Term Paper Trauma: The Ordeal of the First Term Paper

By Alan Haroldson

Research for a term paper is much easier than most students imagine. A website created by scholars provides abundant information, arguments for and against controversial ideas and links to articles with evidence. One good source, an article that argues for a position and provides arguments against the position, with solid facts for both sides, tells a student how to write a paper. With that one source, half the work of research is done.

Anyone who can write a good paragraph can write a good paper. One of the most important writing skills is the ability to make facts from different sources fit neatly in a paragraph, the skill of boiling information down, summarizing it. University researchers who reviewed 133 scientific studies of teaching methods ranked teaching this skill, the skill of writing summaries, the most important of all. It's one of the vital skills this ebook teaches.

Beginners can improve their writing by a applying a simple rule: don't use too many long sentences. The run-on sentence may be the most common writing error in student essays. Sometimes, a sentence is strong simply because it's short.

An English teacher warns students against using the popular grammar software Grammarly. Google Docs, which has helpful grammar suggestions and excellent spell-check, is free.

An experiment has shown that students can improve their writing by solving puzzles. The experiment was done with puzzles that teach eight very important sentence types. Learning these sentence types, or a few of them, will make a difference in the quality of a student's writing, and the puzzles are here for the student to solve.

Some books on writing have big promises in their advertising. Use these books, say the ads, and A+ papers are guaranteed. All this ebook sets out to do is show students, parents, and teachers how to deal with the beginner's trauma, how to write a decent first paper.

That's not to say that the paper won't get an A.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Haroldson
• Release date: Apr 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005000820

Book preview

TERM PAPER TRAUMA

THE ORDEAL OF THE FIRST RESEARCH PAPER

by

Alan Haroldson

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by:

Alan Haroldson

Term Paper Trauma: The Ordeal of the First Research Paper

Copyright 2022 by Alan Haroldson

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. Wikipedia's texts co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) grant free access to Wikipedia content. Portions of the Wikipedia articles listed below are reproduced in this book.

Alan Turing; Animal Testing; BBC; Benjamin Franklin; Computer Security; Direct-to-Consumer Advertising; Frank Lloyd Wright; Hayao Miyazaki; Marine Chronometer; Neil Armstrong; Phobias; Safety of Electronic Cigarettes; Samuel Morse; Standardized Test; Theodore Roosevelt

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CONTENTS

Introduction: My Book and How to Use It

Chapter 1 – Mood, Motivation, and Creativity

Chapter 2 – Resources

Chapter 3 – The Most Effective Ways to Teach Writing Skills

Chapter 4 – Good Sentences

Chapter 5 – Strong Paragraphs

Chapter 6 – Organized Paragraphs

Chapter 7 – The Writing Process

Chapter 8 – Research

Chapter 9 – Writing the Draft

Chapter 10 – Revision and Proofreading

Chapter 11 – Resources for the Future

Afterword

Appendix: Remedial Reading Resources

Answer Key

INTRODUCTION: MY BOOK AND HOW TO USE IT

The secret of accomplishing anything is knowing how to get started.

~ Mark Twain

First, here’s some valuable advice for getting started – how to use any non-fiction book. You should never read a non-fiction book start to finish. Before you start reading a chapter, get a sense of what the chapter is about by looking at headings, subheadings, and first sentences of paragraphs. It’s always good to know what’s involved in a job before going to work on it.

I'm using the word you here for a student who reads this. That's not to say that parents and teachers won't read it. I hope many do.

Some books on writing have big promises in their advertising. Use these books, say the ads, and A+ papers are guaranteed. If my book enables you to get an A+, that’s great, but if all it does is enable you to get a C on your first paper, don't worry about it. If you start with a C, you'll have plenty of time to improve.

My purpose here is just to get you started, to help you pass the hurdle of the first research paper, which is difficult for so many.

I've tried to make this as easy as possible. For example, I show you how to find the Golden Source that tells you how to write your paper.

You can spend a lot of money on things that help with writing. I'll tell you about good things that are free.

The language of this book is the kind of informal English often seen in self-help books. I want to get across my points as clearly as possible. I offer help for learning formal English, which looks better in a research paper than informal English. It can be fun. I’ll tell you about the word puzzles that have been shown to improve the writing of high school students.

A researcher named John Mellon showed that teaching high school students eight sentence types greatly improves their writing skills. He showed this with an experiment in which students learned these types by solving word puzzles.

Scientific evidence shows that no method is more effective than teaching students how to summarize. My book teaches a strategy for writing summaries.

This can be thought of as a workbook because some of the chapters have exercises, although some of these exercises don't have answers in the Answer Key. Sometimes I just suggest that you try something.

The way you use my book is up to you. You can use the exercises for writing paragraphs, connected paragraphs, or a finished term paper. The best way is using it to strengthen the skills that need to be strengthened. Identifying your weaknesses will be very helpful. If something is hard for you, it's a sign that you need to spend a lot of time with it.

Some readers will find Chapter 1, Mood, Motivation, and Creativity, more helpful than anything in the book.

As I said, I hope parents and teachers will read this book. Maybe a teacher or someone in your family can help you with it.

About all these Wikipedia articles, which I'm using because the copyrights are so easy to deal with, I've omitted the numerals in brackets that refer to the articles' endnotes. I'm not suggesting that the authors have failed to back up their writing with facts, something good researchers never do.

← Return to Contents

CHAPTER 1

MOOD, MOTIVATION, AND CREATIVITY

The secret of getting started is to divide your complex task into a series of tasks that you can take on one at a time and start with the easiest.

~ Mark Twain

It's very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxation. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you're curious, you can find lots of interesting things to do.

~ Walt Disney

Please note:

No advice in this book or any book by the author should be regarded as treatment for a mood disorder. Experts on the use of self-help for psychological problems agree that this should not be regarded as a substitute for the assistance of qualified professionals.

Putting Things Off

Procrastination, putting things off, is a problem for many of us. At times it may seem that the willingness to get some work done is just around the corner, that all we have to do is watch another show or play another game and then we can face the work with enthusiasm. Too often, the willingness to work doesn't come before bedtime, so that we can either lose sleep or miss a deadline.

Why do people procrastinate? The simplest explanation is that people don’t like work that’s hard. Work you don't know how to do properly can be very hard. Getting good grades is an awful lot of work for students who lack good study skills.

Dr. Marvin Cohn, the expert on reading and educational psychology whose advice I refer to in this book, says that the problems of struggling high school students most often stem from deficits in reading skill. Helping Your Teen-Age Student by Cohn has very helpful advice for reading and for study skills in general. The Appendix of my book tells about other resources for overcoming reading deficits.

A number of illnesses have fatigue as a symptom. That's one reason why it's good to see a doctor when one is suffering from depression. Depression conveys a sense of fatigue. People suffering from depression feel that they lack energy, but they often have as much energy as they normally do. This is a matter of the system being reluctant to let a person use energy, as if the person was suffering from a cold or the flu. Think of someone trying to get money from an ATM after forgetting the PIN. The section below with the heading A First-Aid Kit for Struggling Students tells you about getting more advice for dealing with depression.

Motivation Boosters

Getting started. When a task seems too big, think of it as a series of tasks you can take on one at a time and start with something really easy. One way to do this is just to lie down and calmly imagine yourself at work for five minutes. Another approach is to work for three or four minutes and take a short break before going back to work. After that, it becomes easy to work for longer and longer intervals, still taking short breaks, but it's important to watch the clock during breaks. This incredibly simple method is the most valuable thing I've found for dealing with procrastination. When I've got the ball rolling, I can recover from a seemingly hopeless case of laziness.

Look for natural break times, like after you finish reading a chapter. I always put an outline away after I've written it and come back to it at least a day later.

The conservation of energy. A great way for people to conserve energy while at work is simply going back and forth between easy tasks and demanding tasks.

Enjoyment. Obviously, enjoyment