Please find the remarks modified under the suggested ideas of John Louie from Nevada University that will considered to grade submitted abstracts for course GEOL-581.

Twenty-five percent of your grade in this class will depend on your ability to write clear, concise, and original abstracts ``summarizing the essential information based on the well-established elements of the geophysical literature.  You are supposed actually to improve on the authors' original abstracts. The quality of your writing will also affect your grade on the final project report.  Please find here some suggestions for avoiding common errors.

Your abstracts are considered to be on a scale of 0-10 points:

0   No abstract, or contains plagiarism		 8 Good
1-5 Partially complete			 9 Very good
6   Poor					10 Excellent
7   Fair

Also,  late submitting abstracts are considered one point downgrade.

If you have difficulty writing or don't understand the grammatical terms used here, buy a manual of English style and keep it at your elbow. Several are in the library:

An Instructions to Authors by the Editors of the professional journal Geophysics gives the proper forms of many specialized geophysical terms and SI units. (Also available in PDF, RTF, and GIF formats including a few necessary special characters.)  The general suggestions of John Louie that you are supposed to consider are listed in below:

• You must not plagiarize. The guides above define plagiarism and explain how to avoid it. I will return any material with plagiarism to you without grading it.

   

• You do not have to type your abstracts, but they must be neat and easily readable.

   

• Please use double spacing, so I can mark corrections clearly.

   

• Try to avoid the passive voice. If this seems difficult, then one trick is to never use the verb to be (am, are, is) in your writing. Substitute an active verb with a more precise meaning.

   

• Check your spelling carefully, especially if you use a spell-checking program on a computer.

   

• Write short sentences. Avoid sentences with multiple clauses. A well-placed semicolon or ``and'' often averts a run-on sentence.

   

• Hyphenate related compound adjectives. Do not hyphenate compound nouns.

   

• Pay attention to capitalization of, and articles preceding, geographical and geological terms. The Suggestions to authors of the reports of the USGS is an excellent guide.

   

• Use only correct SI units of measurement. Review the proper capitalization and punctuation of unit names and their abbreviations. See the Geophysics Editors' suggestions referenced above.