1 If you had an eight page paper to write, that means you need to write roughly 16 paragraphs.
2 The intro and conclusion paragraphs should be last things you write. In the course of writing a paper you will almost definitely reach conclusions or think of new ideas that didn't occur to you when you set out
3 Your introduction should be written like you're trying to explain the paper to a friend who doesn't know anything about the topic.
4 Your conclusion should be written like you're trying to explain to your professor why your paper is important
pretending the audience are middle school students keeps ideas=clear, words=simple, and papers=long
introductory paragraph and conclusion, that leaves 14 body paragraphs.
5 Write down 14 ideas that support your thesis,
rearrange them to make sure there is a natural thought progression,
and before you know it you had an 8-page well-structured essay.
- Topic sentences: It should be possible to read only the first and last sentences of each paragraph and still understand what your paper is saying. Not only should they capture the point of the paragraph, they should indicate how one paragraph leads to the other.
6 When doing your reading, keep a word document open and transcribe passages from the books or articles, with page numbers.
90% of what you've copied out won't make it into your paper, but you will be able to easily copy-paste quotes into your paper
Go one step further with that 6th tip. Start a new file for each source. Title it Author's last Name - key title phrase. First thing you do, before anything else, is write out the bibliographic entry as it will go in your bibliography. Then take your notes under that. It's now searchable on your computer by author and title phrase and your bibliography is plug-and-chug. And don't delete it when the paper is done. You may need those notes again...
7 Use the professor's assignment as the outline. They'll usually give you 3 to 10 points they want covered. Those are your talking points
8 For each paragraph, fill in:
P: Point/topic of paragraph. you should be able to read this sentence and know what the paragraph is about.
E evidence . This should be your quote or your sources information.
E: Explain. Explain how the quote relates to your topic and expand on it. This part should be a couple sentence
(9 If you're in a real hurry to finish, here's what you should do to produce an essay of sufficient length:
Write a paragraph that summarizes your whole paper. Then type out a few sentences to lay out the topic at hand. Make sure to cover everything in the paper in a cursory manner.
Split it into lines, rewrite each line after itself in a slightly different manner. You should compartmentalize topics and expand every subtopic whilst maintaining variety of expression. Finally, divide the document into parts and change everything up a bit.
Repeat till desired length is reached. Do everything at least once but add extra passes as you go until the document's verbosity is sufficient. Be extra careful to reiterate the previous methods to perfect the amount of information covered. Periodically you should restate everything of importance to expand upon the topic at hand.)
10 Writing on a blank page is hard. So don't. Before I start an essay, after all the planning stages, I write half a page on MS Word. Half a page of anything. If it relates to the essay, then great! But if not, it doesn't matter. Half a page of how I'm not looking forward to do this essay, of how those meatballs are starting to repeat on me, or how pissed off I am with a flatmate right now. Once I've got half a page or so, I'll stop and start on the essay.
