For those who are rising seniors in high school: in less than 5 months, you will have completed and started sending out your college admissions applications. Both liberating and terrifying, the idea of college looms on your horizon whether you’re ready for the transition or not. Chances are, you’re excited about the prospect of going away to school (no parents! no curfews!) but there are probably still lots of reservations you are experiencing, one of the most stressful being the process of figuring out which college is right for you.
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Whether you like it or not, the quality of your academic research paper rests entirely on whether you can uphold your thesis statement. You can be an amazingly eloquent writer with intelligent analysis and good ideas, but if your thesis is weak, the rest of your paper falls flat too. A thesis statement is the single most important aspect of any research paper — everything else exists solely to uphold and support it. It’s no surprise, then, that for serious students, the act of devising a thesis is stress inducing, nerve wracking, and dreaded. Here are 5 tips on how to make the pressure of coming up with a good thesis a little easier, and a lot less stressful.
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Creative writing is often thought to mean fiction or poetry writing, specifically the kind of creative writing taught in workshops at liberal arts colleges where people sit around and ask each other questions about character motivation, symbolism, and whether you’ve earned your cliche.
Actually, creative writing is so much more than that. You can approach any writing creatively, be it a research paper, an essay, a journalistic article, or even a blog entry. I like to think that I’m approaching this blog, even now, from my own creative angle. All ‘creative writing’ means is that you are infusing your writing with your personal creative spirit. That the creative energy of your writing comes from you and you alone. Not only is creative often confused with ‘fiction,’ but it’s also confused with the false idea that in order to be creative, what you are doing has to be a completely isolated work that lives on its own, outside of what anyone else has ever done. That’s simply not true. Writers are often influenced by other writers, and part of being creative is letting yourself be inspired by the work of others. There are many myths to being creative, and the purpose of this post is to encourage students to find their own routes to creativity. We are all endowed with the creative aspect; it’s just up to us to access it!
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It’s 9:00 AM, and the final bell begins to ring. You barely slept the night before in preparation for today’s exam. You wait anxiously in your seat, and your palms are already starting to sweat furiously. You glance at your teacher, sitting in the front of the classroom, who is busy pulling something out of her desk. A horrible feeling gushes through you: something like a mix between fear and dread. Before you even see what is in your teacher’s hand, you already know what it is — and you suddenly realize that your worst nightmare on Earth has just become reality. In your teacher’s hand is a stack of objects which signify to you everything that is insipid, unnecessary, and evil in the world. Your teacher is walking toward you with a stack of blue books in her hand. As if dreaming, you rise from your seat, walk over to the row of windows at the back of the room, and throw yourself out of one. Defenestrate, incidentally, has always been your favorite S.A.T. word.
Had you conquered your fear of the essay test (and had you paid more attention in science class to Newtonian laws of physics), you would not have participated in an act of defenestration.
The essay test is one of the most challenging exams for students, largely because you never know what to expect. Writing essays is a difficult endeavor in its own right, but with the time constraints and ‘element of surprise’ that go into essay tests, the whole situation becomes even more challenging. But if you learn some basic strategies for taking essay tests, you will soon realize that they aren’t really as noxious as everyone seems to think. There are techniques that you can use to ace this dreaded exam, and all that is required is a little foresight and organization. By learning these 10 tips for taking essay tests, you’ll score higher on your tests, write better papers, and sleep a lot easier the night before your exam.
10. Prepare for the exam. Essay tests are infinitely easier if you go into them with knowledge of the topics that are going to be covered. In my opinion, essay tests are actually easier than multiple choice exams, because while you need to know the ‘broad picture’ of what you studied, you don’t need to memorize every specific detail of your subject.
9. Understand the question. Before you do anything, read the essay question three times. Seriously. I can’t tell you how many great essays I wrote that missed points because I failed to answer the entire question. If the question is, “Why is the television show LOST so confusing and why did you stop caring after the third season?” and you give a persuasive answer of why the show is confusing, but you forget to say why you stopped caring after the third season, you’ve probably lost more than a few points (bad pun, sorry).
8. Write a clear thesis. Essay exams test your analytical skills rather than your memorization. Your teacher wants to see you assess the question, respond critically with a sound thesis, and provide a persuasive, analytical discussion of ideas that validates your thesis.
7. Outline everything before you begin. It helps you stay organized if you take the time, before you start writing, to outline what you’re going to say.
6. Keep your introduction short and to-the-point. Because of time restrictions, it’s silly to waste time writing a long and involved introduction when the real intention should go to the heart of the matter: the argument.
5. Stay on track with your subject. There is no greater time-drain than a tangent. Nor is there anything more annoying to the reader than when the writer veers wildly off topic.
4. Examine one new idea in each paragraph. Think of paragraphs as separate little arguments, each with a strong central point. If you stick to one idea per paragraph, the reader knows where you’re going with the paper, and your writing will be clearer and more organized.
3. Keep track of time. There is no worse feeling than when the bell rings and you’re not done with your essay. Your teacher has another class coming in, and trust me, she’s not going to wait around for you to finish. She’ll kick your butt outta class as soon as the test is done.
2. Include specific details in your writing. You can’t prove an argument without providing facts. Knowing your facts, and displaying them prominently, not only makes your paper stronger, but it will impress whoever is grading your paper.
1. Proofread your entire paper at least once before you hand it in. I know it’s annoying, and you want to get that dreaded blue book out of your hands as soon as possible. But take a chill pill and set aside a minute or two to read through your paper again. You’ll be surprised how many mistakes you can catch in the second go-over.
In your day-to-day vernacular, you probably use a lot of non-dictionary words. I, for one, have a habit of abbreviating things to the nth degree when I speak, to the point where “whatever” becomes “whatev,” “totally” becomes “totes”, “vacation” becomes “vacay”, “details” becomes “detes” and… you get the point. Sadly, I also use some words that are blatantly fabricated, like “criticality” when I mean “criticism”. Worse of all, I have an annoying habit of using the word “funner” when I ought to simply say, “more fun”.
However, as peppered as my speech patterns are with non-standard English, I try not to bring my own personal language into the sphere of academic writing. I couldn’t imagine what would go through an English teacher’s mind if I turned in a paper that said, “Yo, Herman Melville’s gynormous book about Moby Dick was super phat, cuz Ishmael will be one of my fave, most coolest protagonist forevs LOL.” Like, automatic F, right?
To help you write better, I compiled a list of 5 words you should avoid in all your papers. I understand the importance if irony, but the irony of using grammar and spelling like “Dey’s awluz at it, sah, en dey do mos’ kill me, dey skyers me so,” even in a paper about The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (which that quote is directly lifted from) would completely be lost on your professor. So, without further ado:
1. Irregardless. This word is completely unacceptable in any universe where proper grammar is encouraged. According to Wikipedia, “Irregardless is a term meaning in spite of or anyway, that has caused controversy since it first appeared in the early twentieth century. It is generally listed in dictionaries as “incorrect” or “nonstandard”. This word is used to mean “regardless,” but with the inclusion of the “ir-” preceding the word, it is formed into a double negative. Logically, “irregardless” would mean “not regardless,” but of course, that’s not the way it’s ever used. Long story short: avoid.
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