Assignment 13-14
Q & A's
1. I have found that I have been able to write my paper without a lot of references; what is the minimum number you would like cited throughout the paper?
Sometimes many references is unavoidable, but students do sometimes tend to over document their papers. Remember that you only cite statistics, quotes, authors' opinions, and unusual information (only find it in one source and no one else seems to know anything about it). All other information is deemed common to the subject and covered by the bibliography. If you have many statistics, you may have many citations, but be careful about over quoting your paper -- it is best to put it in to your own words unless there is a reason not to lose the wording of the source.
2. I've had someone review my paper and he says that I shouldn't end a sentence with "of" such as: "...the crime he was convicted of." Is this right? Should it be written as "...for (or of) which the crime he was convicted."?
This someone must be an English major or teacher! Give him my compliments.
He is correct. You can not end a sentence (correctly) with a preposition, and "of" is a preposition. Prepositions are linking works that tie a noun and its modifiers to a sentence, which is then called a prepositional phrase, i.e. The man walked in the house. "In the house" is a prepositional phrase, with the "in" being the preposition that ties the noun "house" and the modifier "the" to the rest of the sentence.
As you can see, if you use a preposition at the end of the sentence, it is not linking anything to the rest of the sentence, and is grammatically incorrect. So your friend put it where it belonged, but I would state it a little differently -- "...the crime for which he was convicted."