Style Score Guide
 

A clear, concise, and engaging style makes anything you write more persuasive. For readers, your style as a writer is your persona, and human nature is such that people like to agree and are reluctant to disagree with people they like, and instinctively resist the ideas of those they dislike. Of course, college students in 300-level courses should be able to write grammatically. And yes, deviating from conventional grammar can be a way to create particular effects, but writers do that as a conscious choice, not because of indifference or incapacity, and the rules for academic essays are not the same as those for poems, short stories, and novels. James Joyce did not write letters the same way he wrote Ulysses, let alone Finnegans Wake.

However, style is not limited to grammatical correctness; a sentence may be grammatically flawless but impenetrable, long-winded, and annoying to readers. Many grammatical errors have little or no effect on clarity: a comma splice, for example, is an obvious grammatical error but will never by itself cause confusion. Confusing writing results from some combination of imprecise (or simply incorrect) vocabulary, awkward syntax, and wordiness. Readers may well ignore a misused semicolon, but the moment they decide you aren’t making any sense, they will toss your work aside. Paragraphing matters, too: a paragraph that continues despite an obvious change of focus creates a coherence problem, as does a paragraph break in the wrong place, though short, undeveloped paragraphs are a problem of content rather than style.

In addition to grammar, vocabulary, word choice, and concision, some mistakes degrade your ethos, meaning your readers’ sense of your competence and trustworthiness. These include errors in quotation and citation format, spelling mistakes, and anything that hurts what I like to call your work’s GDI, for “Giving a Damn Index.” If, for example, you cannot be bothered to proofread your work carefully enough to notice that you misspell the name of someone you are writing about, why would your reader think what you have to say has any value?

The table below lists various types of errors and the penalties each incurs. These penalties are for any document of 1000 or fewer words. Longer documents’ scores are modified by length; for example, a 2650 word document would have its total deductions divided by 2.65 before being subtracted from the overall grade. Every document starts with a style bonus of +3 for concision.
 
Grammar
Sentence structure errors such as fragments and run-on sentences, including comma splices (first instance of each kind) –1
Sentence structure errors such as fragments and run-on sentences, including comma splices (second and subsequent instance of each kind) –.5
Subject-verb disagreement (first instance) –1
Subject-verb disagreement (second and subsequent instances) –.5
Apostrophe errors (first instance) –1
Apostrophe errors (second and subsequent instances) –.5
Other punctuation errors, depending on severity –.25 or –.5
Pronoun and antecedent errors –.5
Part of speech errors such as using an adjective as an adverb or a noun as a verb –.5
Dangling participles and misplaced modifiers (words or phrases) –.5
Other syntax errors, depending on severity –.5 or –1
Verb-form errors such as using the past tense where you need a past participle –.5
Unnecessary tense shifts (maxiumum four penalties per paragraph) –.25
Other grammatical error –.25 or –.5
   
Coherence  
No transition where one is needed –.5
Incorrect choice of transition word or phrase, depending on severity –.25 or –.5
Failure to break paragraph where topic changes –1
Paragraph-break in the wrong place –.5
Other coherence problem –.25 to –1
   
Vocabulary and Word Choice  
Using the wrong word for your meaning, depending on severity (worst case: using a non-standard English word) –.25 to –1
Using a cliché –.5
   
Wordiness  
Using an adverbial intensifier –.25
Using to be, to have, or to do where a stronger verb is easy to substitute –.25
Wordy sentence openings (There constructions, It is . . . [that]constructions) –.25
Unnecessary passive voice –.25
Using prepositional phrases instead of posssessives where the latter are possible –.25
Using progressive tenses where simple tenses make more sense –.25
Prepositional phrase leading to pronoun subject –.5
Weasel words or phrases (including seem when you are not contrasting appearance and reality) –.25
Other wordy phrasing (the fact that, able to, at the present time, and so on) –.25
Redundancy –.25 to -1
Maximum total penalty for wordiness (remember you start with a +3 for being concise) –5
   
Quotations, Paraphrases, and Citations  
Quoting inaccurately (per inaccurate quotation) –3
Failure to indicate where a paraphrase begins –3
Failure to parenthetically cite a quotation, first instance –3
Failure to parenthetically cite a quotation, second and subsequent instances –1.5
Incorrect, inadequate, or unclear citation –.5 to –1
Poor attempt to integrate a quotation with your own syntax –1
Failure to block-quote when required, first instance –1
Failure to block-quote when required, second and subsequent instances –.5
Incorrect punctuation at end of a quotation, first instance –.5
Incorrect punctuation at end of a quotation, second and subsequent instances –.25
Incorrect use of quotation marks or failing to include them where they are required –.5
Other quotation and citation format errors –.25 or –.5
Works Cited page format errors (spacing, indentation, alphabetization, and so on) –.5 to –1
Works Cited entries format errors (maximum penalty –5, provided every source is cited) –.25 or –.5
   
GDI Errors  
Misspelling a word –.25
Spelling the same word two different ways in the same document –1
Confusing any of the words in the first section of The Incredibly Annoying Error List –1
Misspelling the name of someone you are writing about –3
Other errors from Conventions page –.25 or –.5
Violations of the format rules (font, margins, spacing, headers, and so on) –.5 to –3
   
Bonuses  
An instance of emorably graceful or vivid (but still clear) phrasing, which includes word choice and syntax +.5 or +1
Effective use of varied sentence length and structure in a paragraph +.5
 
 
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