professionalism

Here's a basic guide for how to email your professors. The overall ideas it presents are on target—however, steer clear of the typos and comma splices demonstrated in the sample email!

academic honesty

Academic honesty is expected and required. This means:

• Doing your own work and collaborating with others only as directed;
• Using sources the right way
  • When should you quote, and when should you paraphrase?
  • How do you quote a source properly?
  • What is plagiarism? I don't want to be a plagiarist!​​

citing sources

Do not use automatic citation generators until and unless you know the style well enough to check the citations for accuracy. The automatic generators often get citations wrong. You are responsible for getting it right—and it's not difficult once you get the hang of it. 

Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge, makes the entire Chicago Manual of Style ​available online. (Login required.) Most of the time, you will not need this much information. The resources below offer the aspects of the Chicago Author-Date style that you will use most frequently.

Dr. Ray Gen made a video for his AP Language course demonstrating how to use Chicago Author-Date style. His explanation is geared toward people who are familiar with APA style, but it is helpful whether you know APA or not.

Fairfield University provides a checklist for reviewing your papers to ensure you've included all the elements of citation.

Purdue University's impressively comprehensive Online Writing Lab offers a sample paper written in Chicago Author-Date style, with explanations of the guidelines throughout.

writing conventions

Think grammar doesn't matter? ​A court ruling in a Maine labor dispute hinged on the omission of a comma and the parts of speech used in the state's wage and hour law! Workers were ruled eligible to receive overtime pay because of this grammatical analysis. 

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