When writing papers, a large part of the work will involve research — lots of it. A high level of writing skills can only get you so far. Without comprehensive research, there won’t be anything for you to write beyond conjecture and personal opinion.

Importance of Sound Research

Research is very valuable regardless of what you’re writing. It takes on even more significance when you’re producing content for school, since sound research is what will fuel your arguments and ideas. Papers earn their credibility by demonstrating that your ideas are backed up with information from experts and other authorities on the subject.

Additionally, performing thorough research allows you to gain a broader understanding of the subject matter. Even if you don’t use every piece of information you come across during your research, it lets you form a more complete picture of the issue at hand, making your arguments more informed and authoritative.

Categories of Research

There are three ways to categorize most research tasks. Your first task is to figure out which of these your paper belongs in, so you can focus your research on the appropriate sources.

• Hard. This involves performing research from scientific and objective sources. You’ll be scouring for data consisting of proven facts, statistics, figures and other measurable evidence. A paper on the impact of modern biology to medical advancement will likely require research along these lines.
• Soft. This involves performing research on more subjective topics, including cultural and opinion-based sources. Research for a paper on the influence of 90s hip-hop on today’s youth should fall in this category.
• Mixed. Papers on politics and economics, among other topics, tend to require this variety of research, which involves drawing from both hard and soft research sources. This type of research is necessary when facts and figures aren’t enough to make your case — you’ll have to argue against strong opinion as well.

Finding Sources: Soft Research

There are plenty of online sources for soft research topics. Provided a website isn’t a shady hack job created solely for ad income (e.g. article repository sites), there’s a good chance you’ll be able to use it as source. Good places to look at include:

• Product review sites (e.g. CNet Reviews, ZDNet)
• Blogs
• Discussion forums
• Wikis

Rule of thumb: as much as possible, stick to larger, authority sites, rather than obscure ones with a very small audience. Larger sites tend to have better quality control since they’re exposed to a larger group of people. As such, there’s lesser chance for false information and misattributed quotes (chances are, transgressions will be called out quickly in the comments section). Do note, though, that even large blogs are notoriously under-edited these days, so you might need to verify some information yourself.

Wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) are a great first stop for information, but don’t stop there. The real value of wikis are the links to sources at the bottom. Well-researched wiki pages usually collate some excellent sources for information, which you can use for your own research as well.

For the most part, soft research will involve collecting information from respectable and, hopefully, authoritative sources. While soft research sources are not as subject to scrutiny as their “harder” counterparts, positive reputation helps.

Finding Sources: Hard Research

For hard research, you need to cite material produced by scholars, professionals and industry experts who carry the proper credentials. The campus library is a great destination for this type of information. If you want to try your work online first, you can check out online libraries and academic journal repositories. Websites to check out include:

• Intute
• Google Scholar
• Journal TOCs
• JURN Repository
• ROAR e-Prints

If you’re looking for current data and statistics for the US, these websites offer excellent sources of details:

• Public Agenda. This is a great one-stop source for finding out current public sentiments on a wide variety of subjects, providing access to press releases on hundreds of research studies. Even better, these aren’t reports from amateur surveys and polls — instead, these are professional-quality documents put together by highly-credentialed research centers and academic institutions.
• National Center for Health Statistics. For stats and figures on various health and medical issues, you can’t do any better than this website as a primary source.
• National Center for Education Statistics. For stats and figures related to education, such as student performance, literacy levels and dropout rates, this website should provide a definitive reference.
• US Census Bureau. We’re guessing you have a good idea of what “census” means. As you may have guessed, this is the definitive place to find information on national population, living conditions, economic standings and more.

For a list of official government publications, just punch “Uncle Sam” into Google Search and you’ll get a full list as the result. When seeking out peer-reviewed medical and scientific documents, the OJOSE facility is a great source for finding and downloading both free and paid journals.

For international statistics, you can look for agencies per country that correspond with the above organizations. You can also use GeoHive for geopolitical data, statistics on the human population and other interesting world facts. Same with archived news via Archive.org and Google News. Non-commercial consumer websites, like Consumer Watch, are also great for finding objective, unbiased information.

Filter And Validate

While researching, you’ll likely accumulate more information than you’re likely to need in your paper. That’s fine. After compiling a hefty amount of research notes, though, you want to filter the material, sorting out the legitimate and useful information from the rest of the pack.

Research that you end up using in your paper should be able to withstand close examination later. For information to do that, it has to come from a credible source and be relatively current compared to other findings in the field. You want to collect pieces of information that support, rather than contradict, each other.

Cite Your Sources

Every time you use a research item in your paper, whether paraphrased or in quotes, always cite the source. You might get away doing this when posting to blogs, but papers for school need to be properly cited. Not doing so is lazy at best and can be construed as plagiarism at worst.

Writing essays — lots of them — is an inescapable reality for many students, regardless of how natural writing comes to you. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a gifted wordsmith to turn out college essays that get high marks. If you turn your attention to a few things that can produce high rewards, you can ace those college essays even with relatively average writing abilities.

Formulating Your Main Thesis

Most of the time, essay assignments won’t provide you with a ready-made thesis. Instead, you’ll get instructions about the kind of essay to write, the general subject to write it in and other such guidelines, but you’ll need to decide about the actual main thesis for yourself.

In these situations, your first move should be to formulate the questions that you want to answer in the essay? Once you have that, you can proceed to decide on your hypothetical answers, each of which then becomes one of your candidate theses.

From there, you can evaluate each one individually on the way to deciding which main thesis could work best. Personally, I filter them through these criteria:

1. Scope. Which candidate thesis has a scope that’s just the right size for the word count required in the essay? Too narrow and you could end up grasping for words. Too broad and you’ll have to cut out too much of your discussion.
2. Difficulty. Some thesis candidates will stick out at you as being easier to argue for than others. If it tackles an important enough issue, isn’t an obvious conclusion (i.e. the opposite of a thesis needs to be equally valid) and has the right scope, why make life harder for yourself by choosing something else? Make sure you test and refine as the research proceeds, though, to ensure you end up with something you can adequately prove.
3. Depth. You want something that delves deep enough into the subject that you have plenty of options where to go. Most surface issues restrict you to surface arguments — those tend to feel a little underwhelming when used as a thesis.

Outlining

Some people outline. Others don’t. If you belong in the latter group, you might want to consider your stance. The longer and more complicated the essay, the more an outline can help, as it allows you to plan the paper’s structure before diving in to actually put together the draft.

Outlines allow you to think before you write. It allows you to test out various elements of the essay — from the sequence your ideas are presented in to the paragraph groupings to the progression of your logic — before you even write a single word.

When you write an outline, make it brief. The point is to put your general ideas on paper so that they may gain structure and nothing more. In programming, this will be a flowchart or a use-case, rather than the actual code, so there’s no real need to delve too deep into the nitty-gritty.

Drafting

The biggest advantage of writing an outline is it simplifies the drafting phrase a lot. When you draft without an outline, you’re basically thinking on your feet, building the structure, presentation and progression of all your points and arguments on the fly. Instead of focusing on just expressing your points, you’re worrying about the structure of your logic and the sequence of your ideas along with it.

We always recommend jumping right into the body paragraphs unless the introduction comes naturally. After you’ve done the body paragraphs, the right introduction should be a little clearer, as you have a more concrete idea of how the essay flows. Many times, students get stumped trying to construct the introduction as the first paragraph they write. You can avoid that by just jumping right into the meat of your discussion and going back to the introduction later.

Finish the draft as fast as you can, focusing on expressing your ideas according to the structure in your outline. Don’t second-guess anything you write. If you put something on paper, leave it on. When you finish the draft, you should have more than enough time to second-, third- and even fourth-guess yourself. Learn to control the urge to judge your work — it can save you plenty of time.

Introductions And Conclusions

You can strive for average in all paragraphs in your essays and still get good marks, provided your introduction and conclusion are strong. For the introduction, make sure it includes an attractive component — one that generates interest in the reader to learn more. For the conclusion, try to end strongly, ending with a statement (a quote, a statistic or a finding) that carries heavy impact. The stronger the conclusion, the more satisfying the ending of a paper usually becomes.

For both, make sure you write clearly. Avoid using complicated language and keep things as simple as possible. Being the two most important paragraphs, you want to avoid any chance for misunderstanding.

Good Practices For Writing Essays

1. Start early. The earlier you start brainstorming ideas for the essay, the sooner you’ll start getting work done. If you think you can finish an essay in three days, then begin with the work two weeks before deadline — people tend to overestimate their own abilities to finish essay assignments (yes, including you), so don’t be too cocky.
2. Don’t write from beginning to end. Instead, write whatever is ready to be written. If the second point is already clear in your mind and the first point isn’t, then do the second point first. Doing so saves you time and speeds up the drafting process.
3. Keep the overall purpose and organizational scheme in mind throughout the drafting. That way, you don’t ever lose track of what’s important in the essay whether you’re writing the introduction or a body paragraph. Done right, it could lead to a more cohesive piece of writing.
4. Revise extensively. When you revise, attend to the whole essay, rewriting it as a whole, rather than a series of isolated sentences. Do multiple passes, checking for different things each time in order to ensure you sculpt it to the best of your ability. This is where starting early really helps you — the earlier you begin work, the more time you’re going to have to perform revisions.

You think you’re a funny guy.  So, you want some of that personality to shine through in the next essay you write.  However, you’re not exactly sure how to communicate humor on a written page.  Don’t worry, you’re not alone.  Writing in a humorous manner is, in fact, one of the most difficult things to pull off.

1. Enjoy the writing process.  If you’re not enjoying the writing process, there’s no way you can be funny.  What kinds of funny things can you come up with if you’re dreading this moment of sitting in front of the computer trying to come up with words to fill the page?
2. Start small.  Throw in a funny line here, a surprising ending to an example there and a chuckle-worthy anecdote somewhere.  Don’t be too ambitious.  Start small and test how your readers react (like, have a friend or family member take a look).  Then, build on that.
3. Comedy is timing.  You can’t just drop jokes on an essay and make it funny.  In a lot of ways, written humor is all about being witty at just the right moment.  Instead of focusing on being funny, just write normally and look for opportunities to insert humor after.
4. Be conversational.  It’s hard to integrate humor when you write in a dry and formal tone.  The whole combination is just off.  If you’re going to be funny, make sure to maintain a conversational tone throughout.

Buying essays from the internet and submitting it as your own is always a bad idea.   For one, rarely (more likely never) will you get you anything original.  Worse, the teacher might have seen it already (other students can buy it, too).

If you’re really pressed for time and don’t have any options, then go ahead and buy that essay you’ve been eyeing from that shady website.  Just don’t put your trust blindly in it, though.  Instead, put in a little work.  Rather than submitting it as-is, try using it as a basis for writing one yourself.

Here are a few tips:

1. Buy pre-made essays instead of commissioning a new one.  Many previously-made essays available online are usually written by real students who submitted it for their own classes.  At the least, they’re usually on-topic and properly researched.
2. Write your own essay.  Don’t change a word here or there.  Instead, fire up an entirely new Word document and start a new essay there.
3. Use the bought essay as a source material.  Think of the essay you bought as a source material.  Sure, you’ll use its ideas, its research and its bibliography, but you’ll write it in your own words. That way, you lessen the chances of getting busted.  Plus, your paper actually sounds like you, instead of someone else.
4. Do better next time.  Just because you get away doing this once doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it every time.   Learn from your mistakes here and do the work next time.

Writing an essay?  Here are a few things that can quickly put a damp on the style and flow of your writing.

1. Cliches.  Not just cliched expressions, mind you.  Generic declarations, arguments and thoughts are just as trite.   Either come up with something fresh or sit in the corner until you come up with something fresh.
2. Excessive summary and paraphrasing.  Your essay should be a showcase of your ideas, backed up by research and evidence from other sources.  Too much summaries and paraphrased passages will make readers feel like they’re reading nothing but regurgitated material.
3. Long quotations.  Keep quoted material to one or two sentences.  Any more and you might as well summarize it.
4. Congratulating yourself.  While few will be so tacky as to literally congratulate themselves on paper, a lot will do so in less overt ways using self-praising expressions, bragging and being too clever for their own good.
5. Lack of analysis.  Dropping facts is fine, provided it’s followed up by interpretation and analysis.  Otherwise, you’re just spewing things people can probably find themselves in Wikipedia.
6. Slang and jargon.  They neither make you sound hip nor knowledgeable.  In fact, they tend to do the opposite and show a lack of touch with your target audience.
7. Poor use of humor.  Be careful when trying to drop funny lines.  A lot of the time, it doesn’t turn out like you think.  Any time you write something you think is funny, highlight it for later review.  That way, you can reconsider whether it’s genuinely funny or it just seemed that way at the time.

Here are some things  to avoid when writing the beginning of your essays.

Too Long

The length of your introduction will depend on how much information you need to include in order to introduce the essay,  define its scope and orient the reader on the necessary background details.    As a rule, though, you want to keep it as short as possible and get to the body as soon as you can.

Unrelated Openings

Some students like to lead in with  a controversial statement, an interesting fact or a humorous line.   While effective for grabbing attention, you have to make sure it’s directly related to the focus of your essay.  Otherwise, you’ll only end up confusing the reader.

For academic essays, it’s always best to go direct and specific, as you’ll rarely be graded on clever wit as much as you will be on clarity and effective arguments.  In particular, steer clear of starting off with general statements (as a way to set up your specific topic) and drawn-out contextual discussions.

Technical Items

As much as you can, leave the technical items to the essay body.   Use them in the introduction and you can end up spending the rest of it explaining the technical details to the reader.

Your essay went way past the prescribed word count limits.  And the assignment brief specifically said that it needs to under 1,000 words.  Now, you’ll have to work at trimming it to make the requirements.

Here are a few things to start with:

Check your opener.  If parts of your opener serve as nothing but introductory warm-up, you could remove those parts without affecting the content or flow of your essay.

Check your conclusion.  Does you conclusion simply summarize the highlights of the essay?  If so, you can probably condense that into shorter copy.  Do that.

Look at your explanations.  Go to the parts of the text that explain a concept or an idea.   These sections are always at risk of being too long-winded and repetitive.  See if there’s a way to shorten your descriptions without losing any relevant information.

Look at your examples.  If an idea or concept is simple enough to explain, an illustrative example may not be necessary.   Cutting off an example in favor of a brief explanation should help shave off a good amount of words from your essay.

Delete large chunks of the essay.  If you’re still a long way off from making your word count requirement, you may want to consider chopping off long blocks of text, as in entire paragraphs.  To do that, read through the material and see which main point you can take off without affecting the overall conclusion.  Maybe you can integrate it with another point if taking it off completely isn’t quite feasible.

Want to finish your essay assignments faster?  Much as it may feel like a good idea, don’t skip the preparation phase.  If you do that, you’ll end up writing paragraphs with no clear idea of what it is you’re talking about. Instead, try one of these things to help streamline your writing process and see how well it works out for you.

1. Use an outline.  An outline can be as simple as an sequential arrangement of the key points you will present in the essay.  These points need not be too elaborate, either — a keyword that represents what the idea is should suffice.  The purpose is to give you an organized skeleton to follow when you do start writing the first draft.
2. Write a summary essay.  Before writing the actual draft, write a summarized version first.  A single paragraph with five to ten sentences should be enough to let you condense your main points.
3. Formulate the main idea in your head before firing up the word processor.  Before you even sit down to begin writing, go over the main idea and how you’ll go about discussing it in your head.  Give it images, like a story, if possible.  Know how easy it is to write when you already know what you’re writing about?  The time you take to mentally take stock of the material will do you a world of good.
4. Map out the main idea and its associated points.  Create a mind map with the main idea of the essay at the center with all the main points connected to it. Keep it to one or two levels, though — that should be enough to make it easier to finish your draft.

While some of those might sound like they’ll delay the process, they’re actually more likely to end up speeding things along.   All of the above allow you to organize your thoughts and give them a logical form, instead of constantly going back and forth in your mind while you’re writing the actual essay.

You have a ten page essay to write for school.  Problem is, you’ve adequately covered all your material in eight pages and it’s explicitly required in the assignment brief that you must turn in a ten-pager.

Here are some valid ways for you to stretch the content of your existing piece:

1. Add historical background on the topic.  You can quickly fill up a page covering some sort of historical background for the subject.  Just make sure to keep it somewhat relevant to the particular details of your paper.
2. Cover material that contradicts your main point and debunk it.   Look for contrarian claims that you can disprove over a paragraph or so.  You can do comparisons with evidence you’ve previously presented, as well.
3. Expand summaries into detailed descriptions.  If you summarized a source anywhere in the essay, rewrite that part into a detailed description instead.  Specific descriptions are always bound to be substantially longer than summarized equivalents.
4. Add a comparison paragraph.  This won’t work for all subjects, but it could for a variety of them.  If you’re writing an essay about an author, for instance, you can compare the person’s body of work to another writer of a similar stature.

Literary essays are written, primarily, to inform the reader and convey a message, rather than persuade the reader into anything.  Sometimes, though, they work that way, especially when it comes to affecting the way people think about a subject matter.

When writing a literary essay, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Literary essays need to be well-written.  That means showing a good command of language and writing techniques in order to communicate your points, more so than other types of essays.  The literary essay is an appropriate venue for showing off your chops.
• Literary essays aren’t articles.  If all you do is convey information, you’ve written an article.  A literary essay, on the other hand, instructs in a manner reminiscent of a scholarly material.
• Literary essays can include personal material.  However, they shouldn’t be the focal point of the writing.  Instead, you want it to focus on the subject, with the personal reflections and individual stories merely adding to the message.
• Literary essays need to sound authoritative, but not necessarily scholarly.   You can write in a friendly, conversational or personal tone (in fact, it’s actually recommended in a lot of situations), gaining most of your authority by the quality of information you dispense.