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Rick Hill: Assignment\Readings\thoughts 101

Healthy Recipes manual

Suzanne Brant: Materials for healthy life styles

Healthy colon

Stress

Norma: thoughts from elder on this session 3

Writing Tips

linked from suite101.com

Tip #1: Figure out exactly what the professor wants. Read the assignment sheet very carefully. If you have any questions, ask your professor for clarification. Visit your professor at office hours, and discuss your paper plan to make sure you understand the directions. At a guess, I'd say that at least 10% of my students over the years were downgraded because they did not follow directions.

Tip #2: Brainstorm a great topic that is appropriate for the assignment. Students often are uncreative when thinking of topics. I recently assigned students to write about international media coverage of a current event, and over half of them wrote about North Korea! Stand out from the crowd and write about something unique. You definitely want to write about something that interests you, or else this paper assignment is going to suck. If you're not sure what to write, visit the professor to get some help with brainstorming, and check out this article about choosing term paper topics.

Tip # 3: Write an outline. Professors always tell you this, and students often don't listen. We mean it. Good organization is one of the keys to success in a college term paper, and it's very difficult to be organized without an outline. It doesn't have to be a very detailed outline, and you can certainly deviate from the outline as you write the paper. Consider showing your outline to the professor before you write the paper.

Tip #4: Make sure you back up claims in the paper with sufficient evidence. A claim is a statement of fact. Evidence is material that lends support to that claim. For example, let's say you want to claim that hot dogs are linked to child leukemia. If you're going to state this, you need to back up your claim with evidence. Discuss some medical studies and statistics, and include a quote from a credible pediatrician. When using evidence, be sure not to rely too heavily on examples. You can find examples of just about anything, and isolated examples are rarely good evidence. For example, a story about your cousin who has childhood leukemia and ate a lot of hot dogs is not strong evidence to back up your claim. Feel free to use this example, but use it alongside more general evidence, like statistics or medical studies.

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