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Many students come to university without a strong grasp of academic writing style conventions. Some of them are also not well-known, such as around Indigenous peoples. Here I provide some of the rules of academic writing that are often assessed but not as often taught. If you want to get a sense of other style conventions, beyond what I talk about here, a good guide is Strunk and White, Elements of Style (a book). Affect "Affect" is almost always used as a verb, while "effect" is almost always used as a noun. For example: Sea level rise from climate change will affect many people.
One effect of climate change will be sea level rise.
To get a more complete explanation, see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/affect-vs-effect-usage-difference Apostrophes (e.g., the mistake of "iPhones’s are framed") I think this site is useful for reviewing apostrophe use: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/apostrophe/ There are many apostrophe errors in student writing. If you're new to academic writing, you will need to practice. You probably will not get it perfect, and that’s ok! Assertions vs. If/Then In general, it's best to try to avoid saying we "need to" or we "must" or we "should" do something unless you say what we need to or must do it "for". So instead of an assertion, we would have an "if, then" format to the sentence. The sociologist’s job (*I am a sociologist, and teach sociology) is to tell people what will happen in the social world "if" certain conditions exist. We can have personal opinions about what should happen, but the sociologist’s job is to say what will likely happen in particular conditions. The "if, then" format reflects this. For example, say a study shows that environmental education in childhood leads to adults later supporting environmental stewardship actions. Then you could say, “if” we want to have a society where more people are engaging in stewardship actions, “then” we “must” give schools more funding for environmental education. Breadth and Depth One thing to keep in mind, which is important in all academic writing, is balancing breadth and depth. Sometimes, undergraduate papers include a bit too much breadth and not enough depth. By this I mean that there are many concepts mentioned, but definitions are more scarce and deep engagement with the concepts is also scarce. Citations to more than one source: Combine them all within one set of parentheses It is conventional in academic writing style to combine all sources within one set of parentheses if you want to cite more than one source at the end of a sentence. Sounds straightfoward, but many undergraduates miss this. For example, this is not correct in terms of academic conventions: When people participate in a playful activity, such as birdwatching, they often gain a moral commitment to taking care of aspects of that activity, such as people who enjoy birdwatching becoming bird conservationists (Bargheer 2018) (Cherry 2019). But this is correct: When people participate in a playful activity, such as birdwatching, they often gain a moral commitment to taking care of aspects of that activity, such as people who enjoy birdwatching becoming bird conservationists (Bargheer 2018; Cherry 2019). The exact punctuation separating individual sources within the set of parentheses won’t always be the same. Sometimes it is a semicolon, other times it is a comma. You can check the rules of the citation style you are using to find out which punctuation is appropriate, or just use software like Zotero to automatically format it. Colloquial Try to not be too colloquial. In academic writing, we try not to be excessively formal, but we try not to be too informal either. It’s good to be clear and direct. But it if something sounds too informal, adjust. Commas If you want to use commas as a pause when you are writing a draft, that is ok, but try to edit extra commas out when you are editing. See these links for some tips on how to edit out incorrect commas:
Sometimes students also have missing commas. In general, see these links for some tips on comma use:
Students typically write with some comma splices, which you want to avoid. See guides on that here:
Contractions It is best to avoid contractions in academic writing. When you are editing, to conform to academic style, change things like “don’t” this to "does not". I understand that it is easier to write contractions when you’re in the middle of writing—I think that is common. But then at the editing stage, remove the contractions. Clarity One thing that I’ve learned about writing is that accomplished writers actually edit their work a great deal, often rewriting things to make them as clear as possible (even re-writing entire papers). I tend to just edit a lot, but I try in general to be as clear as possible so that my writing is accessible as possible. One way to write clearly is to imagine someone you know who you respect and like, and who is a generally educated person (e.g., someone who reads the newspaper, or keeps up with world news, or is a frequent user of a library, or an undergraduate in their 3rd or 4th years of university) but who doesn’t know about this exact topic. Then I imagine writing for that person, writing in a way that I think is as clear as possible. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid all specialized terminology. But it does mean that if you do use specialized terms, that you define them, and then the reader can continue on reading while understanding it all. Try reading it out loud to yourself as a stage in editing (I do this, not talking loudly, but softly to myself!), and imagining whether this "general educated reader" you’re imagining would get your point. Developing countries Typically these days it is more conventional in academic prose to say “Global North” and “Global South” since “developed” and “developing” melds a theory of modernization onto colonial relations. There is a theory called “modernization theory” that proposes society moves along a pretty specific track, in all societies everywhere, so that you could have “developed” and “developing” countries—they’re just at different points on the modernization track. But Global North and Global South are more consonant with postcolonial and decolonizing studies that take a critical stance toward modernization theory. et al. "et al." is all lowercase with a period after the "al." This is because “al.” stands for “alia”, so it is an abbreviation, and one usually adds a period after abbreviations, like i.e. or U.S. “et” just means “and”, so it is *not* an abbreviation. As a result, “et al.” has no punctuation after the “et” because “et” is an entire word. Please see the following resources for the correct use of “et al.”: E.g. vs. I.e. The use of i.e. is sometimes incorrect in student writing. I.e. is not used to list an example. Rather, “i.e.” is used to basically say, “what I mean is X”. In other words, “i.e. is used to explain, clarify or rephrase a statement” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/i.e.). E.g., is used to give an example. But why “e.g.” and not “ex.”? Where’s the “g” in “example”? The “g” comes from the Latin roots: “E.g. stands for exempli gratia and means “for example.” I.e. is the abbreviation for id est and means “in other words”” (https://www.grammarly.com/blog/know-your-latin-i-e-vs-e-g/). Extra space between paragraphs Sometimes when students double space a paper, they add an extra space between the paragraphs, which should be removed. In a double spaced paper, the space between the paragraphs is the same within paragraphs. You just indent each paragraph (you just indent the first line). Flow and Writing One important aspect of good writing is its flow of the writing. One way to address flow is to read your writing out loud or listen to it by running it through an app like Natural Reader. It is good to write in a way that is also nice to hear. What I mean is that writing should in many ways sound like talking to someone. If it seems so formal that you’re not even sure what it means when you say it out loud, then you should edit your writing to sound a bit closer to how it would sound to explain your ideas to a friend. Academic writing shouldn’t be too informal, but sometimes students try to make their writing sound so formal that it starts to lose flow. It starts to sound disjointed. So if you think about trying to explain your writing to a friend, and like tell your friend you’re going to explain it in a relatively formal way, and then say it out loud to yourself, this will help you edit your writing to make it flow better. Font – Using a Standard Font In academic writing, it is better to use a standard font, such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Helvetica. It’s just an unnecessary distraction to use another font, especially one that is quite noticeable. If you want to write it that way, that’s fine, but when you are about to submit, please change the font to a standard font. Font – Consistency It is conventional in academic (and most types of professional) style to make sure that the font you’re using is the same across the whole document. So please make sure your academic documents have the same font throughout. Fragments Student writing tends to be full of sentence fragments. We speak in sentence fragments, often. But it is not correct, in terms of the conventions of academic style, to write with sentence fragments. So part of the conventions of academic style is not writing with sentence fragments. Student writing often has sentence fragments in it – just something to work on as you continue writing in this academic context. These links describe how to do avoid using sentence fragments as sentences.
In other words, sometimes students write without complete sentences. A complete sentence is the opposite of a sentence fragment. Grammarly—do a Grammarly editing pass One way I have used to remove errors from my own writing is Grammarly. There is a website called “Grammarly” that you can use to check your paper for small grammatical errors before submitting. There is a paid version of Grammarly, but there is a free version and for general document editing. For my purposes, there is no need to use the paid version. I use the free version, which allows me to copy and paste my paper into Grammarly to identify errors that I have missed. I do this before I submit important documents. So I go through the Grammarly report that is produced by the website, and in Microsoft Word I find the errors that Grammarly has pointed out and I think through each one (sometimes the “error” Grammarly points out is just fine as it is, but for things like spelling, comma use, and other minor errors, Grammarly is great for catching things that I miss). The free version is genuinely helpful for catching little grammatical and spelling mistakes. Alternatively, if you have a good friend who is an excellent English editor (maybe a student who is majoring in English), then they could also read it over for you to help you fix these minor grammatical errors. You could also try methods like saving the document as a PDF and then reading it to yourself out loud, which often also helps identify errors that we miss in Microsoft Word when we are just reading silently in our heads. Finding small grammatical errors is important, because they can add up and tarnish the overall impression someone has of your document—too many grammatical errors and the document is not very professional as a whole. Growth Mindset Feedback When you take feedback about your writing, it is very important to take it in the spirit of the growth mindset. I realize not all professors have a growth mindset: some of them are pretty harsh and think that you are either smart or not. But I don’t believe that. I think that what you do has an enormous influence on who you are and who you will become. There is research behind this idea, it is not just my opinion, as another post on this blog makes clear (e.g., as in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success). The following is a comment that I paste into notes I give students when I’m critiquing their writing, i.e., telling them about other parts of this chapter. So when you are learning about the conventions of academic style, I think keeping a comment like this in mind is important: Please note that I tend to give a lot of comments. I **don’t** do this to indicate something fundamentally wrong with you. Academic, professional, and general writing conventions have to be learned through trial and error. The other way to learn them, beyond trial and error, is to consult books on writing conventions, such as The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. In any case, I’ve been in academia for over 15 years, so I’ve been learning the conventions for a long time, and so I know more of them than you do. My comments are meant to help you learn the (often hidden and untaught) rules of academia. There are lot of these rules, so it is completely normal to need to learn a lot of them every time you write and get feedback from someone who is more senior to you in academia. I’m still learning these rules: when I send my own papers to more senior academics, they always have something to say that can help me learn more of the rules. So the following comments are meant to help you learn a few more of these rules, in the spirit of the growth mindset, **not** to indicate anything fundamentally wrong with you. Hyphen/Dash Sometimes students use hyphens where they should be using dashes. The correct punctuation is often an “em dash” (e.g., see: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/why-you-should-love-the-em-dash/). This is a dash that is the about the size of an “M” character (—). There are keyboard shortcuts for em dashes—on a Mac, Shift+Option+Hyphen and on Windows, Ctrl+Alt+Hyphen. So when you have a parenthetical comment that you want to break up with dashes, you need an em dash. So for example, if I said this: “Environmental sociology—the study of the community in the widest sense (Bell and Ashwood 2016)—can help us understand the issue of climate change”, the “em dash” is being used to set off the “parenthetical comment” (http://www.grammar-once-and-for-all.com/punctuation/parenthetical-expressions/ ). A hyphen (-) is not the correct punctuation in that case. “Our” Indigenous people The phrase “our Indigenous people” or “our Indigenous” is particularly fought against by Indigenous peoples. To say “our” or "our own" is to imply ownership of Indigenous peoples by Canadians or USians/'Americans', as many Indigenous scholars have emphasized. "Indigenous peoples in the land now known as the United States/Canada" is one option for the correct phrasing here, or "Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island", although not all Indigenous peoples in the land that is sometimes called "Turtle Island" would call it that (so there is plurality in what to call the land, as well). "Indigenous peoples in the land now known as Canada/the United States" works, though, from what I have seen. So also do *not* say "our Indigenous communities". They are "Indigenous Peoples" and they are their own. Indigenous scholars often emphasize this fact – see for example Chelsea Vowel, Indigenous Writes, a book. Indigenous Style: Basics 1. Say “Indigenous Peoples” or “Indigenous peoples”. Unless you are yourself Indigenous and reject the label of “Indigenous peoples”, do not say "natives”, “Aboriginals”, or any other term. The shift in language to “Indigenous peoples” in academic and public discourse happened around the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015) and the publication of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). (And if you are Indigenous and are rejecting the term, briefly stating that for your professor/TA will likely be appreciated). “Indigenous peoples” is plural for a reason: there are many different Indigenous groups in Canada, the US, and elsewhere, and reducing them all to one “people” is problematic. Indigenous scholars often refer to this problematic reducing of Indigenous peoples to one group making them a “monolith”—Indigenous peoples are plural peoples. So it is important to say “Indigenous peoples”, rather than any alternatives you may have used *or might think to use*, such as “the natives”, “the aboriginals”, “the indigenous”, “the indigenous society”, “indigenous populations”, etc.. To help give some more background to this, in the following quote, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, an Indigenous woman, describes why we say “Indigenous peoples” rather than “Indigenous people”/“indigenous populations”/“the indigenous” or other such terms. *Please note* that she chooses to not capitalize “Indigenous” here, but she is Indigenous, and that is up to her (as it is for you if you are Indigenous). But you should usually capitalize "Indigenous" just like one capitalizes “Peruvian”, “Canadian”, etc.: "The term ‘indigenous’ is problematic in that it appears to collectivize many distinct populations whose experiences under imperialism have been vastly different ... ‘indigenous peoples’ is a relatively recent term which emerged in the 1970s out of the struggles primarily of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Canadian Indian Brotherhood. It is a term that internationalizes the experiences, the issues and the struggles of some of the world’s colonized peoples. The final ‘s’ in ‘peoples’ has been argued for quite vigorously by indigenous activists because of the right of peoples to self-determination. It is also used as a way of recognizing that there are real differences between different indigenous peoples. The term has enabled the collective voices of colonized people to be expressed strategically in the international arena." (Linda Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012, from the book Decolonizing Methodologies, p.7). 2. It is conventional in academic writing, and in the broader world to a large degree these days, to capitalize “Indigenous”. Unless you are Indigenous and reject the capitalization of Indigenous, please capitalize it. You wouldn’t say, “east asian” or “european” when referring a group of people, so we usually don’t say “indigenous”. 3. There is no single Indigenous perspective. So, don't say things like "the Indigenous perspective". If you’re talking about a specific nation, like the Anishinaabe, then you can say “an Anishinaabe perspective”, but even then, since the Anishinaabe is a confederacy, it would be hard to say what THE single Anishinaabe perspective is. So “an” Anishinaabe perspective is better than “the” Anishinaabe perspective because allows you to maintain the plurality of Indigenous peoples in your writing. This is again this issue of avoiding reducing Indigenous peoples to a “monolith”, to one single entity. Mac + Ken + dr + ick Ok this is a very specific one, if you're learning about/teaching the book Better Safe than Sorry by Norah MacKendrick, but take this as a moment to remember to check to make sure the authors' names you write are correctly spelled: The author of Better Safe than Sorry is Norah “MacKendrick” (said “ma-ken-drick”) not “McKendrick” (which would sound like “mic-kendrick”), “Mackendrick” (which would sound like “mack-endrick”), “Macnendrick”, or another version! You could think, “Mac” the computer, “Ken” the Barbie doll, and “dr. ick” to think about someone with a PhD (a “dr”) studying the “icky” chemicals inside consumer products and food. I don’t know if that funny mnemonic device helps, but it’s clearly a hard name to spell, based on work students have submitted to me. About a third of students devise very creative spellings and capitalizations of Norah MacKendrick’s name. Mac + Ken + dr + ick. Matter of Fact In the academic writing style, it is conventional to cite whenever you say something that makes a claim about how something happens in the world. When a statement is "a matter of fact", it is conventional in social science to provide a citation that shows that this matter of fact about the world is true. How do you know it's true? We want to know. In academic writing, we want to know how you know what you know. We solve this problem with citations. So, anything that you say that is a fact about the world should be cited. Your professors/TAs will thank you if you do that. The writing we do in academic contexts is not journalism, where we assume that the journalist probably checked their sources. The writing we do in academia requires you to tell us where you’re getting any information you discuss. Nounification Where you can, it is best when editing to try to remove unnecessary nouns like “comprehension” or “implementation”. Try to find a way to use verbs instead: “comprehend” and “implement” rather than “comprehension” and “implementation”. It takes some restructuring of the sentence, but it can usually be done. This is one of the principles of good writing style. Parenthetical comments and commas If you make a “parenthetical comment,” use commas to set it off. Parenthetical comments are conventionally enclosed within commas (a comma on each side of the text). A way to find out if something in the middle of any sentence is a parenthetical comment is that you can check what would happen if you took the part of the sentence out—would you still have a complete sentence? If so, then you have likely found a parenthetical comment. Or, could you put the text in the middle of the sentence within parentheses, and then the sentence would still make sense? Then it's a parenthetical comment. With parenthetical comments, you can take them out of the sentence and you would still have a complete sentence. You can review this grammatical issue here: http://www.grammar-once-and-for-all.com/punctuation/parenthetical-expressions/ Periods and Citations The position of the period in relationship to a citation is an academic writing convention that is important to learn. The period comes after the citation, not before. So in academic writing, this is **incorrect** in terms of the convention of how to use periods in relation to the citation: When people participate in a playful activity, such as birdwatching, they often gain a moral commitment to taking care of aspects of that activity, such as people who enjoy birdwatching becoming bird conservationists. (Bargheer 2018; Cherry 2019) And this is the **correct** version (the citations here are in American Sociological Association style): When people participate in a playful activity, such as birdwatching, they often gain a moral commitment to taking care of aspects of that activity, such as people who enjoy birdwatching becoming bird conservationists (Bargheer 2018; Cherry 2019). Plagiarism In general, if an article/book/website has a sentence in it, you cannot simply copy and paste that sentence into your paper, change a few words in the sentence, and leave it at that. Any sentence that has been copy and pasted into your paper needs quotes around it and then a page number in the citation (no page numbers for websites, obviously). IF YOU COPY AND PASTE, JUST CITE IT. PLEASE. SAVE US ALL THE HEADACHE. You need to use your own wording if you are not going to use quotation marks. In general, avoiding using THREE words in a row from another person. Two words is ok. But if you have two words and then you change one word and then two more, etc., for a whole sentence, that is still plagiarism—in general, just don’t copy and paste other peoples’ sentences into your paper unless you are going to use quotation marks and provide a page citation, which is perfectly fine to do. Better to make a citation error than to plagiarize. To avoid plagiarism, what you can do is this: read the thing you want to cite. Then, without looking at it, write out what you think it said. It is almost certain that you won’t be able to remember the exact wording and you’ll put it into your own words. Or just use quotes around the copy and pasted text and list the page number, in the format of the citation style you need to use. In any case, you need to find a way to avoid this kind of plagiarism. Proofread In general, I encourage you to proofread. I usually read through what I’ve written at least twice before submitting something. The number of errors we don’t think we are making when we’re writing is often surprising! Quote as a whole sentence It is conventional in academic writing to introduce all quotes with your own writing. So something like, As [author] discusses, “quote”, is the minimum amount of your own writing that should be included. So, e.g., you could say: As Bourdieu (1990:55) argues, “the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions.” You include some of your own writing at the start of the sentence, so that the sentence isn’t entirely a quote from someone else. Do NOT just paste in an entire quote as a sentence. That is not the convention. Quotes need Page Number Citations If you quote a source, in the sense that it is a direct quote, word for word, citation styles require you to add a page number within your citation. So, to give an example, instead of this: The word “birding” refers to, “the active walking around, looking for birds, and identifying them by sight and sound” (Cherry 2019). We would do this: The word “birding” refers to, “the active walking around, looking for birds, and identifying them by sight and sound” (Cherry 2019:18). (That quote is from this book: Cherry, Elizabeth R. 2019. For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.) Reference List It is conventional in academic style to have the reference list ordered by author, alphabetically. Reference List Indent The most conventional way to report a reference list is to provide a ‘hanging indent’. If you search YouTube or your favourite search engine for "hanging indent", you can see some examples. The first line of each reference should start at the same place as the text above it starts. Then the second/third lines are indented. So the first line should start about 1 inch or so from the margin, just like your text. The first line of the references should start at the same distance from the edge of the page as the title, such as “References”. The first line of each reference shouldn’t like “dip” into the edge of the margin. It should start at the same distance from the edge of the page as the title of the reference list, and then the indent comes only in the second/third lines. So for example, we could have these references in a reference list:  And each one is the same distance from the edge of the page as the title, which is in this case is “References”. They don’t “dip” into the margin.
Scare Quotes Don’t use quotation marks in the “scare quotes” way, like I just did there with the term “scare quotes”. This is a common error in undergraduate writing. In general, when you have a concept to discuss, you don’t need to put it in quotation marks. If you are using quotation marks as scare quotes, to show that you have some kind of critique of the idea, it is better to make the argument rather than using scare quotes to make the argument. Semi-colons Semicolons are often used incorrectly in undergraduate writing (review: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/semicolon/). In general, when you are an undergraduate, I recommend not using semicolons. They are very difficult to use properly, even for professors, who often need professional editors to help them edit semicolons properly. Incorrectly used semicolons can really distract from seeing clearly what the paper is saying. For some reason, undergraduates try to use a lot of semicolons in their writing, even though it is such a difficult punctuation mark to use. Subscript The “2” in “CO2” should be subscripted, as should the “2” in “N2O”, if you use either of these. E.g., if you look up CO2 etc. on Wikipedia they’ll have it subscripted. It’s the normal way to represent things in chemistry, and we need to follow those conventions to create good dialogue between disciplines! If chemists insisted on pronouncing “Weber” as “Webber” (pronounced “Ve-ber”), sociologists would be up in arms. (I can't use subscripts in the formatting tool on this blog. If this is not clear, please look it up). This what? If you use “This” at the start of the sentence, you should say something about what “This” is. So instead of saying something like, “The sociological imagination involves thinking about the structural level, such as corporate lobbying efforts. This is an important part of how environmental problems continue to occur.” You could say, “The sociological imagination involves thinking about the structural level, such as corporate lobbying efforts. This **corporate lobbying** is an important part of how environmental problems continue to occur.” So if you use “This” at the start of the sentence, that is ok. But answer: “This what?” Title of a book italics and Title Case When you include the title of a book in your writing, it is more conventional in academic style to italicize it, and put it into title case. If you don’t know what title case is, it is the style where most words have the first letter capitalized. So there is a book called For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife Through the Naturlaist Gaze. If you are referring to this book and want to say its title in your writing, it would not be conventional in terms of academic writing style to say something like, “In the book for the birds: protecting wildlife through the naturalist gaze, Elizabeth Cherry discusses how the pleasure of observing birds is an important part of protecting the environment”. Rather, to conform to academic style conventions, you would put the book’s title in title case and you would italicize it saying, “In the book For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze, Elizabeth Cherry discusses how the pleasure of observing birds is an important part of protecting the environment”. So with book titles, if you really want to say them in the text of your writing, to use academic style conventions, you don’t put them in quotes, and you don’t just leave them lowercase. You would use quotes only for more minor publications like journal articles or newspaper articles, and for all publications you would use title case. That being said, at the same time, it isn’t usually needed at all to say a source’s full title in your writing. I realize textbooks often do this, so undergraduates may think it is conventional in academic writing. But in most academic writing we do not write out the full title of something. The reader just wants to know what the source says; they don’t really need to know what the source is called. Title case when you’re writing a title for a policy brief or other professional document You should use title case when making a title for a professional document. Title case means that you capitalize the first letter of most words. Sentence case, which is the ‘case’ I’m using in this sentence, only involves capitalizing the first letter in the sentence, other than proper nouns and the pronoun “I”. I think you know what lower case and upper case is. In general, then, just be careful about case when you write a title. You can sometimes use sentence case in a title, but then you should also capitalize the first letter of the word that comes after a colon, if you put a colon in the middle of your title, as many people do. Title of an article in your writing When you include the title of an article in your writing, such as a journal article or news article, it should be in title case, meaning that each major word of the title has the first letter capitalized. And then it should be in quotes, not italicized. These guidelines for capitalization and italics are consistent across APA, American Sociological Association, and Chicago Author-Date styles. That being said, at the same time, it isn’t usually needed at all to say a source’s full title in your writing. I realize textbooks often do this, so undergraduates may think it is conventional in academic writing. But in most academic writing we do not write out the full title of something. The reader just wants to know what the source says; they don’t really need to know what the source is called. So it is best to just put the source in a citation at the end of your sentence and not mention the title of the source, so that we can focus on the point you are making, rather than the title of one of your sources. Whereas “Whereas” is often used incorrectly in undergraduate writing. In general, there are two correct ways to use the word “whereas”. In one correct way, “whereas” comes at the start of the sentence, and is always of this general format: “Whereas X, Y”, where Y is a contrast to X. So for example, “Whereas the term “climate change” may appear to mean that global warming is no longer happening, the term is meant to attest to the complexity of climate even while the Earth’s annual temperature is still rising.” So the two parts of the sentence, when using “whereas” this way, are always to some degree a contrast. So the general form is something like, “Whereas X (something that has one quality), Y (something that has the opposite quality)”. The “Y” is usually more true than the “X”, as in the sentence that was used as an example there. The other correct use of “whereas” is also in this contrast sort of way, but mid-sentence (e.g., see https://grammarist.com/usage/whereas/). In any case, most students use “whereas” at the start of sentences without thinking about this required contrast when using “whereas”. Make sure you check to make sure you’re using it properly, if you choose to use it. If you use it incorrectly, the document looks less professional. Year in Citations In APA, Chicago Author-Date, and American Sociological Association styles, the year should always be reported. Usually, for a source that might appear to not have a date, finding a date is possible, such as in looking at the url for a website or just using the current year for websites that are themselves current and continuously updated. There you have the most common errors I see in undergraduate writing. I hope this post reads ok – I developed these as standard comments I give to undergraduate students in their writing, since these errors come up so often. I did work on the writing so that it sounds more general. In any case, I hope this is helpful! If there's something I should add, please let me know ([email protected] as of 1 Sept 2026).
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