Anne Herrington presents to students as well as teachers the essential "Traits of a [Strong] Documented Essay."

  1. an opening that draws in readers, engages them intellectually/emotionally, and directs their attention to what the essay will be about;
  2. an overall sense of purpose with the writer's thinking providing the overall line of development, a line of development that carries forward the writer's point in a reasonable order;
  3. sufficient background to give the reader some context for what's being told or discussed;
  4. a blend of research and the writer's own thinking and/or experience, where the research information from the various sources serves to develop the writer's point and doesn't seem superfluous;
  5. liveliness, vivid examples, detail-all those items that take a reader into an experience and the writer's thinking;
  6. textual acknowledgments (signal phrases and parenthetical references) that distinguish and make clear the interplay between the writer's ideas and those of others from research sources; quotations that are memorable, well chosen, and contextualized within the writer's texts, without over-quoting; works cited page done according to MLA or APA conventions;
  7. a well-edited text.