This handbook is a means to an end: improvement in writing college research papers. But it is not the only, or the most important, means, for only you can improve your writing. A handbook, a dictionary or grammar guide, instructions from a professor, or contact with good books - all these are secondary to you. 

You make the choice of words and paragraphs; often you raise the questions; sometimes you find the answers. When the words work, the questions provoke and answers illuminate, then you get the credit. You'll have discovered authority in your writing, the word which derives from author.

At college you have a chance to make that discovery. Here you'll be writing college research papers with differing styles, requirements and degrees of difficulty. Sometimes you will make a mess, or say something you don't mean, as Mayor Daley did at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:

"The police are not here to create disorder. They are here to preserve disorder."

When your writing goes wrong, it will seem not only to create disorder but also to preserve it. At such moments this handbook might prove useful, showing you ways to organize and rewrite college research papers, which can help you rescue order from chaos. But simply reading it and following its suggestions will not help you be a good writer. This handbook is not a How To Be Your Own Best Friend of writing college research papers, because you will not learn "how to" in isolation. The learning you will do here at Amherst will ask you to connect, to make relationships in your head.

Your words on the page are signs of those relationships with other people, tests, facts, authorities, historical events, chemical reactions, biological processes, theories, dreams, and most important, your own ideas. If your writing works, it will show that the relationships can give pleasure and bear fruit. You need not be an "expert" writer to have that happen. Simply believe that words have reasons for being, that they are alive.