McMahon College Essay Requirements for both English 1A and English 1C

These Are the Essay Components and Rules of Conduct I Consider When I Grade Your Papers and Assign Your Final Semester Grade.

 

1.  You must present a clean stapled essay with the pages stapled in the right order with no pages upside down and no food stains.

2.  You must turn in a paper that has the minimum pages set in the assignment and include a Works Cited page according to MLA format.

3.  You must have a Works Cited page with a minimum of 3 sources.

4.  Your essay must be about 80% in your own words, establishing your own distinct authorial voice, and about 20% quoted and paraphrased material.

5.  You cannot use unattributed material from other sources (like the Internet) and try to pass off the writing as your own. Such writing is a fraud and a work of plagiarism and will result in an F grade with no opportunity for rewrite. A handful of students try to pass off plagiarized writing to me every semester without fail.

6.  You must use headers with your full name and page number in the upper right hand corner of each page.

7.  You must use correct verbs.

8.  You must avoid sentence fragments, comma splices, and run-ons.

9.  You must distinguish the use of quotation marks and italics.  Quotation marks are used around short story and essay titles. Italics are used for book, magazine, newspaper, film, and TV titles.

10.                You must use quotation marks the American way with the punctuation INSIDE the quotation marks, not the British way, with the punctuation on the outside. Correct: “The Mini Cooper is a symbol of stuffy hip consumerism,” according to Professor McMahon.

11.                For your quizzes, you are writing one or two paragraphs. I am grading your ability to comprehend the reading material and develop your paragraphs with a topic sentence, supporting details, and cohesiveness.

12.                You can email me your essay in lieu of coming to my office but realize you must email the essay (to jmcmahon@elcamino.edu) in two forms: a PDF file or Word document AND by pasting the entire essay in the email text box. If you don’t hear from me in 12 hours, I did not receive your essay. You cannot say you emailed me for a final paper and then give me the essay after the semester and demand a grade change.

13.                To be fair, I have to deduct a full grade for late essays.

14.                You can rewrite one essay of your choice for a maximum increase of 30 points. You cannot, however, simply revise corrections I’ve already made. Otherwise, I would be grading my own essay. You have to dramatically change the substance of the essay for a successful rewrite.

15.                Some students try to give me an essay that their friends wrote during a previous semester. This is why I change the essay assignment every semester. You must adhere to this semester’s essay assignment, not a past one.