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What Makes A Good Term Paper: 7 Key Ingredients


A term paper involves a lot of time and effort. Additionally, it is usually worth a large percentage of your grade for the marking period. It is important to do well on any assigned term papers. With our seven key ingredients, you can make that happen.

7 Key Ingredients


  1. A great topic-you want to pick an academic, yet innovative subject. When looking for an idea with these characteristics, scan social media and trending/breaking news updates. Just make sure that if the topic is current, that there is enough support for your main ideas.
  2. The strong thesis statement-once you have a topic, you need s thesis statement. The statement should have 3-5 main points. The support is the proof to the validity of your thesis sentence.
  3. It’s all in the support-go to academic databases or your school library. Be prepared to interview experts if necessary. You want 2-4 supports for each of your claims. These could be interviews, quotes, statistics, data, stories or similar things. If any idea has no support, you will need to remove and to replace it immediately with a stronger concept.
  4. Transitions-as you move from idea to idea, sentence-to-sentence, and paragraph-to-paragraph, make sure to employ transitions to make the movement smooth.
  5. A balancing act-you have strong opinions on your subject, however, no thesis has ever been proved by emotions and opinions alone. For each of your thoughts, you must find credible and academic support for each of them to be considered valid. Your job is to prove your thesis statement by the end of the paper.
  6. Proofing –you could have an excellent paper based on content, but full of grammar and writing mistakes. This means that you will not get an A on the assignment. It is imperative that you and preferably another set of eyes proof your paper several times. This will help to polish the piece.
  7. Revision-once the paper is proofed, you can move in to complete the final draft. Keep the rough draft, as some teachers require for you to submit it with the final draft. You will carefully rewrite the paper making all revisions and editing corrections. After you do that, then read it one more time to double-check it. Make sure all of the work is submitted by or before the due date given by the teacher. He or she may also want your outline or hard copies of your sources.

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