Guidelines for Writing an Academic Paper - Article Example

In the book The Little Seagull Handbook, the author talks about 7 easy initial steps to start working on the paper. Which are brainstorming, free writing, looping, clustering, questioning, keeping a journal and lastly starting up with some research (Bullock, Richard, and Francine Weinberg, 7). Brainstorming, clustering, and looping are all ways of jotting down the points that come to your mind about the topic so that before you start writing you have a bunch of points from which you can select and write.

Questioning about the topic includes asking yourself what is your purpose of writing? Who the audience is? What does the audience want? Keeping these questions in mind you should research about the given topic. Once a student is done with the research the second most important thing that follows is the tone and the style of writing. Since college papers are a part of academic writing informal and elevated style of writing should completely be avoided. Your style should lie between a formal and informal style of writing using simple words.

The tone of your writing should depend on the paper you are writing it could be persuasive in an argumentative essay or informative in a research paper that totally depends on the kind of paper one is writing. Fallacies are another thing that should be avoided while writing a paper. There are mainly three kinds of fallacies logical, ethical and emotional. Ineffective arguments that use logical, emotional or ethical fallacies detract the reader for writer’s credibility. It not only makes the paper ineffective but the reader will fail to trust the writing if he uses any fallacies and thereby the paper fails to fulfill its purpose.

Examples of these fallacies are guilt by association, hasty generalizations, false analogy and many more. Redundancy- words that repeat the same idea is also to add to the negative for a paper. Examples of redundancies are, the end result, circle around, final completion, exactly the same and many more. In the book ‘Politics and English Language’ the author talks about the usage of meaningless words in chapter 12 Language and Literacy. He talks about how some words lack meaning and make the piece of writing an ineffective piece.

He talks about words like democracy, socialism, freedom and patriotic. He says words like these have no agreed definition and therefore must be avoided (Orwell, George and Bruce Rogers, 795). Starting a paper seems the most difficult yet is the most essential part of a paper. It is often said the first impression is the last impression; the introductory paragraph is like the first impression of your paper, therefore, it must be strong enough to grasp the attention of the reader. Your introductory paragraph includes your thesis statement which is like a road map for your essay it should be clear and to the point listing out the main points of your paper.

The introduction of a paper should be interesting so that the reader continues to read the rest of it. People often start their papers with a quote from a famous person or generalized idea then lead to specific topics. To write an A grade paper, revision is the trick.