General Rules for All Assignments

1. ASSIGNMENTS MUST BE TYPED and printed in dark ink. Use 1 inch margins and a 12 point font or larger.  Also double space the pages.

2. NO LATE PAPERS. Assignments must be completed acceptably to receive an acceptable grade, but there will be no credit for late papers.

3. GRAMMAR COUNTS. (I will not waste time with uninterpretable passages. To avoid a zero grade for a paper, PROOF IT!)

4. Avoid first person singular. Write formal responses.

5. Make a copy of each assignment for yourself, because I will keep the paper you hand in.

6. If you use verbal or printed information (or ideas) from others, be sure and cite them. Plagiarism will not be tolerated. Neither will assignments that lack your own thinking and analysis.

7. Keep to the point. Make sure every sentence and piece of information you include is important for answering the question. Be sure you develop your ideas and provide enough explanation to satisfy a reader that your conclusions or statements are reasonable, supported, and well-thought. However, extraneous information may be costly. Think of your reader as a active businessperson who wants an answer to a question or requested specific information about the problem or situation in the assignment. You do not have to explain economic concepts and terms from class, just use them in the given situation. If you feel your application is an unusual use of the term or concept, you may need to explain, but ordinarily--not unless I ask you. Avoid Redundancy!

8. Be specific! If you are talking about the price of other products, mention these other products (and usually the units of measure). Definitely, attach units and interpret actual values that you produce in an analysis in the context of the problem--if you estimate the coefficient of price in a model for tomato plants is -6, then say that a one-cent (or whatever units are attached to the price variable) increase in the price of tomato plants will decrease the quantity demanded of tomato plants by 6 plants (or 6000 plants, gross, or, again, whatever units are attached to the Q variable). Avoid textbook generalizations--apply what you learn from the book and lectures.

9. Organize your ideas! Present matters in a logical, easy-to-follow style. Use connections, topic sentences, introductions, summaries, and other aids to inform your readers and insure their steady progress through your presentation. Poor organization frustrates your readers and distracts them from your insights and arguments.

10. The following additional qualities generally impress:

accuracy, thoroughness, terseness, organization, cleverness, creativity, individuality, use of economics, reasonableness, support from real world experiences/events, precision, and clearness of presentation. Kuralt was a student of The Elements of Style, the smallest and most useful book ever penned about the English language. It was the work of Professor William Strunk Jr. of Cornell University. A Strunk student, author E.B. White, later added an appreciative preface about Strunk the teacher and enlarged just a bit on Strunk=s simple rules. Consider everything you ever heard Charles Kuralt say or write and you can trace it to this Strunk paragraph:

    Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph
    no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and
    a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or
    that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Source: The Charlotte Observer, Sunday, July 13, 1997, Page 3c.

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