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 if you are some variety of English major (as most students in this class are), that goes double. 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 an author or character 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 for the first instance; subsequent instances receive a smaller deduction. These penalties are for any document of 1000 or fewer words, which for this class means synthesis posts. (Reading posts do not receive a style score, though clarity still matters.) Longer documents’ scores are modified by length; for example, a 1650 word document would have its total deductions divided by 1.65 before being subtracted from the overall grade. Every document starts with a style bonus of +3 for concision.