Sophys: Common Errors for Your First Paper

You will get a copy of this in class tomorrow, but in case you're bored or are perusing your paper at home tonight, here are some common errors that manifested themselves on the first paper assignment this year:

Common Errors The Stranger/Death Paper 08-09

1. Stay in present tense when evaluating literature
2. Double space final copies, please!
3. First and second person problems—particularly, opinion statements about the summer reading assignment or “I am going to tell you about this in this essay” issues
4. Play v. novel. They are not both novels.
5. Pronoun-antecedent/Subject-verb disagreements (particularly in who v. that and in number—Meursault and his friends goes to the beach.)
6. No thesis statement in a handful of papers
7. Irrelevant pop-cultural commentary in some papers—and not as analogies, either
8. Quotes in space
9. Avoid the verb “get”
10. Redundancies: Arab Man, suicide death, death of suicide, convicted guilty
11. Odd statements: “Willy is full of it.” “Meursault gets an offer to work in France but is decapitated before he can accept the offer.”
12. Odd words or phrases: womanist, orientated, narrarator, OMG