Guidelines for Assignment Content

These guidelines apply to both minor and major assignments, but especially to major assignments. It might seem as if all these details and formalities are pretty pointless, but there are good reasons for them. Most importantly, they help to organise the presentation of your ideas and get your message across more effectively. They also give you practice at writing and working to specific requirements. And, of course, they'll get you a better mark.

Please read them carefully, and feel free to ask about anything which is unclear to you. Marks will be deducted if the work you submit does not comply with these guidelines.

If you are having difficulties with the content or references for any of the assignments, feel free to contact your lecturer or tutor. If you are having more general difficulties with assignments, contact the Learning Skills Centre in the Support Centre in the Guild building.

• 1. General
• 2. Structure
• 3. Referring to other works
  • 3.1 Selection of Sources
  • 3.2 List of References
  • 3.3 Referencing
  • 3.3.1 Direct Quotation
  • 3.3.2 Paraphrase
  • 3.3.3 Characterisation or summary of source
  • 3.3.4 Second-hand References

1. General

Good academic writing should both give proper coverage of the topic and be easy to understand. So you need to focus on both the content and the style/presentation.

In terms of style, your aim should be readability with accuracy. Some people feel that using dense, convoluted or highly abstract expression gives the impression that the writer has a solid intellectual grasp of the content but we think that clarity is a much better way to demonstrate this. When you are reading an article or book, you know when it is clear and easy to read and when it is not, and you know how much more you can get from an article or book when it is easy to read. Well that's what you want your writing to be like. Write for the reader!

Semi-random points:

Avoid inane presentational formulae such as 'It is interesting that...' - unless it really is interesting and relevant, in which case make sure that it is clear how it is relevant to your argument/description. If it is an interesting point which is not strictly relevant to your argument/description but which you would nonetheless like to include, put it in a footnote.

Similarly, avoid formulae like 'It should/can/must be noted that...' 'It is notable that...' - unless the point has particular relevance at this stage in your argument/description, in which case make sure that it is clear how it is relevant.

Avoid overusing 'thus' and 'therefore'.

2. Structure (mainly relevant to major assignments)

It is not enough to simply string together facts, points or arguments selected from various sources. The essential task is to present a coherent overall view or argument, and to make clear how those facts, points etc. relate to that overall view. Recognising which points are relevant and developing a coherent overall view is intellectual work, and it is this which is the main focus of assignments (and assessment).

You should be aware that different disciplines have different kinds of requirements for essays, partly through tradition but also because of the different natures of the different disciplines. Make sure you understand how the Linguistics requirements described in this documents differ from those in your other units.

The basic structure of an essay is Introduction, Detailed Points/Arguments, and the Conclusion. This follows a well-established principle for getting complex ideas across: Tell'em what you're gonna tell'em, Tell'em, Tell'em what you told'em.

Introduction

The Introduction should succinctly do the following:

1. identify the central point(s) your assignment addresses,

2. summarise the conclusions you come to, and

3. sketch out the structure of the argument/description that leads you to those conclusions.

In this way, the Introduction is like an abstract of the assignment. It gives the reader the key points, and that gives them a mental framework for understanding the detailed points you need to make to justify your conclusions. Without a good Introduction which summarises the conclusions, the reader has to take on each of the detailed points as they read without really knowing where they're leading and that makes it harder for them to get the key points you're trying to make.

Some students don't like the idea of summarising the conclusions in the Introduction - "Isn't that what the Conclusion is for?" This might be one of those differences between disciplines, or whatever, but it generally works better in Linguistics assignments to make this distinction between the logical conclusions to your argument/description and the final section of the assignment.

Sketching out the structure of your argument/description within the Introduction needn't take much more than something like: "I will first discuss A, then look at B and C" or "The first section deals with A, the second with B and the third with C." Keep it short and to the point.

Detailed Points/Arguments

The sequence of individual points or arguments you provide in your assignment should be logically organised.

Each should be clearly introduced so that the reader can clearly distinguish what the detailed point is. Section headings can be very useful in making the structure of your argument/description clear. [This is one of those differences between disciplines: section headings are punishable by death in some other disciplines.]

Language examples of one or two words may be included within the body of a paragraph. Larger examples should be set off from the text and numbered. Interlinear glosses should generally be provided for languages other than English. Make sure that the point of any example you use is clear - it won't always be as obvious to the reader as it is to you.

Conclusion

The Conclusion should briefly reiterate the central point and remind the reader of the main points of the argument/description which support that central point. Think of it as the thing that ties together the various threads in your assignment so that the reader can more easily see how the details fit into the overall argument/description.

As the preceding paragraph implies, don't introduce new points in the Conclusion. However the Conclusion may identify further questions for research, but it certainly doesn't have to, and more often than not it's better not to.

Avoid inane conclusions of the type 'Well, different people said different things and it's not clear yet which one is right but progress marches on.'

Remember: Don't hold back the logical conclusion of your argument for the Conclusion, it should be introduced in the Introduction!

3. Referring to other works

The main reasons for providing references in your written work are:

• to demonstrate that your intellectual work is better because you have considered a range of existing facts, arguments or opinions in formulating your ideas.

• to give proper recognition to intellectual contributions, which means distinguishing your intellectual work from that of others (i.e. your analysis, arguments, comments, criticisms, comparisons, summaries, evaluations, identification of important points, original presentation of facts, etc.).

• to allow readers to follow up the original sources if they wish.

You should bear in mind that the focus in assessment is on your intellectual work, so extensive quotation or close paraphrase is valued much less highly than work which is in your own words. Using your own words helps to demonstrate that you understand the intellectual content of any sources you use and have considered the facts and arguments involved.

3.1 Selection of Sources
The selection of sources is an important part of the intellectual work in an assignment, and this is reflected in the assessment. You are strongly advised to start this part of the assignment work as soon as possible. No special consideration is given to students who leave it so late that they are unable to get access to suitable sources in time.

You are generally expected to at least consult the reference works nominated for the unit, including those held in closed reserve in the library. You should be aware that using 1st-year introductory texts as significant sources in higher-level units suggests that you have not read adequately in the literature recommended for the unit and may result in a lower mark. The same goes for excessive reliance on the various dictionaries and encyclopaedias of linguistics in the Library - though these are generally good sources and can make a good place to start your reading.

It's not a good idea to start your work on an assignment with the thought that you just need to find a couple of references, just enough to get you to the required number of words. You need to do enough reading to form a solid overview of the topic - that's one of the key things we're looking for in assignments.

On-line Sources

An enormous amount of information is available on the web but you should focus on scholarly works. (i.e. Generally avoid sources such as a webpage entitled 'Dade County Family Services Tips for New Parents: How your child learns to speak'). Publications such as books and journal articles which have undergone academic refereeing are generally more highly valued in scholarly work. UWA students have access to many such books and journals in hardcopy and on-line via the Library catalogue. Many academics also make copies of their refereed and unrefereed articles available via their websites and these can be excellent sources.

With unrefereed papers, one way to check whether they are likely to be suitable is to search for refereed publications by the same author. An author who has many refereed publications is likely to be a better bet than one who has no significant publications. But in the end you have to use your judgement.

Relying solely on on-line sources for your assignment can mean that you have ignored some excellent hard-copy resources (books and journals) available in the library, and your selection of sources may be assessed on this basis.

Make sure that all the URLs for on-line sources are accurate and check that they are still live before you submit your assignment. [Copy the URL from the assignment document and paste it into the browser to make sure.] It is not uncommon for a source to be 'NOT FOUND' when a lecturer or tutor follows up on a reference, and this may prevent your lecturer/tutor from crediting you with the intellectual work you have done in summarising from the source. (Some students like to temporarily save a copy of any on-line sources they use and to note in their assignment that they are available if necessary.)

Age of Sources

Depending on the assignment topic, the most appropriate sources may be quite old. However when the focus is on current work/theories/etc it is worth considering whether the age of the source makes it the most suitable one or whether there are more recent ones which would be better. When in doubt, feel free to consult your lecturer/tutor.

Number of Sources

Your aim should be to read widely enough to be confident that you have a good overview of the points that are most relevant to the topic. There is no simple formula for the number of sources that should be consulted, and accordingly the assessment of selected sources is not a simple count. As an example, it would be rare for a good 2000-word assignment to use less than, say, six sources but more important than just the number is how they are used. Five sources that barely contribute anything to the assignment are less valuable than one source that makes a major contribution.

Place of Source in the Scholarly Literature

An important aspect of selecting sources is to recognise the place of a particular argument/theory/description within the wider context covered in textbooks and/or in the lecture program. An important part of this is often to understand the place of a source in the historical development of the relevant area of theory/description.

One type of error that you can make in this regard is to draw points or issues from different sources without realising that they are quite different because they come from very different theoretical backgrounds or descriptive approaches. If you are unsure about such things, consult your lecturer/tutor.


3.2 List of References
A description of all literature referred to should be given in a references list at the end of the assignment (rather than in footnotes). References should be in alphabetical order according to the surname of the first author, and should include:

• the names of all authors of the paper, chapter, book, etc.
  

• the year of publication
  if you include more than one work by the same author(s) with the same year, distinguish them with letters, e.g. 1988a, 1988b, etc.
  

• the full title
  

• if a book, indicate the edition if there is more than one, and give the place of publication and the name of the publisher
  

  Chomsky, N. and M. Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English, New York: Harper and Row

• if an article, give the name of the journal with volume and page numbers
  

  Carstairs, Andrew (1988) 'Paradigm Economy: a reply to Nyman', Journal of Linguistics 24:489-99

• if a chapter in an edited book, also give the title of the book and the name of the editor(s)
  

  Newman, Paul (1986) Contour tones as phonemic primes in Grebo. In K. Bogers et. al. (eds) The phonological representation of suprasegmentals, 175-94. Dordrecht: Foris

  if more than one reference is from the same edited book, it is acceptable to make a separate entry for the book and refer to this in the individual chapter/article entries in the bibliography
  

  Hammond, M. and M. Noonan (eds) (1988) Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics, San Diego: Academic Press

  Perlmutter, D. (1988) 'The split morphology hypothesis: evidence from Yiddish', in Hammond and Noonan 1988 (eds), 79-100.

  
  

• if a web page, indicate the author, title or page heading, '[web page]', version number and date if available, the URL and the date you accessed that page to get the information
  

  Becklehimer, Jeff How do you cite URLs in a bibliography? [web page] Aug 26 1996; http://www.nrlssc.navy.mil/meta/bibliography.html [Accessed 10 June 1998].

• if a paper or manuscript downloaded from a web or ftp site, cite as for any other manuscript but give the version number and date, the URL and the name of the archive it comes from, if it has one

  Alderete, John, Jill Beckman, Laura Benua, Amalia Gnanadesikan, John McCarthy, & Suzanne Urbanczyk. 1996. Reduplication and segmental unmarkedness. Ms., UMass Amherst. [July 1996] ROA-134. Rutgers Optimality Archive, http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html.

  
  Any of the formatting and punctuation conventions for reference list entries in common use in the social sciences may be used provided they are are compatible with the requirements above. Either outdent the first line of each entry in the bibliography to make the first author's name prominent, as in the above examples, or leave a blank line between entries.
  

No work should be included in the references list unless it is explicitly cited in the body of the assignment. Do not list works that you have consulted in the process of preparing your assignment but do not actually cite in the assignment. If some work you have consulted has been directly important in developing your ideas, then the relevant point warrants mention in your assignment.

3.3 Referencing in text
If a citation refers to content on a particular page or pages in the source, then the page numbers must be given. If it refers to the general content or theme of the work as a whole, page numbers need not be given. However, if it is possible to give a specific page reference where the general content or theme has been explicitly characterised by the author, then give the specific page reference.

Each citation in the text should identify the author's name(s), the year (with letter if necessary) and the page number where that is possible. For example, ...(Harrison 1990: 212)... or Harrison (1990: 212) claims...

We prefer that you don't use footnotes for referencing.

3.3.1 Direct Quotation
If you include significant content from a source using the form of words used in that source, then it must be marked as a direct quote with a reference to the page number in the source. This includes content from the body of the text as well as illustrative examples, data items, tables, diagrams, notes etc. An expression in common use in the literature need not be referenced.

Use quotes sparingly - only when you think the author makes an important point succinctly, or where the exact form of words is important to your argument.

Quotes are to be enclosed in quotation marks, except for long quotes which should be in a separate, indented paragraph.

Example:

The sample of languages chosen by Bybee was 'designed to be as free as possible of genetic or areal bias' (1985b: 25).

3.3.2 Paraphrase

If you restate significant content from a source without using the form of words used in that source, it must still be referenced to the relevant page number in the source (but does not need to be in quotation marks). Significant content here means a fact, idea, point, analysis, argument, definition, etc.

Example:

For example, psycholinguistic research on the learning of inflectional systems seems to suggest that agglutinative patterns are always learned more quickly and accurately than fusional ones, irrespective of the type on the language being learned (Slobin 1971; Dressler 1988: 202).

When presenting a number of points from a single source together in a single section, a reference need only be given at the beginning of the section so long as the section is worded in such a way as to make it clear throughout which points are yours and which come from the source.

Example:

Weinreich (1974: 18-9) lists four types of phonological interference. Under-differentiation occurs when a phonemic contrast in the second language involves phones which are more or less the same as the allophones of a single phoneme in the first language, and a speaker consequently fails to recognise the phonemic contrast in the second language. In over-differentiation, the opposite situation holds, and a speaker imposes a phonemic contrast from their first language on the phones of the second language. The remaining two types, reinterpretation of distinctions and phone substitution, are not relevant to the present point.

An important point here is that readers (and teachers assessing the work) take anything without quotation marks to be your work. If you are drawing on other work, anything without quotation marks is taken to be your presentation of your interpretation of the source. For this reason, close paraphrase, using the form of words used in the source but with only a few words different or with only minor re-ordering, should be avoided since it wrongly presents someone else's work as yours. Close paraphrase of an extensive section of the source is not acceptable (roughly: a large part of a sentence, or more than one sentence) . Fairly close paraphrase is only acceptable where it is giving an explicit listing of a number of very brief points or facts which form the background to a point you are making, but this should be done sparingly.

Here are examples of some of the things to avoid:

3.3.3 Overall Characterisation or Summary of Source
To explicitly report or summarise (some of) the content of a source, it should be referred to as in the following examples:

Di Sciullo and Williams (1987: 88-106) adopt a similar analysis of French causative constructions.They explicitly reject the earlier analysis by Valdman (1977) on the following grounds: ...

Dorer (1988) offers an explanation along these lines for certain kinds of nominal expression in German. The main argument against analysing these as compounds...

3.3.4 Second-hand References

If you cite a source it is taken that you have consulted it yourself, unless you indicate otherwise. If you wish to refer to a source which you have not been able to consult yourself but which is referred to in another source, use the following format or an equivalent in the text:

...Halle (1983: 95, quoted in Kenstowicz 1994: 139) proposes a different solution...

...associated with the segmental tier (Archangeli 1988, cited in Roca 1994: 312).

Both the original and secondary sources should appear in the reference list.

These Guidelines developed by John Henderson. Updated October 31 2005.