Focus/Thesis
College professors are often concerned about seeing a thesis, or strong focal point, in student papers. A thesis sentence is as important to a paper that explains something as to an argumentative paper. You may arrive at a thesis sentence by asking yourself, "If I boiled my whole paper down to one sentence, how would that sentence read?" It is not absolutely essential that your thesis be stated in one sentence, but it should be succinctly stated early in your paper and should be reiterated, in slightly different wording, near the end of your paper as well. A thesis sentence generally consists of your topic and a stance or attitude toward it.

Introduction
When you are writing an informative paper in a senior seminar or equivalent upper-level class, forget what your high school English teacher told you about attention-getting introductions. It is important that your introduction be clear, stating the nature of a problem and potential solution or establishing the significance of research in a particular area. The tone should be appropriate to the discipline, or subject area, and those attention-getters are best left in the creative personal essay or journalistic writing. Your paper will not be a personal essay or an article for Veritas.

Organization
The organization of your paper will follow content-that is, what you have to say will govern the order in which you say it. Make sure to give some thought to the sequence of the information, however, in terms of what a reader needs to know first, second, third, etc. Are you reasoning from cause to effect? From problem to alternative solutions to one preferred solution? Are you defining and explaining several categories in which phenomena can be classified? Your organization should reflect your purpose as a writer. A good overview of the purposes of outlining is at Developing an Outline, a handout from Purdue University's OWL (Online Writing Lab).

The use of transitional wording between paragraphs and sentences helps to make your organization clear to the reader. Wording like "As a consequence of A, . . ." and "First, . . . Next, . . ., Finally, . . .," or "For example," helps to show the reader how information following that wording relates to the preceding idea. A useful site is Gallaudet University Tutoring and Writing Center's Guide to Transitions with Sample Sentences.

Paragraph Structure
Clear, informative writing generally treats one topic per paragraph and should have sufficient explanation and evidence to make that topic clear. Many professional writers do not use topic sentences, but readers find it easier to comprehend content when they find a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

In research-based writing, make sure to make your point in your own words. Use research to support your point, but do not let another's words carry your argument. See Quoting Tips, Paraphrasing Tips, and Summarizing Tips and our Guide to Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Quoting.

Documentation
Bear in mind that all material coming from other sources must be documented.  If you create a table with data from other sources, you'll want to give credit to the sources for the data; if you use someone else's table, you'll want to give credit for the whole table.  A useful overview is given in Appendix B: Documenting Sources to the Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students. Appendix A of that site supplies formatting guidelines. If you prefer the more familiar MLA Documentation, you may find An Overview of MLA (Modern Language Association) Format useful. For more examples, check the Research and Documentation Online site established for users of Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers. 

Proofreading/Editing
A few words of caution: Be careful in your use of spell checkers; use a dictionary if you are unsure. Take what the grammar checker says with several large grains of salt-it doesn't process long strings of words and is often useless in checking complex sentences about complex ideas.

Getting Started
Give yourself plenty of time to write your paper. Try to write early, even if there are holes in your writing. It's a good idea to have a clear thesis when you start writing, but it isn't absolutely necessary: some of us are writers who discover what we have to say through the process of writing things down, while others of us need a precise plan before we can get the first sentence down.

As you think about your paper, make lists of info or lists of questions a reader might need answers to or flow charts showing the chunks of writing that your paper will need to completely present what you have to say. This is important writing activity, even if you don't see finished paragraphs coming out of it.

Drafting
Start writing well before your deadline. If you don't know everything you need to include, skip parts. Try not to be a harsh critic of your writing at this stage. Get as much down as you can, because it's easier to revise to produce a good final product if you have plenty of material to work with. Schedule times for writing and make good use of them, actually producing instead of staring at the screen, waiting for the perfect way to phrase your sentence.

If you get really, really stuck, allow yourself a 10-minute break-or a 30-minute one, if you have time-and go do something else, but tell yourself that you'll write your way out of your dilemma when you sit down again and consider that time for returning to your writing as serious an appointment as a doctor's appointment. Or talk to someone about your topic; if no one's around who understands what you're talking about, so much the better-you'll be forced to explain it clearly, and that can help you get back into the writing again. (Writing Center tutors are willing to help you with this kind of brainstorming.)

Revising
When you revise, use your thesis sentence to determine whether everything in your paper revolves around the same focus. Ask yourself whether-and how-each paragraph relates to your thesis sentence. That will help you revise for transitional wording as well. Ask yourself how each idea relates to the idea that preceded it.

Eliminate redundancy-unnecessary repetition of the same wording-as you revise, but don't eliminate all repetition. Repetition may be a way of emphasizing an idea or providing connection between parts of a paragraph or a paper.

Read your paper aloud and listen to the tone, or style, of the paper. Does it have the same level of formality throughout? Have you used slang or other informal wording? Have you used technical terms that you haven't defined?

Have you effectively incorporated research into your paper? Make sure that you have introduced quotations or paraphrases or summaries, with wording such as "Brown and Little found that . . ." or "According to Brown, . . .". Make sure that you cite your sources scrupulously, not sentence by sentence, but every time you bring in major chunks of information from other writers.

Watch for:

• verb tense shifts: When you're writing in present tense, stay in present tense. When you wrote in past tense, you made sure all your verbs had past tense endings.
• point-of-view shifts: Generally, formal writing does not make use of the first person (I) or second person (you). One can generalize by using the pronouns "one" or "everyone" or "anyone" or nouns and noun phrases like "researchers" or "people who do such and such," etc.
• run-on sentences: If you've had problems with this in the past, I strongly advise you to have a Writing Center tutor look over your sentence structure. Punctuation of sentences is fairly logical, but many writers are sometimes confused about what is acceptable.

Doublecheck quoted material, numbers, and dates for accuracy.

Doublecheck the spelling of proper names or specialized terminology, and add the correct spellings to your Spelling checker.

Doublecheck paraphrased material to make sure you have not plagiarized.

Doublecheck information and format in your bibliography.

Doublecheck formatting guidelines.

Updated by A. L. Trupe Feb. 13, 2008