College writing is a new challenge that you need to overcome during your academic career. It is not too difficult if you completed papers during your high school but the point is that college papers are a bit different. They are not more complicated to write but just different, thus, you should consider some basic rules of college writing, which we will provide you with here. Also, our article includes some essential terms of academic writing that every good student should be familiar with.
- 1. Basic terms in academic writing.
- Arguments – pieces of information that reason your writing or speaking and present it in a logical manner. Argumentation is a “must-do” for the academic paper.
- Audience – the people that read your paper and whose interests you have to consider when writing.
- Body – the central paragraphs of the essay, which develop and defend the main idea and are placed between introduction and conclusion.
- Brainstorming – an activity that includes open and free thinking about the research topic.
- Coherence – the manner of arranging the ideas that is easy for reader to follow.
- Composition is a process of combining various ideas in one coherent whole by the writer
- Focus – concentrating and emphasizing the importance or interest to one concrete subject.
- Narrative – a type of writing that tells a story to the reader.
- Persuasion is a way of writing, which is aimed on convincing the reader in the validity of writer’s position.
- Purpose is a reason that makes the writer to conduct the research, take a certain position, complete a paper etc.
- 2. Basic rules for college writing.
1) Thesis. You should keep in mind that academic writing is an argumentative writing, first of all. Thus, you must develop your personal position, which is thesis, and defend it with valid arguments.
2) Pre-writing steps. There is a major strategy of pre-writing stage: choosing a subject, narrowing it to the certain focus, creating a thesis statement, finding the supporting details and arguments, refining the thesis and polishing it.
3) Arguments. When you are looking for the arguments for your college paper we recommend you to consider to the certain models of facts relations, such as cause and effect, comparison and contrasting, similarity and dissimilarity, definition of the term or concept, the good and the expedient.
4) Revising a thesis.Pay attention to thesis refining. Usually your first step is developing the thesis statement and arguments are preceding it. It often happens so that your ideas and points throughout the body writing deviate from your main course stated in the thesis. It is not a big issue you just have to refine your thesis to the extent that it keeps balance with the arguments.
5) Topic sentences. Your claim should be supported with the topic sentences, the ones that begin body paragraphs and link them with thesis. Basically, they create a framework for your paper.
6) Introduction and conclusion. Usually experts recommend writing introductory and concluding parts after you have completed the main body of the paper. And we think that this point of view is fair as these are the paper’s components which have to analyze and describe an entire image of the research issue.