In my continuing series on basic college study skills, today I’ve decided to discuss what I’m personally very good at, writing an A paper!
I’ve been a teaching assistant for almost 5 years and have literally marked thousands of papers. In my experience I’ve seen the worst and best in paper writing and from the interviews I’ve done with successful students for my book, I’ve come to the conclusion that effective paper writing boils down to sticking to the fundamentals and proper planning. So here are the basic skills you are going to need to write an A paper quickly and effectively.
There are four major stages when writing an A paper; research, brainstorming, writing and editing. Each stage should be disconnected from each other and should be given a specific start and end date. Starting and finishing papers are crucial as you will either not get a paper started or get hung up on a particular step and have to hurry the entire process along.
Researching your A paper
You would think that in order to write an A paper you would have to do tones of in depth research, ironically however the reverse is true. The key to the research stage for an A paper is to research selectively. Multiple sources get confusing and realistically there are only a few well known sources on any subject, or there are a few major camps for a particular subject in which case you would choose the best readings for each viewpoint. Take the paper and do what I call the ‘academic meta search.’ Take 5 relatively well known papers on your subject and cross reference them through an online academic database such as ‘Jstor’ and choose the articles that are referenced the most by the authors, only read those articles and abandon the rest. This will not only allow you to speed up your research it will also keep you focused and motivated as you won’t get confused from multiple sources. Also remember to database all your articles through referencing software such as endnote.
Brainstorming your A paper
By far the most important step in any paper is brainstorming as you will work out your thesis and outline from this process. Many high school and even college teachers will suggest that the outline should follow the research; however this is again ironically wrong. As I tell my students, brainstorming IS NOT an outlining exercise it is instead a thinking exercise. You should not be working out your thesis in your outline, nor should any of your points be muddled or unclear in your outline. An outline is simply a tool for the writing stage NOT the brainstorming stage. For brainstorming I like to use critical thinking. It has recently fallen out of fashion as a brainstorming technique as many students find it difficult but I have put together a guide which will bring you through the fundamentals of brainstorming in an easy to understand way. You can check it out by signing up through my university study skills page for free. (This step is quite in depth which is why I’m giving it to you as a free download instead of taking up the next 10 pages).
Writing your A paper
Begin with an outline from your critical thinking brainstorming exercises. Once you have a good idea of what you’d like to talk about and can see the entire paper mapped out on paper you can begin writing. Make sure your writing is clear, concise, holds the proper level of diction for the class and above all keep it simple to understand. I can’t stress this last point enough. Always offer multiple examples to your reader to explain complex ideas, it’s not that your prof or TA are stupid, it’s simply that if they have been reading 200 papers today, they are not going to have to be hand held through your paper. Make it incredibly easy for them to give you an A on your paper.
Editing your A paper
Many students forget about editing in paper writing. This is in some instances more important than the actual research as the content can be great, but if it’s communicated badly the reader will get frustrated. Unfortunately frustrated readers simply hand out low marks rather than really trying to study the content. It’s not necessarily their fault it’s just the reality of having to mark hundreds of papers and not having enough time to really engage with each student’s content. So edit your paper, give it to somebody else to edit, make sure it is easy to understand and go through the critical thinking technique once again so you can see if you’ve covered everything for an A paper.
I hope this is helpful to you, if you have any questions or comments you’d like to make on this guide or the series please leave them below and I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible. Also remember to check out my university study skills page for a free chapter on critical thinking.
