Tips on Writing a Good Paper

Need help with your grades? Here's some advice about how to write a good paper from the book "How to Get A's in College" (Hundreds of Heads Books $14.95), straight from people who've done it:

"It's funny how so many students believe that what they write is divinely inspired and not in need of revision. The better papers are the ones that are revised. Most students procrastinate, which is fine as long as you leave enough time to do three revisions. I've been doing this since high school and I always do well on my papers. I tend to write the paper in the first draft then 10 hours later I'll look at it again and change some stuff. Then I leave it for a day and look it over one more time."

"Students who don't write well are a lot more successful when they go to their school's writing and/or tutoring center right from the beginning of a writing assignment. The people there help you narrow down your subject, which is usually too broad. They'll point you in the right direction. It may seem embarrassing, but you will get over that right away, and you might as well get on the right track instead of having to go later when you are rushed, which is even more embarrassing."

"I was writing my first paper for Introduction to Humanities. I tried to take everything I heard in the lectures and cram it into one paper. I started to shoot from the hip and throw out as many ideas as I could. I thought it was a great paper. However, I had a million points in the paper, and 999,000 of them were not going to support my thesis. I ended up getting a C-. I spoke to a few writing tutors and one thing they all told me was how important it was to sit down and brainstorm. Construct a solid, coherent argument by writing an outline. When you jump into just writing, you tend to stray on tangents and you don't always support your stated thesis."

"The best way to write a good paper is to humble yourself. Go to the writing center on campus and get a second set of eyes to read your paper."

"When I wrote thesis-style papers in college, my grade would always be higher when I used examples from the text in every paragraph. It took me a little while to realize this, but once I had it down I started seeing A's instead of B's on my papers. Because a thesis paper is all opinion, I learned that as long as I was supporting my points, I was on target. And once I had the formula down, it became easier to crank out those papers."

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