How to Compose an Academic Term Paper

Academic writing gets considered a crucial means of acquiring and presenting skills and knowledge in a specific area. Thus, it becomes prudent for students to engage in writing academic papers to illustrate their understanding of concepts besides equipping them with other relevant skills. Academic papers include thesis papers, essays, term papers, and seminar papers.

Students have to write these papers to apply cultural and literary methods, and theories learned besides developing skills that will necessitate clinical text analysis, process information, besides reporting research. Academic writing gets directed to particular audiences and would generally follow conventions and rules defined by the audience or the specific academic institution. Additionally, such a paper’s content must prove concise and precise to meet the audience’s expectations and requirements.  Further, the sources have to get identified clearly, prove recent, besides coming across as unambiguous.

Guidelines to Writing an Effective Academic Term Paper

Most academic papers come across as either essays or seminar papers, and they often follow similar regulations and guidelines. Such papers have to gather, consolidate, and present concepts analytically based on the primary text. However, seminar papers and essays differ distinctly in features, especially regarding the length and the skills gained. Both of them, however, articulately require the organization of concepts to become suitable to the audience.   

So what do you need to consider before embarking on the research process?

• Work with sources. It becomes prudent to get valuable sources to base your research write-up upon. You can obtain your sources either from print or online resources. However, it becomes crucial to avoid sources that fail to follow the expected research standards. Three types of sources exist: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

1. Primary sources. It encompasses the critical analysis text and can entail poems, films, novels, and short stories.
2. Secondary sources. It entails scholarly journals and articles that get published. It mostly deals with the first group of sources (primary sources) and the analysis of their methodology.
3. Tertiary sources. It includes literary term glossaries besides specialized encyclopedias. Most of such sources get highlighted at the onset of your study.

• Picking reliable sources. You have to pick the correct sources while trying to develop your research. Therefore, it becomes prudent to avoid non-scholarly encyclopedias and sites. Additionally, ensure the sites picked have sufficient and reliable information for use in your study.
• Avoid plagiarism. You have to ensure your work passes the plagiarism test as plagiarism often comes as a grave breach of academic integrity. It matters none if the material used has copyright status or not. Having plagiarized content will always lead to your paper getting rejected and, worse, facing the full force of the law. Therefore, try and avoid plagiarism by properly citing sources.

Structure of an Academic Term Paper

1. Introduction. The rationale and subject within the introduction have to revolve around the guiding question. Additionally, it has to contextualize and issue an understandable explanation, besides specifying the relevant conditions to be followed.
2. Body. Also referred to as the main part, it gives an argument, which answers the study question besides supporting the key claim. You have to incorporate scholarly literature at this point. Ensure that the statements used prove consistent, in-depth, and coherent. However, in instances where you are writing your seminar paper, you can include thematic sub-headings. It becomes essential to provide a clear structure with a logical flow of thoughts.
3. Conclusion. It has to summarize and provide the analyzed concepts and results from the research. Here, you can also incorporate other concepts not succinctly captured in the paper’s analysis section but may require additional clarification.
4. Bibliography. It has to contain every relevant source of information cited, including secondary, tertiary, and primary sources.Try and arrange the sources in an alphabetical order, which has to start with the author’s names (APA style).

Conclusion

Academic term papers prove helpful as a grading mechanism for concepts students have learned. As such, students have to ensure they do their academic papers as effectively as possible.