Welcome to the College Writing Guide! Writing is essential to your academic career. You will be required to write papers for many if not all of your classes. Because of this, it is important that you know how to write a good paper. This guide will help you choose a topic, organize your thoughts, format your essay, and nail your citations.
Before you can begin working on your paper, you want to make sure you understand what your teacher wants and what the criteria of the assignment are. How many pages do you need to write? Are you supposed to persuade the reader on an opinion or just inform them on a subject? Asking these types of basic questions will help you construct your paper.
The next step is determining the topic of your paper. Sometimes your teacher will give you your topic in the assignment, but you will usually have to choose your own topic. See the boxes below for strategies on choosing a topic.
Writing a solid paper takes time. It takes time just deciding what you want to write about! The number one mistake students make in writing their papers is not starting the process soon enough. You should begin choosing your topic and organizing your thoughts as soon as you know what the assignment is. Do not wait until the day it's due! To help you manage your time on each assignment, see the link below:
Your thesis statement is the key idea of your paper summed up in a single sentence. Whether informative or persuasive, it is important to develop a strong thesis statement so that your readers know what your paper is about. It is typically placed at the very end of your introduction and serves as the backbone for your entire paper.
REMEMBER: If you are writing a persuasive paper, the thesis cannot be an informative statement. It has to be an opinion that you must support and convince your reader of.
When choosing your research, follow these 3 steps:
First start with a broad subject or area of interest. Then narrow down to your topic to something specific in that area of interest.
For example, you can start off with a general interest in environmental science and then narrow this down to climate change. Your topic can’t be too broad or too narrow, it has to be right in between these two extremes.
After choosing your topic, you now have to narrow down to your specific research question.
Creating concept maps or mind mapping is a powerful brainstorming tool that will help you narrow down your topic. The purpose of mind mapping is showing the relationship between different concepts. It is typically a series of circles connected by lines to show the relationship between topics.
For example, as you can see, you start in the middle with your main, broad topic. From there, connect it to smaller, more specific topics within that broad topic. Some of those secondary topics will be related and some will not be related.
