MD: This article deals with the distinctive features of college papers and how they differ from papers typical for high schools.
How College Papers Differ From High School Papers?
The very first writing assignment in college can be a real eye-opener: it may seem that there is nothing in common with high school papers. Of course, some basic principles always remain the same, for example, necessity of a catching topic or clear and logical structure of the paper. However, good old tricks that can help a high school student to wax eloquent on a subject filling speech with vacuities won’t help in college writing. And common five paragraph structure is not capable of covering different topics that are typical for colleges. College papers are the perfect examples of academic writing, a task that professional writers of reliable and helpful custom writing services like https://dissertationlabs.com complete every day.
There are three distinctive features of academic writing that every student should know in order to create top-notch paper:
- Academic writing is a science-based writing, and papers are created for scholars, and what is more important, the authors of such papers are also scholars. And yes, all college students are considered to be scholars, so prepare to think, analyze, summarize and write as a scholar.
- Topics that are selected for academic writing are of scientific interest. That means that the point of your personal interest is not a key factor, when you select a theme for your paper. It is important, however, pride of a place goes to the point of academic interest. It is not that easy to come up with a topic that is interesting both to you and other scholars, though, such topics are worth the time spent on their selection.
- Academic writing deals with an informed argument: all your suggestions expressed in the paper should be supported with facts.
With all these in mind, one may find out how to write academic papers properly.
First and foremost, it is necessary to select data for an argument and if whether in high school you could collect some info that concerns the topic only, in case of college paper you will have to find out much more to get a full picture for more precise analysis.
Writing a college paper is all about answering questions who, what, when, where, why and how – put it another way, giving detailed information about the topic so after reading your paper reader will know the answer to all major questions. And if a high school paper makes a shift with repeating someone else’s opinion about the issue, college paper requires your own vision of the problem and your own ways of solving it. And that does not mean that it would be enough to give an opinion – any statement in the paper should be a result of critical thinking supported with solid arguments and indisputable proofs. In order to learn how to transform personal opinion in a critical thinking, one should:
- Summarize – collect all information about the topic and single out a core
- Evaluate – ask certain questions in order to evaluate the personal experience and figure out what influences that experience
- Analyze –separate the topic into several components and analyze them individually
- Synthesize –search for connections in ideas expressed in the topic
The very process of text writing is not that challenging if you know exactly the purpose of the task and what sections should be in it. So to complete the task, it is necessary to:
- Come up with catching topic
- Define the target audience of the paper
- Select a position – what point of view you are going to support
- Select a structure of the text that is the most appropriate for the covering of the topic
- Select a tone and style: for example, do you want your paper to be persuasive? Or simple narration can do the work? Referencing style like APA, MLA or Chicago also are very important – with proper citations no one will accuse you in using plagiarized content.
- Write the paper according to the chosen points
- Edit it
These simple steps can help you to create top-notch papers within the shortest time possible, guaranteed.
