The tide of midterms has already washed over us, and before long term papers will be due as well.
Unless you’re in the very lucky one-third of college students who has somehow avoided writing a major paper, you’ve probably spent a long and stressful night burning the midnight oil writing about plot structure in a Shakespeare play or the role of Watergate in the election of President Jimmy Carter.
There is nothing more challenging, in my humble opinion, than writing a paper. That is coming from someone who has written over a dozen papers in my time in college. It gets easier over time, but it never stops being a challenge. This article is intended to serve as a helpful guide for the students that struggle with writing, especially academic papers. Most of these pieces of advice can, however, be transferred onto your personal writing. As a matter of fact, I recommend taking up writing as a hobby, even just in the form of journaling, if you want to write well in college. The extra practice never hurts, and you’re never under an obligation to share your personal writing with anyone if it feels like it’s never up to snuff.
I also want to underscore that this list is by no means complete, and it will not match the recommendations of others perfectly. If you are truly interested in knowing the ins and outs of writing, this guide is a good starting point, but certainly not an end point.
I want to begin this brief guide by dispelling a common error. There is such a thing as good writing, and thus by extension there is also bad writing. Anyone who has ever told you that this is not true is doing you a disservice. This does not mean, however, that if you are someone who struggles with dyslexia or a learning disability you are a bad writer, anymore than a person with astigmatism is a bad painter. For those that have these sorts of conditions, there are resources available to mitigate their effects on your writing, just as a near-sighted painter can wear glasses and have perfect vision again.
For most people, however, writing is merely a painful process, and while they might be able to produce an essay or research paper, even they would admit that it’s not particularly good.
To think about what makes a piece of writing good, we have to think about what writing is done for. Writing is done to communicate ideas, in a specific way, in a specific order, establishing specific relationships between those ideas.
The way that you communicate ideas is through using correct grammar. Half the time, when you are trying to get an idea across but your writing just doesn’t seem to capture the idea you had in your head, it’s because your grammar is incorrect, or you have formed a grammatically correct sentence but it isn’t saying what you intended it to mean.
English grammar is extremely complicated, but luckily you do not need to be an expert grammarian to write correctly. Most people probably could not tell you what a participle is, nevertheless they know how to use one. They do it all the time in everyday speech. So this leads me to tip number one.
1. Keep resources handy while you work (a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a grammar guide).
As I said, you’re not going to become an expert grammarian overnight, but the way to ensure that your writing actually means what you want it to say is to consult reference sources anytime you run into an unexpected issue. Let’s say you want to use a quote from a source that uses an unfamiliar word like “pusillanimous” or “avarice.” It’s most prudent to look up that word in a dictionary before you accidentally provide a quote that contradicts your thesis as evidence for your thesis. In a similar vein, if you’re unsure where you should place a comma, or when to use a semicolon, or what the correct conjugation of a verb is in the past tense (is it swam or swum?), you can consult the myriad different grammar guides available both online and in print. Resources like these help you communicate the substance of your ideas, and do so such that your readers come away understanding what you intended them to know.
Sometimes, however, you may be saying what you intend, but not saying it in a way that is compelling. Maybe your writing is dull or repetitive, or maybe you are coming off as biased, dry, or overwrought. This brings us to our next tip.
2. Read your work back to yourself, and pay attention to style and tone.
As we said before, part of good writing is not just what you say but how you say it. The first problem that many struggling writers tend to run into, once they have the fundamentals of grammar down, is repetitive writing. Now, I’m not saying repetition is never called for in writing. After all, repetition can be highly rhetorically effective. We might recall Lincoln’s formulation that America is a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people,” or the famous line from the Book of Common Prayer which has been uttered at many a funeral: “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Nevertheless, oftentimes essays and research papers suffer from a problem of repetition, most often (but not always) in regard to the use of adjectives. If you want to say a character is smart, but keep using the word “intelligent” over and over again, pretty soon your writing will grow dull and unreadable, even if you are making really good points. To avoid this very common mistake, it is necessary to read everything you write back to yourself, preferably out loud, and preferably several times. The mind naturally singles out unnecessary repetition when speaking, so this is a great way to root that out alongside any grammar mistakes you might have missed in the initial draft. To fix repetitive writing, you can try combining simple sentences into more complex or compound ones, or consulting your thesaurus to look for a suitable synonym.
Sometimes, however, repetition isn’t the problem, but there are other stylistic errors one can make, and these will largely depend on the kind of writing you’re doing. If you’re writing poetry or fiction for, say, a creative writing class, it’s best not to employ a dry, academic tone. In a similar way, if you’re writing an essay, it is best not to use a conversational or overly-flowery style.
This is the hardest part about writing, in my opinion, because oftentimes if you write a lot you tend towards one style or another, and it can be simple to eliminate extremes but difficult to ever fully nail the correct style and tone. In my case, for example, my writing is usually too formal and verbose, and even when I take corrective steps a little of that will still leak through. The important thing is to not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
A very important, and common, writing vice that is important to eliminate, however, is bias. Oftentimes, you will be forced to defend or attack a position in your academic writing, but you should be careful that even in these cases you don’t come across as overly-prejudiced against the positions you are critiquing. In general, be very careful when using words with loaded meanings or very strong connotations.
To give a concrete example, it is accurate and grammatically correct to say that a car that lacked proper functions because it was stopped halfway down the assembly line represents an “abortion of the car manufacturing process,” in the sense that the word “abortion” does mean “arrested development,” but it is clear the word also has other meanings and with such strong connotations that it is best to substitute a different word or phrase.
Applying this to bias, sometimes we have a tendency to use or introduce words and phrases that are technically correct but have the effect of unnecessarily prejudicing the reader against a particular person or their work. This can be done, most obviously, through what is called an ad hominem attack, which is when the writer directly undermines the character of the person they are responding to in order to discredit their work.
For example, “Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, argued in Being and Time that we are not aware of beings in and of themselves, but primarily of their utility.”
In this example, the detail about Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi Party serves only to prejudice the reader against him and is not relevant to what is being discussed in the rest of the sentence.
Another more subtle way that bias can manifest in writing is the use of words that mean the same thing but have different connotations. For example, most people who advocate against environmental degradation are called “environmentalists,” but are sometimes referred to by the pejorative label “tree huggers.” To conclude, try to avoid using that sort of loaded or biased language in your own writing. This is especially true of position papers. If you can refute the position you are responding against while still accurately and fairly representing it, that is a sign of a strong argument and a strong writer.
3. Make notes; make outlines.
The next and, in my opinion, most crucial tip that not enough college students are doing is reading the material, making notes as you go, and then forming those notes into outlines.
The reason, I think, is not because students don’t understand what a good idea these techniques are. I think, rather, that students often skip this step because they want to procrastinate and throw their paper together at the last minute. This is not coming from a place of judgement. Trust me, I’ve done it, but I also know that my writing really suffered when I did not have a solid outline to follow.
But you can’t just make an outline up out of whole-cloth, so where are you getting the information to populate this outline? I recommend, if you have source material to work from, making sure that you have a print copy that you can make notes on. If you need to copy a book that is a library reference material, for example, you can still photocopy some pages using the library’s KIC machine and print those pages out. Then, I recommend going to town. By the time you’re done reading your source material, the page should be a tenth to a half your own notes and underlines, because trust me, if you do not make notes, you will forget it.
Once you have that information, try transcribing that onto an outline of about a page or two. I recommend having no more than one main point per three assigned pages. More detail spent on one main idea will be more profitable in the end than a shotgun blast of a bunch of different ideas all thrown at the reader at one time. Ultimately, starting from a good outline will allow your paper to have the kind of unity and coherence that professors expect from grade A writing.
4. Make use of the Hortense Parish Writing Center.
My final recommendation is to make use of the resources that UTM provides for students, i.e. the services that you fund with your tuition. If you struggle with paper-writing and you haven’t checked out the writing center, you’re not putting using that crippling student loan debt to its fullest potential.
Given the strictures placed on normal campus operations by COVID-19, you can actually make use of the writing center’s resources from the comfort of your own home by utilizing their online appointment service found at this link: https://utm.mywconline.net/.
Dr. Kelle Alden, the Director of the Hortense Parish Writing Center, had this to say about their new services:
“As frustrating as the pandemic is, we’ve used it as an opportunity to evolve and try new services. We now offer convenient one-on-one consultations online. If you visit utm.mywconline.net and make an account, you can see our tutors’ full availability and sign up for appointments at times that work with your schedule. Visit us from the comfort of your own home!”
This is not a 10 step program (it’s a four step program, if you want to get technical). I mean that in the sense that it will not cure all your writing woes. Consider this list a good place to start working on those end-of-term papers, and hopefully once you’ve put all these tips into practice you’ll be writing those Henry James sentences in no time.
Photo Credit / Pixabay.com
