"Accuracy of Support"

        College-level readers demand accuracy from writing they will trust.  One enormous difference between most high-school writing and college-level writing is that the latter is preparation for running the world.  High school diplomas usually will not qualify you to manage other people, to set policies, to write laws, or to judge the best course of action among alternatives.  Those are the kinds of tasks college should prepare you to undertake.  Mistakes in trivial writing harm no one.  Mistakes in documents that manage people will harm real human beings, including their authors, and that harm usually has further bad consequences.  For that reason, you must try, to the best of your ability, to tell the truth when you write.  College-level readers will perceive inaccuracy as a kind of "lie" in that it distorts your verbal picture of the world.

• As you write, and certainly before you turn in your writing, check the facts, including the way their names are spelled. 
• Do not exaggerate, ever, and especially do not claim more certainty about your conclusions than you can support with solid evidence.  A carefully demonstrated case for possibility or (harder still) probability can do great things, but an exaggerated claim of certainty always will fail.
• Do not try to achieve this level of accuracy on your own--ask for second opinions of your evidence and reasoning from people who should know the facts as well as or better than you (other good students in the class, the instructor, Writing Center tutors).
• Because your accuracy depends upon your sources' accuracy, always seek the best sources, not the most easily available source.  This usually means using scholarly, peer-reviewed sources rather than sources acquired by Internet searches using commercial search engines like Yahoo or Google.  When your sources are not peer-reviewed by experts, you take upon yourself the burden of demonstrating the sources are trustworthy.  Experts tend to avoid even looking at amateur sources of evidence for fear that they might accidentally remember misinformation from such sources, a kind of "pollution" of your mind by contact with writing that does not play by the rules of academic.