Although your instructors will provide written feedback when assessing your work and entering your grades, they generally won't provide exhaustive notes on any errors they notice. Take control your writing development by leveraging available resources like Grammarly, writing tutors, and Writing Lab paper submissions. Polish your scholarly work with the help of our services that will review your work for grammar, mechanics, along with many other elements of writing.

As your writing evolves with each passing academic term, you will recognize a range of registers and styles and adapt your own writing according to the individual course and task at hand. This is to be expected: You are internalizing disciplinary writing conventions that will serve you in your coursework as well as in your chosen profession. Practice writing according to the conventions of each assignment with the support of available resources.

Rasmussen requires all students and staff to format papers, cite sources in-text, and list references according to the guidelines in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (APA). In addition to helping your reader, citations serve a variety of scholarly purposes (avoiding plagiarism, demonstrating a solid theoretical foundation, lending credibility to an argument, situating a piece of writing within the context of the field at large, and allowing other researchers to locate your references).

Bluebook formatting is a uniform system of citation for legal text.  The process of editing legal text to conform to these standards is sometimes referred to as “bluebooking.” The bluebook method is the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. This method is taught and used at the majority of U.S. Law Schools, and used in a majority of U.S. federal courts. While many state courts have their own citation rules, they typically are modifications or customizations of the bluebook method as well.