This is not an exhaustive list. With every new lab protocol, you folks come up with the darnedest ways of messing up a perfectly good paper. However, if you heed the comments here your reports stand a much better chance of being mistaken for professionally written research papers.

       Quotes

       When you write a paper related to literature, history, current events, and many other fields, direct quotes may be essential to a full discussion of the subject. In science, there is very rarely any call for a direct quote. On student papers, there is no reason at all to include direct quotes, except in the case when the student doesn't understand the concept and uses the quote to avoid having to explain it his/herself. Obviously, this doesn't go over too well with the grader. As a rule, do not use direct quotes in a scholarly technical paper. Your own thoughts must be expressed, not those of someone else.

       Verb tense

       Use of the wrong verb tense, at best, is irritating to read and reflects poorly on the student's writing skills. At worst, the reader can be confused as to what facts are already known and what was newly discovered in the actual study that is the subject of the paper. As a rule, use past tense to describe events that have happened. Such events include procedures that you have conducted and results that you observed. Use present tense to describe generally accepted facts.

       We sought to determine if mating behavior in Xiphophorus helleri is related to male tail length by placing combinations of two male fish with different length tails in the same tank with a female fish.

       We found that protein synthesis in sea urchin embryos treated with actinomycin D was considerably less than in untreated embryos. This finding agrees with the model stating that protein synthesis in 24 hour sea urchin embryos is dependent on synthesis of new messenger RNA.

       Reference to results of a specific study should also be in past tense.

       Abercrombie and Fitch reported that 30% of the public is allergic to wool.

       Mixing tenses is even worse - this sort of thing hurts my ears. Unfortunately, the people who read the news in television and radio broadcasts are frequently unaware of verb tense at all.

       Two guys rob a liquor store downtown. The robbery occured at midnight last night.

       [from a newspaper article] Two inmates hide in trailer to escape S.C. prison.

       The last one had me puzzled. I was thinking, if they know the inmates are in the trailer, why don't they just go in and get them? What the article actually reported was that the two had hidden in a trailer which was driven out of prison, allowing them to escape. I grew up speaking and reading English (the American version, that is). Imagine the difficulty faced by a non-native speaker who learns proper English and then reads the local rag or tries to make sense out of reports by "talking heads" on new shows.

       Proofread!

       Incomplete sentences, redundant phrases, obvious misspellings, and other symptoms of a hurriedly-written paper can cost you. Please start your work early enough so that you can proofread it. Check spelling of scientific names, names of people, names of compounds, etc. Spelling and grammatical errors can be embarrassing. Since many very different terms have similar names, a spelling error can result in a completely incorrect statement.

       When you print off your paper, please make sure that tables are not split over more than one page, that headings are not "orphaned," pages submitted out of sequence, etc. Remember, someone has to read this thing! If the reader is an editor or reviewer, you might get a rejection notice because you were too sloppy.

       Irrelevant information

       Anecdotal information

       Sometimes you may feel the need to justify a statement or procedure by stating "'the instructor told us to do this instead of that." You might think it appropriate to write "we used Microsoft Excel to produce a graph of x versus y." Such information is anecdotal and is considered to be superfluous. In some cases omission of anecdotal information is unfortunate.

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