Writing a Great Term Paper in 5 Simple Steps

As you work your way from high school to college, you will have to write many papers. If you are assigned a term paper, it will be at the end of the marking period. It will be comprehensive in that the subject will be on something you studied during that marking period. If you are in United States history class, then your paper could be on something like the Federalists and Antifederalists.

Therefore, it is important that you pay attention in class, take notes, and do all of your readings. The last thing you want to do is to get a subject that you have no clue what it is. Pay attention in class. Then you can use our 5 simple steps for writing the piece.

5 Simple Steps

  1. Make your thesis statement-once you have the topic, you need to decide what you are going to prove or discuss about the topic. This statement is called a thesis. It will include your main points. It is like a road map of where your paper is going.
  2. Do your research-once you have the thesis statement; you can begin to do the proper research. You want to use credible and valid academic sources that will help you to prove your point. The research is very important to the piece.
  3. Make an outline to follow-now you can create your outline. You will follow it as you write, so it should include everything you will mention. You may end up with several outline drafts before you get the final product. It can be in a topic outline or sentence outline form.
  4. Insert your intext citations-as you write you will use support references. You will need to insert intext citations after the source is used. How you format this depends on what format your paper is. Some formats are Chicago and APA. You can get a good resource for those styles online to help you to do it correctly.
  5. Create your bibliography or works cited page-after you use citations and at the end of the paper, you will have either a works cited page or a bibliography page. Your teacher will tell you which one he or she wants you to use. The form for this page is very exact, so you may want to use one of the apps, which helps to format this sheet for you. There are some free and low charge ones that work well.