How To Write A Term Paper
When I was in school I was often confused by how to write a term paper. What should I write about? How should I write it? And why should I write it? It’s a common assigment in many classes, but it’s not always clear what a term paper is supposed to be.
Your teacher or professor might want something specific, so you should check with them to be sure you know the expectations for your assignment. Once you do that, here are some simple tips for how to write.
First, explain.
One of the most helpful things you can do is to try to explain what you have learned or studied to someone else who does not yet know it.
Resist the temptation to say something profound. And don’t worry about sounding brilliant. Instead, just explain what you’ve learned, in simple words.
Explaining will help you to see what you do and don’t understand. Take a big idea and put it in small words. Use short sentences, too.
As you try to explain, you’ll discover what you don’t understand. Don’t get frustrated! This is important, because knowing what you don’t understand is the best way to begin doing research. Let your questions send you to the library to look for answers. That way your research will be organic. Instead of doing work to make a teacher happy, now you’re doing research because you want to know more. The best research arises from your curiosity rather than the need to find more citations.
Second, Write A Letter.
Don’t worry about the format of your paper. Instead, think of it as a letter.
If you write a letter rather than a paper, your writing will flow more naturally. Write to someone you know, and you’ll more easily find your writing voice.
If you aim to explain, you’ll almost certainly wind up interpreting. No need to try to impress! Just try to explain as clearly as you can.
Consider the Example of Marin Mersenne
Most of what we think of as academic papers began as letters. People wrote to share what they learned, and to ask about what they still did not understand.
One of my favorite authors was a 17th Century mathematician named Marin Mersenne. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him unless you’re into prime numbers. I discovered him when I was writing a paper on Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes mentions Mersenne few times in his autobiography. That made me curious, so I looked up Mersenne in an encyclopedia. What I read there made me want to know more about Mersenne, so I started looking for more sources about Mersenne. I wound up spending a few hours in the library that day, just reading about this Minim friar from the 1600s.
Mersenne isn’t famous today, but many of the people with whom he exchanged letters are. Hobbes is one of them. René Descartes is another. Galileo is on the list as well. When European thinkers had big questions or big discoveries to share, they’d write to Mersenne. And most of their letters are like term papers: they’d write to someone they knew, and they’d explain what they knew and what they didn’t know. Mersenne would write back, and if he learned something from one person, like what Galileo was doing with studying pendulums, he’d share it with someone else who needed it, like Huygens, who used it to advance his own work in physics.
I found that paper on Hobbes to be one of the most fun I’ve ever written, because I got to spend time learning things to satisfy my own curiosity. Since then, I haven’t written any more term papers. Instead, I’ve tried to imitate Mersenne by writing letters.
Why not continue that tradition? Don’t get lost in the weeds of citations, page formatting, or bibliographies. Instead, start writing a letter to someone who cares about you, and tell them what you know. When you realize you don’t know as much as you’d like to know, do some research and fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Be sure to tell your reader how you filled in the gaps (this is what citations and bibliographies are for, after all) and before you know it, you’ll have a term paper that you enjoyed writing. You can always edit out the “Dear Grandma” before you hand it in.
Good luck! I hope you have fun learning as you write.
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If you found this helpful, you might also like my short article on how to get started on a paper you have been avoiding.
