How To Write a Paper

Writing a paper is like roller skating -- few people can do it well, but no one wants to admit that they can't. The truth is, writing a paper isn't that hard, but it takes some organizing skills. Like most things, writing a paper takes less time and produces a better result if you follow a systematic plan.

The Plan

The plan is the key to writing a paper. You need to select a topic, select an audience and select an approach. Those three items together define your task. Your topic may be selected for you, or you may be free to write about anything at all, but remember, the best topics are the most narrow. Be as specific as possible in selecting a topic and don't hesitate to narrow the topic further. If the assignment is to write about the geology of Mars, you may be able to narrow the topic further and write about volcanism on Mars. Of course, you should be sure your instructor will allow you to narrow the topic, but in general, the narrower the better.

Once you have a topic selected, you must select an audience. This is not obvious at all. Are you writing for a scholar in the field such as your instructor or are you writing for the general public? Perhaps you are writing for someone at the level of your classmates -- someone who is currently taking a course in the subject but is not yet an expert. If you are writing for the general public, it is helpful to think of writing for a retired lawyer. Such a reader will be an intelligent, thoughtful reader but will probably not know the technical terms that may occur in your paper. In any case, you need to think about which terms and concepts need explanation and which can be left to your reader.

The approach you take to your subject can range from a simple report to a critical analysis. You should probably do more than just report the facts you have found. Reports are what 6th graders write about Oliver Twist, but we want to do more than just report. In almost any college level paper, you will want to be analytical. That is, you will want to present the facts you have found, and then interpret them for your reader using the experience you have gained from your own reading and from your work in the course. Thus you might report on evidence for volcanism on Mars and then analyze this evidence to show that some of it is open to question and some is not. Remember to analyze your subject. Any fool can write a report; a college level paper is more.

Papers can sometimes describe procedures such as laboratory projects and their results. Of course, you must report on the methods you employed, but you must then analyze your results. How accurate are they? How could you improve the method to give better results? And so on. Answering such questions is a form of analysis common to good laboratory papers.

Structure

The three secrets to success in writing are Organization, Organization, Organization. You must arrange facts and the relations between facts in a meaningful order. That means your paper must have an organizing structure that is clear to your reader. Your reader should be able to scan your paper and immediately tell what you are going to present. The first paragraph of the paper should state the topic and plan as clearly as possible. The topic and plan together are the controlling idea of your paper. If you are writing about George Washington's false teeth and their influence on the military history of the Revolutionary War, then you should say so in the first paragraph. No matter what happens, don't indent till you have stated that controlling idea.

But don't ramble. Introductory paragraphs are only introductions. Be quick about it and get on to the good parts of your paper. If your introductory paragraph runs more than half a page (typed double spaced) it is too long. Get to the point.

Because we often change our minds as we write, it is a good idea to write the first paragraph after the rest of the paper is done. You may find that you have changed your conclusions or thought of new approaches. Before you start, plan to replace the introductory paragraph when you finish the body of your paper.

The first paragraph will usually make the organization of the paper clear, but the best way to make the organization obvious is to use section headings. Write them down before you start. They are a preliminary guide that you can fill in as you write your paper. For example, the headings in this paper are
The Plan
Structure
Technical Details
Plagiarism
The Most Common Error
Such section headings will help your reader follow your organization.

You can organize a paper in many ways, but don't try to be complicated. Your goal is not to win a literary prize, but to show your reader what you have discovered about your topic. Simple is better. You may want to use a rough outline like this:

Why this is important.
The basic facts.
The implications of these facts.
From all of this we can conclude that...
If your are writing a laboratory paper you may want a slightly different basic outline.

What this project is trying to do.
The data and measurements we need.
How we proceed.
The results of our project.

The accuracy of our results.
These entries in our outline would not make good section headings because they are too general, but you can see how they can help us organize a paper.

Once you have a basic outline such as one of the above, jot down the ideas you want to present in their proper places. Erase, cross out, move items, rearrange, add more until you have an outline. Don't worry about the Roman Numerals and letters that some people use in outlining. They help, but don't let them deter you from making an outline. If you take time to make an outline, you will save much more time when you write your paper, and your paper will be better organized.

Not only should the paper be organized well, but individual paragraphs should be organized also. To a certain extent, a paragraph has a introduction, a body, and a conclusion just like a paper. The introduction is the first sentence of the paragraph, which can serve as a topic sentence. It tells us what the paragraph is about. The other sentences in the paragraph provide details, examples, exceptions, etc, but they don't introduce new topics. All of the sentences in the paragraph fit under the topic established by the topic sentence. Finally, the last sentence of a paragraph can act as a conclusion. Well organized paragraphs will help your reader understand your ideas.

The preceding paragraph contains a topic sentence, a body of sentences, and a concluding sentence. The concluding sentence may not always be necessary, but it is often helpful.

You can test your paper for good organization by reading the first paragraph, the first sentence of each body paragraph, and the final paragraph. If you have used topic sentences, you will be able to understand the topic, plan, and organization from such a quick scan. The great writers of literature do not always use topic sentences, but we are not trying to be artistic. In simple, expository writing, topic sentences almost always help.

The last paragraph of a paper is the conclusion, and it is more than just a restating of the facts. The conclusion draws all of the aspects of the paper together an summarizes the fundamental position of the paper. A concluding paragraph never introduces a new idea that has not been discussed before. If an idea is worth mentioning, go back and create a topic sentence and paragraph for it in the body of the paper. Then it will make sense when it is mentioned in the conclusion.

Technical Details

If you are writing a paper then you must think about your topic, your paper, and the technical process of communicating with your reader. Grammar, footnotes, bibliography, diagrams, equations are all details you may need to consider in a paper.

A grammar lesson is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can list a few of the most common and most serious errors in college level papers.
Fragment. A sentence fragment is not a complete sentence. Often it lacks a verb. For example, "Sentence fragments, lacking verbs and therefore not containing an action." That is not a sentence. Almost all instructors feel that a sentence fragment is a very serious grammatical error. It is certainly a sign of poor literacy.

Comma Splice. A comma splice occurs when two sentences are joined with a coma, this is an example. Beware of "however." It is not a conjunction and cannot be used to join sentences. A comma splice is also a very serious grammatical error.

Agreement. Subjects and verbs should agree. "The men is here," for example, is an example of a subject and verb that do not agree in number.

Notice that there is a difference between footnotes and a bibliography. Footnotes refer to specific pages in a reference where you found specific facts. A bibliography refers to the list of works which you consulted while working on the paper and thus does not refer to specific pages.

In some papers you may want to include diagrams, tables or graphs. You can easily place them at the end of the paper identified as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Then you can reference them from within your paper. Equations, however, are mathematical sentences and should be placed within your paper. You can type simple equations, or you can leave space and later write in a more complex equation by hand.

Finally, arrange ahead of time to have your paper typed or printed out. It is astonishing difficult to read most handwriting, and a stack of 30 papers written by hand will break the spirit of almost any professor. Print the paper on one side of the paper only.

Always proof read your paper and correct any typos before you hand it in. You would be amazed how often a carefully written paper is carelessly printed.

Plagiarism

Presenting another person's ideas as if they were your own is stealing. Don't do it. Presidential candidates have been ruined by episodes of plagiarism during their college years, and a surprising number of students are suspended each year for plagiarism. You may not hear about it but it happens. Such students don't usually mention it to their friends; they just pack up and go home.

Of course you should not borrow other people's words without a footnote giving proper credit, but another form of plagiarism is borrowing ideas. If someone else invents a neat idea for the origin of the moon and we present it as if we thought of it ourselves, we are guilty of plagiarism even though we may not have used the same words.

Another form of plagiarism is the theft of entire papers. If you are writing a paper on a subject and your friend wrote on that subject in a previous semester, you could copy your friend's paper and put your name on it. Of course, that would be plagiarism. If you read your friends paper to get ideas, and then wrote your own paper, you might be guilty of plagiarism. Did you take ideas from the first paper and present them as your own? It may be best not to read an earlier paper to avoid any possibility of plagiarism. Of course, you must read something. Books and articles written by experts in the field are acceptable references, but a paper written by a student in a previous semester is quite different.

Working with someone else in the course, a lab partner, for example, raises questions about plagiarism. You may need a partner, or you may need some advice on procedures, but once the data is gathered, do the work on your own and write your own material. Even in that case, you should acknowledge your partner's help at the end of the paper. If you have doubts about whether such cooperation is permitted in a course, check with your instructor.

The Most Common Error

Many people try to leap to the end of a project. They want to save time, but by skipping the middle parts, they make their job more difficult and wind up wasting time. Confucius said, "The longest journey begins with a single step." Begin at the beginning, work step by step in an organized way, and when you reach the end, stop.