Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. “Does it have to be typed?” “What size margins should I use?” “What style do you want the references in?”

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas — which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

I’ve never once, in 5 years of teaching, been asked a question about ideas.

Ideas are not more important than content, any more than respiration is more important than circulation — formatting is part of the expression of ideas. A reference is a piece of data — it helps answer the question, “how does the author know what s/he claims to know?” A section heading or a footnote is part of the process by which an argument is structured and developed — they aren’t extras.

At the same time, students’ (and teachers’?) emphasis on form seems to miss the point that good presentation without ideas isn’t any better than good ideas badly presented. Is it any wonder that much of what we read is a vapid rehashing not of the course materials but of Wikipedia entries. I mean, if the quality of ideas doesn’t matter, what does it matter where they came from – as long as it’s nicely formatted and search-engine friendly?

Here’s my advice for students: consider formatting not as something separate from your ideas, but as a part of them. Your entire paper is a presentation of ideas — and your design choices are one of the ideas being presented. Every reference, every footnote, even the margins and line-spacing should serve that end.

That doesn’t mean to ignore the standards — APA for a psych paper, MLA for a lit paper, etc. Those standards exist because they are tried-and-tested ways for ideas to be expressed well. But learn them as ideas, not as meaningless frills.

And ask a professor how to write a persuasive argument in your discipline once in a while. That matters, too.

A lot of students try to navigate blindly, responding to the sometimes almost random demands of the system, hoping at any given moment to find someone – anyone! – who can tell them what the heck they’re supposed to do next. Although a lot of schools offer study skills courses to their incoming students, few offer a college survival course to help students figure out how everything fits together.

And it’s far from self-evident – even the vocabulary of the university is weird: there’s registrars and proctors and bursars and provosts and… Who are all these people, and what do they want from you? And more to the point, what are they there to do for you?

Because that is, after all, their job: to facilitate the process of getting you educated. It’s crucial that you learn how the system works at your school, not only because it will help you make smart decisions about your education but because it will help you plan for your life after college as well.

For instance, do you know the difference between an adjunct professor, an associate professor, a visiting professor, an assistant professor, and a full professor? In the classroom, the difference is negligible: they are all people with a strong background in the disciplines they are teaching, and while a full professor might have more experience than an adjunct (or not – some people adjunct their whole lives while pursuing other, non-teaching work) they’re basically all able to provide expert instruction in the topics they teach. But full, assistant, and associate professors are full-time employees of the school, while visiting and adjunct professors are temporary – visiting professors are usually on a fixed term, while adjuncts are hired each semester or year on a short-term contract. There’s a good chance that an adjunct or visiting professor won’t be there a year or two after you graduate – which might matter quite a bit if you decide to go on to graduate school and need recommendations. Full professors, on the other hand, tend to be the senior scholars at the school – tenured, with several publications, and well-connected in the field; a recommendation for a graduate school, scholarship, or job from a full professor will probably carry a lot more weight than one from an adjunct.

It’s important that you make sure you have strong connections with the senior faculty in your department – which doesn’t mean you should avoid the junior and temporary faculty, but it does mean that you should be careful about making strong ties only with junior scholars. A little research on the department website or in your class catalog will reveal the rank of your professors – it doesn’t hurt to check into them a little.

Likewise, ask someone – perhaps your advisor – to help you figure out what all the bizarre job titles you’re confronted with mean in the real world, or look them up on the Internet. Take an evening and actually read some of your college handbook to see what the different divisions of the school are and who the important players are. Call offices and see what they do. The point is to find out what the university has to offer you and how to take advantage of it, rather than settling for whatever services you happen to come across.

I’m always a little baffled vby students who tell me they throw out their old assignments at the end of the semester or, almost as often, as soon as they get them back. This shows a level of faith in the goodness of the universe that is far beyond my own capacities.

There are two reasons why you should hold onto your papers, your syllabus, and really just about everything a professor gives you. The first is practical: stuff happens. Professors forget to enter an assignment into their gradebook, they lose their bags, their cars are stolen, their computers meltdown. Your saved copies of your graded papers, syllabuses, and handouts are your proof that you did the work, that you did it according to the professor’s instructions, and that it was received by the professor. If you find at the end of the semester that your grade is lower than you’d expected, and the professor says it’s because s/he never got your term paper, and you can dig in your files and bring out the graded paper with the bright shiny “A” at the top, you can probably convince the professor to change the grade. If you feel that the professor graded you unfairly for some reason, you can go to the department with your work and request an outside review of your work. Essentially, your folder of saved material is your insurance policy, and it is always good to have insurance.

The second reason is intellectual: your papers are more than just an embarrassing record of naiveté and sophomoric thinking, they are a collection of quotes, bibliographic entries, a finely-tuned phrase here and there, and the occasional forceful argument. Most papers can be reworked into larger assignments when you find yourself in more advanced courses, whether in college or graduate school. In short, your papers are a treasure trove of mine-able material to draw on, likely under circumstances you haven’t anticipated. You’re trying to remember the name of the author of a book you read, or what the psychological principle is that applies to some situation, or whatever — dig out your old papers and have a look. Chances are, they’re both more embarrassing and less embarrassing than you remember.

I keep a small file box with all my student papers, from undergrad and grad school, as well as all my syllabuses and every handout. It doesn’t take much room, and it’s reassuring to know it’s there. I also have every paper I’ve written since I started using a computer in a “courses” folder on my PC. With hard drive space being cheap and plentiful — I have thumb drives with as much memory as my first desktop — there’s hardly ever any reason to delete files at all, so why not keep them?

I know it’s hard to imagine needing this stuff down the line, but the reality is, that’s why you should keep it. You may not need everything, but I can virtually guarantee you that you will, some day, want or need at least one paper you wrote in college — and that it will be the one you least expected to ever have to look at again.