Monday, January 26, 2009

Organizing Your Term Papers

If you are working on a short deadline and you are also stressing over the assignment, chances are your paper falls somewhere in the 3 to 8 page range. This is a common middle ground for assignments that teachers love to inhabit. Not coincidentally, it is around the three page threshold that your paper will start to demand a little more than a haphazard jotting down of your thoughts. As you are expected to expound upon your topic at some length, you will find it useful to organize your points.


Lacking organization, you might start off well with a very cogent piece of writing that tackles your subject head on. Still, the chances that you will run out of steam, or put down a paragraph in the completely wrong place, go up if you do not organize.

How can a paragraph be in the completely wrong place? Don’t I, as the author, enjoy poetic license?

No, you do not, because you are writing a report, not a poem. Creativity is valued at university, but it must know its place for most assignments. For custom term papers, creativity is the hand-maiden to Queen Organization. Creativity must wait for the Queen to finish her point before jumping in to add sparkle to the writing, or to steer the paper into an unusual line of pondering, etc. The Queen must be a stern monarch and not let her servant get out of hand.

A paragraph or passage can be in ‘completely the wrong place’ if it obviously writing that is appropriate for one area of the paper like intro, middle or conclusion, and it finds itself in the wrong section. Like a bra on the magazine racks at Wal-Mart, it stands out.

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