Help me Improve my Lifting Essay!

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Hello T-Nation, I am a student who has written an essay for a school project about fitness and am looking for some feedback. It is kind of a large project and is hosted on fitness-health.github.io. If you would read the essay and take the survey on the website so I can get some feedback, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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OK, couple questions:

  1. What class/level is this presentation for?

  2. What citation system are you required to use? You are using quotation marks in places where they are not warranted, and you are citing more than is necessary in any system I am familiar with. Review the rules for whichever style is required and edit accordingly - I am referring to your inline citations, your bibliography looks spot on (to me).

  3. Read through it again yourself, you have some spelling errors and you are using commas in places which do not require them. When you read through it, pause slightly at each comma - this will help to show you where you need them and where you don’t. Also, why do you bracket the first letter of some words (example, [a]bout)?

  4. I understand it is an overview, but you can do better at organizing the whole of the paper. There is no ‘flow’, you seem to jump from topic to topic - a transition between topics, tying the information together, might work better.

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Maybe @The_Myth could help. (Rumor has it he’s Nicholas Sparks IRL.)

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Far from it, lol.

@boatguy hit the high points.

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  1. This is for 10th grade class.
  2. We need to use the MLA citation system, which requires citations after any information provided by the website and after any specific quotations I believe.
  3. Did this. Thanks for the suggestion. I have edited accordingly. The brackets are required when editing a quotation at all, so if the start of a quotation needs to be lowercase, it has to be in brackets.
  4. The first part of the paper regards dieting and the second regards training. What would you suggest as an example?
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Regarding the citations, I think you are doing it too often. Yes, you have to cite every time you use info from a source, however - in some areas of your essay you are using the same citation repeatedly, about every other sentence or so. If a section of your essay is from the same source, you only need to cite at the end of that section (right before you move into information from a different source or at the end of a paragraph).

If I am giving him erroneous information, someone please correct me.

Also, google ‘citation machine’, it gives you proper formatting for every style of citation - just plug the right information into the right part of the form and it will format both your citations and bib for you automatically.

As for the other thing, I don’t know, maybe I’m just nit-picking. My personal style of editing is to read through it once it is done and judge how easy or difficult it is to understand and adjust accordingly. It’s (mostly) easy to understand, though it is a bit repetitive in some spots - you repeat the entire line about caloric surplus or deficit several times when you don’t need to. Or was that a way of reaching your required length? :wink: