Cover sheet: Not necessary--as far as I'm concerned this is a complete waste of paper.

Front Page: Put your name, the class (and section number), and the date that the assignment is due in the upper left-hand corner of the paper. The title (if your paper has one) should be in bold text and centered with a space between the last line of the title and the first line of the body of your paper.

Fonts, Line Spacing and Margins: Papers should be written in a 12-point typeface (that is a font that looks like typewritten or newspaper text, not like frilly handwriting or a circus flyer) with all lines double-spaced. Use the usual default setting of campus word processors for the margins of your papers (1" at top and bottom, 1.25" at left and right).

Definition of a "Full Page": A full page is exactly what it implies, full. If an assignment asks for at least three full pages, four lines of text at the top of page three will not meet the requirements of the assignment. The page length of my assignments is neither difficult to meet nor arbitrary so take them seriously. If your last line of text is at the very bottom of page three in the above example, you're walking on somewhat thin ice, so don't even ask about two-and-a-half pages. I don't round when it comes to page length.

Page Numbers: If a paper is three or more pages long, you should use page numbers to keep the order of your essays together. On feeder assignments, informal writing exercises or papers less that three pages long, you don't need to use page numbers.

Staples or Paperclips: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I will not be responsible for losing loose sheets of papers that are not fastened with a staple or a paperclip. If I lose a whole paper, then you can blame me, but loose sheets of a five-page paper can be lost much too easily. There are staplers and boxes of paper clips all over this campus. Same my sanity and use them. I absolutely will not take a paper with a hole punched in the corner and the tab bent in order to keep the pages together.

Logic: Use it, always and often. Don't assume that your audience automatically knows what you're talking about or agrees with your point of view when you write a paper. Keep playing devil's advocate with your own arguments as you write. If you are making a particular claim, you should try to anticipate and address the reasonable counter-arguments that might arise in your readers' minds. For example, if you write that "Cigarette smoking is bad for you," you need to not only be able do demonstrate why you believe this to be the case (using examples that back up your claim--i.e. "studies by the American Medical Association indicate that smoking directly leads to heart and lung disease") but also to pre-emptively deny the counter-arguments that may arise (i.e. "The studies that indicate otherwise were either conducted by or partially funded by tobacco companies, whose vested interest in the outcome of the studies casts considerable doubt upon their objectivity and validity"). This goes for every single claim you are making in a paper. Obviously you will have to defend 1+1=2 or the sky is blue a lot less than most other claims, but keep asking yourself why you believe something to be true until you feel like you could change someone's mind who disagreed with you. This takes hard work of the mental variety, so apply yourself accordingly. If you need an example of why this is good practice, think of how hard it was for Galileo to convince people of what we consider to be an obvious fact--that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa.