Some Guidelines for Writing up Homework Assignments

Some Guidelines for Writing up Homework Assignments Jaye Padgett – Ling 101 Phonology 1 is a disciplinary communications (DC) course. The upshot of this is that you should consider your homework assignments to be papers – even if they are sometimes rather small. Please always keep this in mind. They can be hand-written or typed, but they should be papers. A good analysis takes time to develop. You will usually have to leave more than an hour or two for the job. The first analysis you come up with is not always the best one. Leave yourself time to come back to your analysis and think about whether you have any new insights that could make it better. 1. It’s important to put off writing anything until you have worked out the details of

your analysis, and your argumentation. Be clear on where you’re going and why, before you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

2. Have an introduction, of even just one or two sentences, where you state the main

point(s) you want to show. It’s OK to write something like “In this paper I will examine the sounds [o] and [ɔ] in Swahili.” But it’s better to write “In this paper I will examine the sounds [o] and [ɔ] in Swahili and show that they are in complementary distribution, with /o/ being the underlying phoneme.” Notice how the second version implies you have to know where you’re going when you start writing.

3. Argue for what you think is the right analysis. This includes taking seriously any

salient alternative analysis and showing why it is less desirable. (E.g., what about saying that /ɔ/ is underlying…?)

4. Make use of examples to illustrate your claims, e.g. Swahili forms that show [ɔ]

only before nasals and that show [o] in a more diverse set of environments. Call on linguistic terminology as appropriate (“phoneme”, “allophone”, “complementary distribution”, etc.).

5. Appeal to notions we’ve developed in class. But offer your own ideas when you

think something more is needed. 6. Make sure you test your analysis or claims against all of the data. Do you account

for all the right forms? Equally important, do you avoid predicting wrong forms? If there are any problems or potential problems with your analysis, discuss these.

7. If you realize that your analysis has problems as you write it up, then go back and

rewrite the assignment. Remember: what you turn in is a well-finished and succinct presentation of the best analysis you could find. It should not be a history of your trial and error work.

8. An assignment should be clear and easy to read.