, I get it: MLA and APA^[15] are picky and ridiculously complex and specific and difficult to understand and follow. We all feel that way. However, that’s not a great excuse for not doing the work to follow the style.

Remember that the reason we have styles that we agree to follow is so that others who come to your paper know what to expect and where to find it. When you participate in academic conversations through research writing, you need to “speak”^[16] the same language as others so that you can all communicate more effectively. This means that you have to do the work of figuring out the style requirements and making an effort to apply them to the paper you’re writing.

If this seems like too much work, don’t just give up. Your professor can help, the research librarians in the library live to help students like you get their paper formatted correctly, and the Writing Center has tutors that specialize in your particular citation style. There’s a lot of help out there that you can use, and that doesn’t make you a bad writer or student. Tons of professional writers have editors that check their work for them. Every doctoral student I know that has to write their own 50+-page dissertation hires an editor that very strictly reviews their paper and helps to format it correctly according to the style requirements of their university. The only difference is that you don’t have to pay the people that want to help you because they’re being paid by your student fees. Wahoo! Don’t worry though—you’ll get to start paying people to help you when you’re a Real Adult just like everyone else.

Not including a correctly formatted Works Cited or References page

One of the requirements of both MLA and APA styles is to collect all of the sources you referred to in your paper on a separate page at the end of your essay. MLA style calls this the Works Cited page, and APA uses the title References. They each have their own format requirements for the citations, of course, but the important thing is that you have to include these citations in order to avoid plagiarism. These citations at the end represent your readers’ best way of finding the information that you included in your paper from outside sources, and they are what each parenthetical citation in the text of your paper refers to. If you don’t have them, or if they’re not formatted correctly, you run the risk of plagiarizing by making it impossible to find the sources you pulled from.

Each style has very specific ways of formatting the individual citations for their list of sources. The Quinary Phase section of the text has more information regarding both MLA and APA expectations along with some examples and explanations. Make sure you become familiar with what’s expected of you so you can correctly document your sources. If you have any questions about what you need to do, please ask your professor, the research librarians, or the Writing Center tutors.

Thinking of your report as just an expanded annotated bibliography

As I mentioned earlier, an annotated bibliography is not a report. A bibliography is, if you examine the roots of the word, a written list (-graph) of the books (biblio-) that you read as you researched your topic. When you’re researching, you should make annotations about every source you read before you ever start writing. This helps you find the source you need when you go to actually write the thing instead of making you sit there, asking yourself, “Now, which article talked about that really important study that makes my whole paper make sense? Was it the third one I read? The 37th? Or was it in that one book? Or the TED talk?” It’s even possible that you will write an annotation for an article that you read during your research that you will then not use when writing your essay. So, you have an annotation for it in your bibliography but nothing about it in your paper or list of sources. That’s fine.

So, the annotated bibliography has summaries and evaluations of the sources you read about your topic. If you’re serious about developing good research skills, you might also include quotes from the article or book that you might use in your paper to save you time later. However, because each of these annotations simply focuses on what’s in each source and does not produce any connections or synthesis between your different sources, they are nowhere near what your report is expected to be.

In other words, don’t copy and paste anything from your annotated bibliography to your report.^[17] They’re not written with the same purpose or for the same audiences.^[18]