Thursday, October 4, 2012

5 Steps To Organizing Academic Essays

Academic essays tend to be tedious. These requirements take the most time of college students compared to other coursework requisites, such as quizzes and long exams. Why? Simply because students are expected to exert additional time just to complete a writing assignment. Mental concentration is needed in addition to the time-consuming legwork.

Here are the five most important things students must remember before writing their academic essays.

1. Topic

Choosing an interesting topic is the first step. This is where personal interests have a great bearing. There is no point in pursuing a topic that students find unappealing, lest they are very open-minded in discovering new things or ideas. It is but natural for young people to stick to a topic that they are most comfortable with.

Also, students must understand the objective of the course they enrolled in. For example, a technical writing course aims to develop the following: communication analysis, documents gathering and interpretation, working habits, selection of appropriate format, organization of information, application of graphics, and adoption of a writing style. With a clear understanding of the objectives of the course, students know what to expect and to deliver to their professors every time they are given a writing assignment.

2. Resources

In this category, students only need to be resourceful and hardworking to find the right materials. Research sources include the libraries, online lecture notes and data from government websites. Adding facts and statistics to an essay would allow students to support their claims or hypotheses statements.

In addition, students need to consider the number of required pages on their essays. This would help them determine how much data need to be incorporated on the papers.

3. Scope and Limitations

Setting the scope and limitations of a research project gives students direction on how they want to develop their paper. It is advisable to list down the sub-topics of a main idea. During the planning stage, students must freely consider a number of sub-topics so as not to forget anything that might prove important. After doing this, students must logically arrange the sub-topics to ensure a fluid discussion of ideas.

In choosing what sub-topics to retain, students must keep in mind the purpose of their essays. These sub-topics serve as supplemental information. Nonetheless, they provide a critical link for writers to relate or support their initial and final assertions.

4. Methodology

In some instances, professors require students to choose a research paper methodology. If so, a skill in data gathering is a plus point. This would make things easier to collate the data for the research material and for the subsequent data analysis to be done. In data analysis, students can employ a variety of statistical tools that are most applicable on the available set of data. These include descriptive statistics to provide readers an illustration of the data being presented; comparative testing methods such as Z-tests or t-tests; and ANOVA or analysis of variance to check hypothesis of thesis statements.

5. Conclusions

Essays must have good closing arguments. In this way, the readers would not forget the purpose and objectives of the main thesis of the paper. A summary of the strong points would also help highlight the important details of the paper.

Essay Writing

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