A term paper is a writing assignment you are supposed to complete over the course of an academic term and accounts for a huge portion of your grade. Consequently, you should approach one with utmost care and attention. In this article, we will tell you about some techniques you can use to improve your term paper writing and produce results that will be positively received by your teachers/professors.
Table of Contents
Structure of a Typical Term Paper
While the exact structure of your term paper will depend on the college you attend, preferences of your supervisor, and the discipline you study, usually it follows more or less the same pattern:
- Title page. Basic information about your term paper, introduced in a manner required by the style guide;
- Acknowledgments. An overview of the paper and its topic to provide a general context for it. Introduce the topic you will cover, your rationale for choosing it, and any other relevant contextual information;
- Table of contents. Make sure you follow the requirements of the style guide here;
- Abstract. Here you enumerate the issues and questions you are going to cover in the paper, as well as provide a short overview of your research;
- Literature review. Here you provide the basic information about the existing body of research on the subject as well as any gaps in it you are going to cover in your paper;
- Methodology. Here you discuss the methods you are going to use and how you measure their effectiveness;
- Main part. Here you introduce your arguments, carry out your research and offer your solutions to problems;
- Results. The sum of your research, conclusions, and closing statements;
- Recommendations. Your suggestions for future research in this area;
- Bibliography. All the sources you used when writing and researching your paper.
How to Write an Original Term Paper
While you can simply follow the requirements in the assignment, there are always ways to improve your term paper simply by taking the right steps at the preparatory stage. You can, for example, choose a very obscure topic, something that is not broadly studied anywhere else. This will make your term paper special simply because you will be writing about something unique, something nobody else is going to cover. As a variant, you can choose a very specific topic to go deep into a narrow aspect of a well-known topic, an aspect that was not paid due attention to before.
A good alternative to an obscure topic is the support of a minority opinion. If you cannot find a sufficiently obscure topic to cover, you can decide to promote a point of view that deviates from or is opposed to the generally accepted opinion on the subject. However, you should be careful when using this approach, lest you choose an opinion that is so widely discredited that nobody in his/her right mind would support it. Pay special attention to brainstorming the topic for all the potential arguments against your chosen point of view, because there certainly are going to be a lot of them.
Another reasonable approach would be to go above and beyond the reading list suggested by the course and dig up some obscure sources of information for your term paper, something that will not crop up in anybody else’s bibliographies. This will immediately demonstrate to your supervisor that you did more than just a token effort and approached the job seriously.
Editing and Proofreading Your Term Paper
Do not be in a hurry to finalize and submit your paper once you finish writing it. Your job is not yet done. Before you can show it to anybody, you have to edit and proofread it. Make sure you do the editing first – it includes all large-scale alterations like a rearrangement of paper fragments, adding or eliminating new material, rewriting of individual paragraphs, and so on. Read your paper at least twice and try to see if everything is logically arranged. If there are no gaps in your logic, you can proceed to the proofreading.
Make a list of all the mistakes you commonly make and go over the text several times, every time paying attention to only one or two of these types. This will help you focus your attention and find mistakes you missed earlier.
Ask somebody to proofread an essay for you – it may be a professional proofreader or just a friend you trust. Another person is always better at noticing your mistakes than you are.
Do not be overly reliant on automatic spellcheckers – they are simply algorithms, and the effectiveness of most of them leaves much to be desired.
As you can see, when you approach the task systematically, writing a term paper is not so difficult. Even if you do not consider yourself to be a good custom term paper writer, you can simply follow our suggestions – it will certainly improve your results.
