How to Understand Your Instructor’s Comments and Corrections:

A Key to the Scribbles on Your Paper

What is Written	What It Means
Intro or Introduction	You did not provide an introduction to the paper or the one that was written needs further development.
Fragment or frag	This is a sentence fragment.
Awkward	The phrasing was very hard to follow. Clarify.
Jumps	The phrasing was very hard to follow. The individual sentences were fine but the order in which they were written does not flow.
Bridge or transition	Lacks a transition between sentences, or between paragraphs. Be sure to introduce the new idea without leaving the reader behind to swim across the river.
Anth, anthr or anthropology	Your answer did not indicate a thoughtful use or understanding of the anthropological explanations for the issue under discussion.
No No No!!	Your answer did not indicate a thoughtful use or understanding of the anthropological explanations. This is a harsh commentary on missed understandings.
ü |ü	This is a very strong and/or interesting point. The more times you see this on your paper, the better.
	In spite of my poor drawing skills, it is the symbol for paragraph; you should begin a new paragraph at this point in your narrative.
Pg # or pg #	You are required to give the page number if you are quoting (which you only do rarely in a well-written paper).
Year	You are required to give the year of publication.
Reference, reference, ref, citation, etc.	You should have provided a reference (also called a citation or source).
	You inverted the letters in a word or the words in a sentence.
Circled words: Spelunk Lots of the time … the person he spoke of	The word is circled for several reasons: It is misspelled It is a poor word or phrase choice Never end a sentence with a preposition.
An x across a letter, or words (example: considered)	Delete the letter or word
	You should use a period for punctuation here.
	Insert semi-colon.
	Insert quotation marks.
Ù word	Insert a word.
	Insert a comma.
cs	This means comma splice. Remove the comma and make into two sentences or re-write to make the connection more clear.
hyper text can not	You should close up the gap between words and make into a single word.
	You should delete the word or phrase and close up the gap between words.
word	Delete the word or phrase.
	Combine the two paragraphs together to enhance the flow of the narrative.
# eventhough eventhough	You should place a space in this word to create two words.
	Spell out the word, avoid abbreviations
	Wrong font (usually followed by size, no bold, type, etc.)
	Italicize
	Change to bold font
	Change to lower case
	Change first letter to upper case. Capitalize.
Yuck!	Generalizations that I have heard so often I want to scream (by type): Temporal: Since the beginning of time; For all of humanity Gender: He, Mankind (when talking about all humans) Quantity: Lots of; Many; Everyone Anthropological: Americans (there are many different cultures and peoples, even in the U.S.); The culture does (culture is not an entity, it is an abstract concept. So use phrases such as: A cultural group does, or Members of a culture do.)