HANDBOOK QUIZZES

One key skill this course seeks to improve is the ability to use a handbook to help you navigate the various academic documentation styles each of you will be expected to use throughout your college career. Some courses use MLA style, while others use APA, Chicago, CMS, and others, depending on the specific discipline. These styles govern the rules about citing sources, quotations, and bibliographies, as well as how the paper is physically laid out. The skill you should be developing is using a handbook to guide you on how to meet the expectation of a given style rather than attempting to memorize any one style.

To promote this skill, you will periodically have a "handbook quiz" in this course: the syllabus will announce specific skills described in the handbook, and you will come to class and take a timed 15-minute quiz to show that you can perform the skill. If, for example, the syllabus says, "The quiz will focus on these four issues: use of ellipses, capitalization of a title, marking a title, and properly punctuating a signal phrase," then you can expect to be asked to use an ellipsis correctly, properly punctuate a title, choose between quotation marks and italics for a title, and give the correct punctuation at the end of a signal phrase on the quiz. You will also be asked to say where in the handbook (or on the class web site) you found information needed to perform the skill.

To prepare for the quiz, do the following:

1. Read and mark the assigned pages in the text.
2. Create a "Handbook Card" on which you will write the key rules that deal with the skills, as well as the handbook page numbers or web page titles that contain the information. The card can be up to 5" x 7". It can be a piece of paper rather than a card, and you can use the front and back of the card. This card will be your only resource on the quiz, so make sure you think about what you will need to know. Put your name is on the card.

Grading: The quiz itself is 30 points. The card is worth another 5 points.