3 Effective Tips to Write Excellent Paper
Diva Aulia Rahman | 10 April 2022
It is already a public secret for every university student that writing papers or essays is never an easy or pleasant experience for everyone. The act of planning, developing, and especially searching for high-quality references could consume an enormous amount of time and would surely make an already tough task even tougher.
After all, creating papers is not the same activity as just reading a book or solving mathematical computations. Although those two activities may seem as tedious as it sounds, it always seems that writing a paper is even more problematic since it involves a lot of “troublesome” processes, such as adding those bothersome citations. However, there is always a solution to any problem. Hence, here are some tips to improve the quality of your paper.
1. Fully Understand the Task
Although it may seem very simple, understanding the assignments thoroughly is essential in producing a top-notch paper. It would be such a waste of time to start writing a paper or essay without fully comprehending the assessment because it would potentially cause the questions being asked by your lecturer to go unanswered. Therefore, it is vital for you not to be afraid to ask about any part of the assignments that seem unclear.
Some of you might think that asking lots of questions could bother the lecturers because it would make you seem “incapable,” but NO, it is not. Besides, that is the function of a lecturer, right? To provide guidance through your stint in the university. Hence, there is no more need to be shy in bringing up questions. Moreover, it is essential to remember there are three critical components in a question that would make the activity of analyzing questions easier.
- Content: The task-specific key concepts
- Directive terms: What you are expected to do relating to the content. Ex: define, compare, evaluate, analyze
- Limitation: The scope that the assignment focuses on
It should be noted that it does not mean eating pizza or other types of junk foods is strictly prohibited. However, it should be a reminder to avoid having a poor diet containing fast foods, high sugar foods, and other unhealthy meals.
2. Prioritize Quality than Quantity
Having an adequate duration of sleep is crucial for every people due to the fact that it recharges our body and brain performance. According to the American Psychological Association, even the slightest obstruction in sleep quality can negatively affect mood, memory, and judgment. As a result, poor sleep renders people more impulsive, sensitive to negative stimuli, and deteriorates decision-making ability, which could impede the capability to conduct tasks and assignments.
Usually, papers will have specific requirements, including a minimum of word counts, pages, and so on. You might think that creating an essay beyond those requirements would always result in a good score, but it is absolutely WRONG. Most of the time, lecturers will prefer a paper with firm content that meets the minimum terms of the assignment instead of the longer essays with a weaker substance.
To deliver an essay with excellent content, you need always to use these two components: evidence and reasoning.
- Evidence: Evidence serves as a concrete information provider to support your arguments or claims in the paper that usually consist of statistical data, quotations, illustrations, and examples.
- Reasoning: Instead of citing your reference list as a bucket of a shopping list, you should evaluate the evidence that has been provided and show how it supports your opinions.
3. Research Efficiently
Typically, researching is the next step that most university students do after comprehending the given tasks. Nevertheless, it is crucial to know that looking up references could potentially become one of many ways to procrastinate. One hour of research could turn into hours more simply because of continuously searching for “one more article, ” making this activity inefficient.
To avoid the procrastination issue, setting a time limit is recommended. For example, for a five-page paper, you can not spend more than 30 minutes per page looking for journals, which means that overall, you do not spend more than 2,5 hours merely on researching. Allocating more time to this process would result in a diminishing return because early research aims to give you just enough information to start writing the paper. If you are afraid of lacking information, do not worry because you can always seek more information once you have begun the writing process.
Additionally, the reliability of your reference is also the other main issue to be looked at. Nowadays, it is easy to find trustworthy articles or books for your paper. Take Monash library, for example, which provides a massive amount of reading materials from various disciplines. Moreover, you also do not have to worry about the materials’ completeness because as long as you are a Monash student, you possess access to the entire contents you want to read.