Self- Regulated Professionals in Saskatchewan

1.Please make sure to read the instructions carefully and do what is asked. To answer questions asked in detailed instruction.

2. Please take a moment to consider the purpose of a written assignment. It is to provide a clear message and important information to the marker or reader. It makes sense to do whatever it takes to make sure you provide what the reader requires, and to carefully and accurately present the information so the reader feels they can trust the information being provided to them, can read calmly for content and not have to go through 6 blue ink pens editing everything before the content is revealed (or not!!) and then gives you a good mark at the end of it all! These are our mutual goals!

3. Write well: Be concise, precise and factually specific (not vague), use the law, format legal citations properly because those are the rules in my world, use the required academic/ legal sources (because that is what is essential in the legal world), organize the assignment logically to improve the flow and readability of your message, and please source according to academic requirements.

4. These are academic/ legal assignments, so the most crucial information to use is the law. That might sound trite, but think about the sources of law we study: legislation (Acts and Regulations further to Acts), case law and the Constitution. When you are researching and analyzing a legal problem, go to the sources of law first. Read and APPLY the statute and then use other legal sources to enhance your analysis.

5. Source your writing: I must emphasize again how incorrect sourcing of references is a problem in university assignments, including yours. I can’t tell you how many incorrectly used lengthy direct quotes copied right from a source, but without quotation marks and/or a source identifying page or paragraph numbers, I’ve seen. It is improper academic style.

APA is very simple to use. It is (author’s last name or organization, year), or (author’s last name, year, page or para number, or n.p., written as p. number) for a direct quote. Substitute “n.d.” if no year of publication is given. That’s the essence of it. It takes one second to do and eliminates all suspicions of plagiarism and shows respect for the intellectual property of the writer.

6. Reference Lists: Robo-reference lists are incorrect and irritating! Please don’t use them! Please consider that the purpose of the reference list is providing crucial information to the reader to follow up your sources because they are deemed by you to be important to your assignment. For instance, recall that when the robot was sourcing the Competition Bureau, it wrote the organization as “Canada, C.B.”. What author/ organization is that?? Completely impossible to determine. What the robot is trying to say is the “Government of Canada. Competition Bureau.” “Canada,C.B.” does not convey accurate information to the reader that the Competition Bureau is a federal government agency. You need to know that to understand its jurisdiction and to access its website.

7. Research:. Do more research than might be stipulated as a minimum. It’s much better to know more about a topic and then decide what to emphasize and discuss, rather than to miss a great deal and hand in an assignment which is conspicuously lacking in content. Again, you MUST USE AN ACADEMIC/ LEGAL SOURCE in your paper as well as websites and the statute.

8. Proofread. Assignments were often almost unreadable because of not correcting common problems: colloquialisms, incorrect grammar, lack of concordance in nouns/verbs, overuse of “they”, “them”, “it” which doesn’t concord with the previous noun, incorrect or missing punctuation, incorrect use of capital letters, the wrong use of words, etc.

PLEASE SEE THE COURSE OUTLINE AS WELL AS THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS

Please check with me if you are still unsure after you read this carefully! I’m happy to discuss anything about the assignment with you so you do a good job of it!