How to Set Up a College Paper Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

A lesson learned in college that you take with you is that a formatting error encourages others to overlook the work you put into writing the paper. Incorrect formatting detracts from your paper so the people who read it might not take it seriously. Microsoft word is the word processor that you would typically use to write your college papers, although other word processors have similar options to edit the header in the insert option.

Keep the position for the page numbers at top of the page, in the header, with the alignment to the right. There are many ways college degree seekers can better their chances of getting an a on a paper. Here are 50 ways to improve your chances of aceing your next writing assignment: start early. don rsquo t procrastinate. Write down several ideas because while you research, you may discover that some ideas will not come to fruition.

You want to be able to identify which topic area will work best before it is too late to compile the appropriate resources. check and double check that your topic is in the realm of the assignment instructions. if you have concerns, check with your instructor. You do not want to put hours into developing a topic that does not meet the criteria requested by your instructor. create a plan. set dates for when you rsquo ll need to complete certain tasks.

utilize online resources that can help you create a schedule and keep you on task. Below you can see that the research project calculator gives recommendations on when you should accomplish each task that goes into writing a research paper circled in green. Here is a great list of other online assignment calculators that you can utilize. create an outline. use bullets, numbers, letters, roman numerals, or whatever you need to organize your information. Do the instructions indicate how many different sources you will need? many assignment instructions will demand a number of sources that will need to be consulted for your paper.

Do the instructions indicate which type of resources you will need to utilize? are websites restricted? do the instructions indicate that your textbook cannot be used as one of your sources? this is common. You may be able to use your text book, but you may be restricted from using it as one of your required minimum number of sources. Are there restrictions on quality of resources? does your paper require scholarly or peer reviewed sources? scholarly/peer reviewed sources are sources that are reviewed by scholars in the field. It is a review process that assures quality and credible authority in authorship of information.

When searching in library databases, it is usually a search option to check a box indicating all search results will be scholarly/peer reviewed squared in blue below.

are there requirements to include primary sources? recognize the differences between primary and secondary documents. Websites? if searching for websites, be sure to use evaluation skills.

Is the website up to date, credible, authoritative? who is the author? do they have credentials? is it a blog, article, general website? analyze the website extension of each website. Com commercial, and several nations have their own extension like.uk united kingdom and.au australia. wikipedia is not an acceptable source for a research paper. The content in wikipedia is constantly being updated and corrected we can only hope , and therefore, if you use information listed in wikipedia, the content could disappear or be altered by the time that you submit your research paper.

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do use wikipedia as a starting point for gathering information. Another fantastic way to use wikipedia is by using the references listed at the bottom of most entries. For assistance with choosing synonyms use a thesaurus, dictionary, or several web resources like visuwords. When conducting research, there are certain tricks to use in internet search engines, library catalogs, and databases. using an asterisk at the end of a word will capture all forms of a word.

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For example, if you use text , this will gather results for text, texts, and texting. put quotation marks around phrases. if you search for ldquo death penalty, rdquo this will only pull results with these 2 words together in this order. Is ldquo death penalty rdquo gathering millions of results? try using a boolean search and/or/not.

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