Writing an academic paper at college is often a challenge, particularly for new students who have never learned how to present a clear argument or do referencing. A college paper requires in-depth research, making an outline, revising and more. Fortunately, it is a skill students can master with practice. Here are some tips on how to write a college paper.

Write your thesis statement

Your thesis statement sums up your main argument and must be specific and concise. It gives your point of view and your answer to a research question. Crafting this statement early on can help you to stay focused when doing your research. You can always make adjustments to it if you need to at a later stage. 

Use a college paper writing service

If you’re a student at college, you may be overwhelmed with all your responsibilities and battle to find the time to study. It will help to reach out to essay writing service EduBirdie for college students for academic assignments. A professional essay writer will write your college essays for you, and this provides you with good samples of academic writing. You can use a well-written paper as a template to follow when writing your own academic paper. This will help you to achieve good grades. 

Make an outline

When planning your essay, you need to make a basic outline. Your outline will be the skeleton you will build on when writing your essay. It will include all the main points you want to make. Referring back to your outline can help you to stay on track and structure your essay correctly.  

Write your first draft

When you write the first draft of your essay, starting with the body is probably the easiest place to start. At this stage, you don’t have to worry about finer details like spelling, punctuation or grammar, which you can fix at a later stage. The focus is to get your ideas down on paper. 

Your body will consist of paragraphs. You should begin each paragraph with a sentence introducing its central idea. You will then back this up with details, interesting facts, statistics and relevant examples etc. The concluding sentence of the paragraph should lead the reader logically on to the next paragraph. 

Write your introduction 

Once you’ve written your first draft, it will be easier to write your introduction because you will have more idea about what to say. Your introduction is very important because it introduces your argument and should make readers want to read further. One way to do this is to introduce a question to which they will want to know the answer. 

Revise your essay

It’s impossible to write the perfect essay the first time around. Revising it is critical if you want to obtain a high grade. You can rewrite a paragraph in a way that better represents your views and eliminates any unnecessary information. Make sure you have enough evidence to back up your arguments. You may also have to reorganize paragraphs to make the flow of your paper more logical. 

Write your conclusion

In your conclusion, you will sum up your main points and the significance of your findings. Don’t include any new information in your conclusion. Try to come up with a strong concluding statement your readers will remember. 

Edit and proofread

Editing your writing will make it clearer and more precise. You can ask someone to read your essay and give you feedback. Reading your essay out loud is another way to hear if there’s any repetition or lack of clarity. 

This is your opportunity to fix grammar mistakes and spelling errors. Correct any run-on sentences or sentence fragments. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms if you tend to use the same word too much. Replace long words with shorter ones where you can. 

Citations

Citations are one of the most important parts of your essay if you want to avoid plagiarism. You must give credit to the people whose ideas you use in your essay. This helps readers to distinguish between your opinions and which ideas are not your own. In-text citations must be done in the citation style you’re instructed to use. You must include a list of all the citations you use in a bibliography at the end of your paper. 

Conclusion

Writing academically at a college level is hard work and requires practice. You will have to master how to do in-depth research, cite your sources correctly and much more. Once you have mastered these skills, you have a higher chance of academic success. 

Author’s Bio

Karl Bowman understands the importance of helping students to write well. He believes that it’s only professional help that can ease the burden of studies on students and help them achieve their goals better. As an academic writer, he has helped many students lead better lives with his essay, thesis and dissertation writing help.