Beginning Your Term Paper: a Guide for Dummies.
Writing a term paper can be a very scary process. If you don’t know what you’re doing with sources, your thesis, or even your topic can make the paper nearly impossible to write. It can be very easy to make everything painless. There are a few things that you need to do before you even begin to write it.
- Your thesis
- Your research
- Your topic
- A good outline
These four things can make it very easy to write any term paper, whether it is a scientific research paper, or even a literary research paper. Your topic is the basis; it is your whole paper. Make sure to keep the topic relevant to your interests, and pick something specific and easy to work with. It will help in the long run of the paper. If your topic is already chosen for you, look at it from your own personal perspective and find points that are unique to your point of view. This is an easy way to simplify the structure of the paper, if the point is easily identified you can narrow it down and fit it into the bounds of your own paper.
Your thesis statement is the backbone to the whole paper. The thesis needs to be properly supported by the research, and should pinpoint the single idea that you’ll be discussing. The more simple it is, the easier it will be for the reader to make their own conclusion from their own experiences, and compare it to your conclusion. The thesis should be easy to defend with the research.
Your research is something that should be organized well; the paper depends on this. If you take notes from the start of the paper, then it won’t be hard to find key things in the research to prove certain points in it. The research should be concise and neatly sorted into something that you understand.
After all of this is done, you should write an outline. This will be the skeleton, or core to the paper. It is the very roughest draft of your paper, but is a good tool to use if you get lost, and don’t know how to structure your paragraphs and big parts of the paper.
The paper doesn’t have to be scary or difficult. As long as your follow these few things, your whole paper should be easy to write and relatively painless.