How to Perfect Your Thesis: 6 Steps and Tips for Writing Your Academic Paper
Aside from terror professors and killer reading assignments, most college students fear what they call the boss level of the academic nightmare which is also a combination of the two: academic papers. Especially if you are studying for a degree in the field of humanities, philosophy, and social sciences, you might find yourself dealing with lots of academic papers that need to layout your course findings inquiries. For starting college students, dealing with intimidating course readings which you need to understand to write your academic paper can be challenging. How much more is writing a good academic paper? With this, we will help you get over your fear of writing academic papers and eventually enjoy it. Here are a few tips for writing your academic paper:
1. Plan your course of action and study habits
Like any other heavy activity, you will also need to warm up and plan out how you will prepare and write your academic paper. Preparation does not only mean brainstorming and writing down topics that you are interested in. It also involves relaxing and finding your center, so you can be ready in facing heavy readings. Planning out how you will have an organized study habit will also help you improve your productivity. Have a schedule on how you can still attend and do well on your classes, finish requirements on each course, and still be making developments on your research. Organizing your readings will also help, especially if you are the kind who easily gets distracted. Online PDF sites can help you do immediate changes to your documents. It can delete PDF pages, merge or split PDF files, among others.
2. Brainstorm according to the assignment
Most students find choosing a topic the most challenging thing when starting their academic papers. You get too overwhelmed with the topics you find interesting that your paper might become a hodgepodge of different topics—which is not always good, by the way. On the other hand, you can also experience having no ideas at all!
What you need to do first is understand what kind of paper is being asked of you. Study the rubrics on how you will be graded and think about what major points might be asked of you. From here, you can have an idea about what topic you will write about. Choose a topic that you are passionate about or one that you are curious about. They say that the key to academic papers is knowing more and more about less and less.
3. Formulate your thesis statement
Your thesis statement will be the main argument of your thesis statement. You must postulate your argument in a single sentence—this is what makes a good thesis statement. A thesis statement makes your ideas more concrete. Your thesis statement is crucial because this is where your entire paper will revolve around. It should be debatable, concise, and particular.
4. Do your research
Now, this might just be the most gruesome part of writing your academic paper, but if you do the first point right, you will have a little problem with this. If your topic is too broad, you might be overwhelmed with lots of other research and references that you can find. On the other hand, if your research is too specific, you might panic about not finding enough resource material. This is the reason why it is important to get to know your topic and your thesis statement. It can be fun to hoard readings about your topic, but you need to be careful about managing your time. You cannot possibly read all those, could you? Besides, you might lose yourself if you read more about your topic that is not within your argument.
If you are worried about having little research materials, you should go with a group and visit more libraries, especially those in universities. Sometimes, schools offer their students free membership on online journals. You can expand your research with the membership your school can provide you. Once you have found a research material perfect for your topic, check out its references to see more about your argument.
4. Create an outline
Another key for writing a good academic paper is to ensure that your points will be cohesive from one to another and the entire string of arguments will be strong enough to bring depth to your thesis statement. When you are creating your outline, you should think about the points that you intend to explain in your academic paper. Now, you can think of the best way on how to explain your point. By creating an outline, you can also think about points that will be bad for your paper. These are called fallacies.
5. Write away!
When you have been studying and researching, make sure to write down notes and the right citation. Once you start writing your academic paper, you will find that doing this will help you a lot. Do this instead of sloppily going through your journals, again and again, looking for that one point that you just remembered.
As you write, do not be too much of a perfectionist. Do not mind all the grammar errors, misspelled words, and other things that can be edited later. The important thing is for you to just write down what is on your mind. There will also be a tendency for you to reread your references and journals as you write along. It is best if you just write what you can remember and explain your ideas. This will keep you from plagiarizing others’ work.
6. Edit like a butcher
You can use online grammar editing tools to help you sift through errors. Since you wrote your raw ideas, editing is important for you to refine your points and language.
Relax and do your best
Most of the time, your only enemy is yourself. We sometimes overthink and panic or become too lax and underperform. The key is to always do your best, but also have time to socialize and relax. Good thing, many online tools, and sites can help you with your academic writing, like PDFBear.com!
