Term Paper Trauma: The Ordeal of the First Term Paper

Research for a term paper is much easier than most students imagine. A website created by scholars provides abundant information, arguments for and against controversial ideas and links to articles with evidence. One good source, an article that argues for a position and provides arguments against the position, with solid facts for both sides, tells a student how to write a paper. With that one source, half the work of research is done.

Anyone who can write a good paragraph can write a good paper. One of the most important writing skills is the ability to make facts from different sources fit neatly in a paragraph, the skill of boiling information down, summarizing it. University researchers who reviewed 133 scientific studies of teaching methods ranked teaching this skill, the skill of writing summaries, the most important of all. It's one of the vital skills this ebook teaches.

Beginners can improve their writing by a applying a simple rule: don't use too many long sentences. The run-on sentence may be the most common writing error in student essays. Sometimes, a sentence is strong simply because it's short.

An English teacher warns students against using the popular grammar software Grammarly. Google Docs, which has helpful grammar suggestions and excellent spell-check, is free.

An experiment has shown that students can improve their writing by solving puzzles. The experiment was done with puzzles that teach eight very important sentence types. Learning these sentence types, or a few of them, will make a difference in the quality of a student's writing, and the puzzles are here for the student to solve.

Some books on writing have big promises in their advertising. Use these books, say the ads, and A+ papers are guaranteed. All this ebook sets out to do is show students, parents, and teachers how to deal with the beginner's trauma, how to write a decent first paper.

That's not to say that the paper won't get an A.