o Font: 12 point Times New Roman
o Margins: 1 inch on all sides
o Ink: Black
o Double spacing throughout
§ Headingo Create a title page (unless instructed otherwise).
o Begin heading 1” from the top of the first page and flush with the left margin.
o Include your name, your teacher’s name, the course title, and the date.
o Center the title on a separate line.
o See example below.
§ Indentionso Indent the first word of a paragraph ½” from the left margin.
o Indent quotations (more than four lines) 1” from the left margin.
§ Number all pages except the title page.o Start with page 1 and number consecutively.
o See example below.
§ A Works Cited page is an alphabetical list of all the sources you have cited in your paper. A bibliography is exactly the same, except it lists all the sources you have used in researching your topic, whether cited in the paper or not. For the most up-to-date citation information, please visit http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/.Rome High School Style Sheet
| Dead Words | Do not use these words! | ||
Instead of … | Use… | ||
a lot, lots | a great many, a great deal of | ||
good | excellent, amazing, generous | ||
many, some, few | several, numerous, two, four hundred | ||
nice | pleasant, friendly, appealing | ||
very | quite, extremely, incredibly, especially | ||
weird | strange, unusual, odd, bizarre | ||
just | now, recently, only, barely, simply, fair | ||
| Reminders § Spell out numbers zero through ninety-nine. Use numerals for figures over 100. § Do not use contractions. § The teacher says, “Punctuation goes inside quotation marks.”§ Use parallel sentence construction. o CORRECT: She loves reading and writing. o INCORRECT: She loves to read and writing. | Things to Avoid § Fragments: Make sure all sentences are complete! § Double negatives: Two negations in the same phrase cancel each other out! § Comma splices: Use a conjunction, semicolon, or period between two independent clauses, not a comma! § Clichés/Idioms: Say what you mean! | ||
| Enhance your writing by…§ using a variety of verbs. Use a thesaurus (or the thesaurus function in your word processor) to enrich your essays and research papers. | |||
| “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” | |||