College instructors expect students to develop informed opinions about important issues in their disciplines. To make sure students cannot avoid thinking about issues in their disciplines, colleges require students to write source papers.
Instructors may call the papers essays, research papers or term papers. Whatever the terminology, the assignments require students to draw on the reasoning and evidence of other people–the students’ sources–to support their own opinions.
Instructors may require students to use a combination of published and unpublished sources as evidence for their opinions. Published sources include book, websites, and databases; unpublished sources include such things as the student’s own experience or an interview the student conducted.
Most college libraries offer classes in research skills to help students to use the library’s resources to find published evidence for assignments. However, it’s not the librarian’s job to find Caitlin a topic for her sociology paper or tell Josh how to limit his biology paper to manageable size. Those are writing skills teachers and librarians expect students to know before they get to college.
If you want to your youngsters succeed in college, make sure they have mastered the process of planning a persuasive paper before they hit campus. Specifically, they need to know how to
- Develop a thesis statement that expresses an opinion on a topic.
- Write supporting points for the thesis that are reasons for believing the thesis to be true.
- Systematically identify evidence they already have for each supporting point.
- Identify key words to use in searching for evidence they do not already have.
- Summarize in a sentence the main idea of a chapter, article, TV program, etc.
- Record enough information about a source that they can easily find it again.
These are skills students can learn in middle school and then practice all through high school. They are equally appropriate for “paragraph essays” and for 10-page research papers.
Knowing just these few writing skills will enable students to develop the research skills necessary to write source papers for their college classes.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1192902