Written Assignment No. 1: Unique Primate Traits and Differences Between Strepsirhines & Haplorhines

1.) First, in one to two solid paragraphs, carefully explain the traits unique to the primate order. “Unique” doesn’t mean weird or peculiar. It means those traits that distinguish primates from other animals. For example, primates have fingernails instead of claws.

2.) Next, create two lists that clearly explain the physical and any behavioral differences between strepsirhines and haplorhines. Your emphasis should be on providing good coverage of the differences and clearly stating them in the lists. Note: The textbook spells strepsirhines and haplorhines each with one “r.”

3.) Use all of textbook Chapter 6 as your source. The many illustrations and illustration captions provide good information as well as the text. Advice: Outside sources may have incorrect and irrelevant information, and their classification scheme may not match that of the textbook. The 25-minute video posted in Module VI will be of use here.

Required

1.) Complete the Plagiarism Tutorial posted in the Written Assignment 1 Module. Do remember the college and class policy that copying will result in a zero for the assignment. You are expected to use all the technical terms and the names of the different genera and species—that is not plagiarism. It’s the way you express the ideas that must be your own. No quotations. This is a short assignment, so it’s your own writing that should be featured.

2.) If you use any source other than the textbook, it must be documented. Give full information about author, title, date, page numbers and URLs. The format for documenting your sources is given in the Writing Resources Module, one of the last modules, so scroll down to find it.

Writing Basics

a. Write in complete sentences. Avoid sentence fragments. Good examples of what is meant by a sentence fragment are given here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/620/01/ (Links to an external site.)

b. Capital letters, underlining, bold or italic fonts should not be used to create emphasis.

Genus and species names are to be typed in Italic font. The genus name is capitalized, but the species name is not, as in Homo neandertalensis.

c. Do not capitalize to emphasize a word. If you are unsure which words should be capitalized, then check the Purdue OWL. See link above. Note, the names of disciplines or fields, e.g., anthropology, are not capitalized.

d. Avoid abbreviations and the ampersand (&), except for standard abbreviations of scientific terms.

e. If you use verbal contractions like don’t, isn’t, wasn’t, etc., do not forget the apostrophe; in college essays and written assignments, it’s better to spell out these contractions: do not, is not, was not, etc.

f. Commas and periods are placed before ending quotation marks: For example, “Cultural anthropology makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” (Note positions.)

g. Avoid run-on or fused sentences and comma splices. These common problems are explained at Grammar Bytes, the silly but useful wesite that will help you with the mechanics of writing. Go to http://chompchomp.com (Links to an external site.). Run-on sentences are confusing to the reader and indicate the the writer’s thinking lacks clarity.

h. After first introducing the full name of a person you are discussing, in most cases thereafter refer to the person by his or her last name. For example, if you are writing about Charles Darwin, refer to him as Darwin, not Charles. This is the convention in college and scholarly writing.

j. Clean up misspellings and proofread carefully for sentences that fall apart or don’t make sense. When you edit, cutting and pasting phrases or moving things around, go back to see that you haven’t left behind the remains of some sentence that you thought was eliminated.

k. Most Important: All writing must be done by you in your own words. That means no copying from the Internet, no copying from printed matter, or from each other. Plagiarism results in zero points for the assignment.

I’m happy to help you get started with the assignment. Ask early if there’s anything you would like clarified.