Explanation
Scholarship is a set of procedures for discovering, creating, and sharing knowledge for improving yourself and the world. When you take a college class, you have dedicated yourself to growing your knowledge in a context of scholarly tradition, tradition which serves to support and amplify the growth of your knowledge. You build your knowledge and abilities on the basis of what has been discovered and established by those who contributed to the discipline before you - whether it is how to write, how to do calculus, or, in the case of this class, how to develop and apply a scientific understanding of the geologic processes that shape the Pacific Northwest.
Writing your own answer is the basis of how you learn. As you develop and write an answer, you are creating knowledge in your own mind. The most meaningful answers are not something you "look up" or "find." The best answers are concepts you assemble, synthesize, compose, polish, and present to others, and are based on research, evidence, skilled use of language, and logic. To realize for yourself the full power of ideas, learning, and knowledge, you must always compose your own answers, write your own phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In addition, of course, you must always cite any sources that informed your ideas.
Always explain things in your own words.Do not copy. If a student copies, it indicates that he or she does not know the answer, and so does not deserve any credit.
Paraphrasing, in which you take somebody else's text and tweak a few words or fit its phrases into your sentences, is also a form of plagiarism.This applies to any essay (whether a phrase of a few words, or anything longer) that you write for this class. If you got information, pictures, or ideas from other people, cite your sources.
If you copy any text, enclose it within quotation marks (which indicates you are quoting it, hence the name quotation marks) and follow the quoted text with a citation for the source.
And do NOT paraphrase. Copying and slightly re-working portions of text without citing your source is also a form of plagiarism. It is intellectually dishonest regardless of whether you thought you were being honest or not.
To not explain something in your own words will be interpreted to mean that you don't know how to explain it, and therefore you don't understand it.
________________________________________________________
One other note, about the importance of answering the essay questions on the lab answer forms.
There are only a few essay questions on the lab answer forms. It is of paramount importance for your lab performance that you answer each essay question.
If your lab essay answer is incorrect, you will earn a zero, but at least you will have tried.
In addition, because you have two attempts on each lab answer form, you can look at the feedback on your failed essay question and use it to help guide you toward a successful answer on your second, final attempt.
NOT answering an essay question at all earns the negative equivalent of its points. The negative points serve to separate the performance of those who do not have the courage to attempt an answer from those who at least tried.
_________________________________________________________
Checklist
A worthy answer will:
- Use complete sentences.
- Have few or no grammatical errors (i.e. use capital letters only in appropriate places, use punctuation correctly, use verb tenses correctly, use spelling that is almost entirely correct, with all key geological terms spelled correctly).
- Make sense on its own without having to read the question.
- Be an original composition, written by you, not copied or quoted without making it clear which part is copied and citing the source.
- Provide references to any information source that you quote as part of your answer, or to any source from which you gained information that you used in constructing your answer.
- Textbook citations can just say Textbook, p. __ or chapter __ giving the page or chapter #.
- Give the first author's last name, the book title or article title and journal title, year, publisher or publication, and page numbers for any books or articles.
- For example, for a book, Smith, Geology, Freeman Publishing, 2009, p. 67-68.
- Or, for an article, Jones, "Seismic Intensity of the Nisqually Earthquake," Nature, 2002, p. 872.
- If you get your information from a website, give the full URL. Most URLs begin with http://.
- For example, do not just write "Wikipedia." Instead, give the full URL of the specific article in Wikipedia that you used.
- And speaking of Wikipedia, you should know that when students use Wikipedia as their only reference, there is a very high likelihood they will fail to demonstrate an understanding of the answer. The quality of information and level of writing in Wikipedia are highly variable and in many cases inappropriate for this class. If you only look in Wikipedia for an answer, you are unlikely to find the information you need to succeed.
- Geology is a science, like physics, chemistry, and biology. Any references (books, articles, Web pages) you use to develop your answers for this class should be based on science and geological evidence, rather than being based on mythology, the "paranormal," pseudoscience, or religious ideology. Examples of unscientific sources to avoid using as a basis for understanding geology include those opposed to science due to religious ideology, those promoting "alternative" ideas such as the idea of sunken continents like Atlantis, those predicting that the world will end soon, those based on Nostradamus or psychic predictions, astrology, and those which think the pyramids were built by aliens from other planets.
Return to Rubrics Index
Writing Rubric
updated: 6/19/13