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While most college classes can be fun, you will have some classes that you must take. For most majors, writing is the most important skill. For some disciplines, mathematics is the most important but writing is usually the the second most important. In addition, even if you take a math heavy major, you will want to be able to write well when you apply to jobs and grad school and writing is important to get that post graduate degree once you do get into graduate school. Even an engineering masters or doctorate usually requires a good deal of writing. For any of the social sciences, even a very math heavy Economics undergraduate program, writing is always the most important thing. It is even more inmportant then statistics and calculus. I also double majored in History and minored in Political Science and took a few classes in every social science, some behavioral sciences and a good deal of the arts and writing was always paramount.
Love or hate my politics, writing style and what you know of me personally, I can write and write a great deal and to all of the incoming freshmen, let me tell you how to write well for college. Your professors are likely to do a very good job for Freshman composition (many of you probably took AP English but there really is no substitute for college writing than freshmen composition. This post is not meant to be a substitute, nor is that the case with this thread. I hope that this post can be something that you save and read over once and keep on hand so you can look at the reference section for additional input, input derived from professional and academic writing on my part and the part of who ever posts in here with some ideas of their own or experiences of their own.
I do not even have to suggest that you take Freshman composition but since you have to take it, take it seriously. It is not likely to be extremely entertaining (the other required freshman level English courses, Literature and Critical Thinking and Writing were fun though) it can and will; if you put in the work, have tremendous utility. The people on NT and in other forums, enjoy, dislike or sometimes simply take note of how many paragraphs I often times type out but I usually post the lengthier posts, where the subject matter being discussed is something that I know well.
If you must do research for your paper. General knowledge for academic writing is not going to get you very good grades. Even if you know the subject matter's general ideas very well, still do a lot of research and not just as a means to that very immediate end of ending your paper but also to learn new things and even something that did not get into your paper can useful be in a future paper or debate or may simply exist to enrich your life. After putting in some serious work in the library, you should be able to develop a good thesis and have a good deal of points (you should have enough that if your commentary on the other facts/points, derived from research, is going well and you have a lot of quality commentary, you can simply drop a point or more from your rough outline if there is a page maximum and you are afraid to exceed it. You should not drop the final point in your sequence, you should drop the points that you feel are the weakest). After you have informed yourself well through quality research (that should take up about 60% of the time spent working on the paper and maybe more in some cases) with another 2.5% for coming up with your thesis, 2.5% for forming the rough outline (when making your outline, place the weakest points at the middle of the papper, your average points at the front and your best at the end), 5% for speed writing the rough draft writing (In my case, I speed write, I write very quickly for reasons I am about to explain) the first draft and 30% for editing. If it is non fiction, keep the content that came from your well informed speed run over the page or screen but if it is fiction, it may be the caes that you change and connect many times ad some potes will write a short poem and make hundred or more edits in order to come up with the perfet word choice. This post is about non fiction though I suggest keeping the content even as you make grammatical and spelling corrections.
When I write on Niketalk, I write on topics about which I know a good deal and ask questions or just read through threads where I am not knwoledgebale about the subject matter. This means that my posts do need the requisite research as an actual essay and if I do any research is limited to getting certain names and dates correct and I do not edit very much. Some people, who tend to dislike the content of my posts gleefuly point that there are grammatical errors those "essays" that I spent an hour or more to write they are one third correct, I do make grammatical mistakes and speeling errors because it takes me up to four time as long to edit as it does to actually write. If you now your subject matter very well, it should only take a minute or two to type a short paragraph or three to five for a longer paragraph so the research portion is not there and it takes me a minute, at most, to form the basic thesis and if the post is going to be really long, I will think of a half dozen to a dozen points in my head and then just write the post. They are also wrong about my "essays," I am not writing an essay and if I were writing an essay, I would edit it exstentively and as much as I like some of my fellow NTers (and the ones that do not like me, I regard as friends who will one day either become more like me and my views by watching enough election cycles and the broken promises contained therein, start a busines here in California or other deep blue-anti free enterprize states, get a job that pays so well that they actually feel the bite of higher federal income taxes or if they stay who they are politically, they will come around and learn to seperate political views from personal feelings towards someone else) I am not willing to spend as much time as it would take to be flawless, from a technical stand point.
In my case and for others, it is a fact that I write very quickly and if I slow down, I will get too esoteric, too vanilla, too willing to seek the consensus and too weak in my convictions. So when it comes to academic rough drafts or Niketalk final products I am willing to give up some technical fidelity. I could write perfect posts but it would take me an hour to edit what took me 15 minutes to write and even if it is the equivalent of a half page and took me 5 minutes, it would take me 20 minutes to edit. I wish my writing could be perfect and just as quick so that those who read it have a smoother experience but I do not have the time and even if I did, not many people do not read it so to those who do read it, I hope you understand that technical limitation. I also hope that you will enjoy the content and feel free to learn from, disagree with it a little bit or to disagree with it completely and to write something with convictions of your own, I would put up with some bad grammar and typos in exchange for something with feeling. You should do the same in writin that rough draft and just allow feelings to flow onto the page or the screen and in an academic setting and then later on edit it laboriously and to all of you freshmen, spend the time and edit and then edit it again to get the grammar perfected, to get the spelling perfected, to use the thesaurus if a certain word comes up over and over again and to avoid the temptation to change the content (the one exception is if you heard something or read something credible, that is brand new information or something from the news media and it is very pertinnt to your paper and that should be added if the paper is about current events and that should be added but treat that new paragraph or portion of the paragraoh as its own mini essay and speed write and then edit and plug it into the final paper).
For an exam, which I did so under time pressure, I would make grammatical errors but I was speaking from the heart (with an informed brain to go along with that heart) and it produced better content than when I wrote terms papers and better than qwhen I would write very slowly and sop to correct anything wrong with the grammar or spelling. I would edit the content and not for the better so the grammar and spelling were flawless but I usually harmed the content and after the course was over I would ask about the exam versus the term paper amd more then one professor said that they liked my exam essay and not the term papers and not one said the opposite. So to all of my NT bretheren entering college, especially if you opt for history or poli sci or econ or another social science, get informed, devise a very loose plan but a very clear thesis and defend the thesis forcefully and without regard for consensus or conventional "wisdom" (which events tend to prove as folly every few years) or what your professor would want you to say. When you edit your term paper to remove all technical flaws, leave the content untouched.
Believe it or not; before had the experience of taking freshman comp and AP English during my senior year and I learned how to research well and how to follow the process I just described, and AP English in my senior year of HS, I actually had trouble trying to meet the page mimimum or if I did know the subject, I just wrote a lot of random things with no unifying thesis. This poor writing was despite the fact that I had read a lot during my teenage and preteen years. When you do not do any drugs or drink and without online video games and the fact that I could not drive to any places (my parents live a few miles out side of town and it was terrible before I had a car), I worked out at home, took my jump shots and did some other drills and maybe swam in the pool and played some video games and did some chores but that left me hours and hours every day during summer time to read and read and read some more.
By 17 or 18, I did have a lot for information (for my age at least) on a variety of social sciences and humanities and some of the arts and I was exposed to many fine writers and I still needed some actual training, specifically on the topic of how to take a lot of information in your head and refine and distill it into a tract, with a unifying thesis (Later on you add to that foundation and learn how make it clear that you have more one thesis in a given paper or to change the conventional ratios of commentary to fact blend them or to change the number of paragraphs or to deliberately write an incomplete sentence). You also will learn how to methodically research and that is especially helpful for topics, with which one is not very familar. Take your freshman composition class seriously because it will influence everything that comes thereafter. If you know very little or failed to prepare you can still salvage an essay exam question with quality writing, bluffing and if you are informed about the subject, you still must be a good at writing for your passion and knowledge to matter in terms of your grade.
I hope this helps, good luck to you guys.
Quick Reference Section
-(Research) Research is the foundation and the keystone of a good paper and a great paper and lack of research will doom your paper unless you have a very soft grader. Get in the library, well ahead of time and schedule at least 45-60 minutes of library research per page and 90 minutes if you really do not know the overall subject matter, So if you know Greek history quite well, a paper about Epaminondas should warrant 45-60 minutes per page of time but if you do not know Ancient Haistory and only know World War Two, Epaminondas would have to be situated so you would need more research about his world and the daily life and the customs and the back story and how the Ancient Greeks farmed and how they organized their polis and how they fought wars and their cultural views towards war ect. That requires 90-120 minutes per page.
-(Thesis and outline) formulate a thesis, formulate a rough outline (just the thesis sentence, and bullet points for the facts/quotes/concrete details) and then write what comes to mind. The Thesis is the unifying theme of the paper, everything is ultimately in service to this one sentence. This sentence is best kept as simple as possible and that is because almost any decent thesis will be complex so in all likelihood, the thesis statement will already be lengthy and contain at least a pair of commas to serve as a qualifier or modifier. If your thesis is simple and direct, the rare, short and grammatically simple sentence will convey that.
- (Introduction) Aside from the intro and conclusion paragraphs and the intro and conclusion sentence to the paragraphs, the body of the paragraphs should average a one to two ratio of concrete, research derived deatails and it should show that you did real research and put real thought into your commentary. Do not give into the temptation to make your "commetary" just a restatment of the concrete detail.
-(Body/sentence clusters or "chunks) Like I said, commentary also includes, all of the first/intro paragraph, including the thesis (it must be early in the paper and in the intro sentence if it is less then 20 pages or so although you rarely will make the thesis statement in the very first sentence. Aside from the first sentence, place it where you think is ideal for your particular paper, the last sentence of the intro paragraph is my prefrence but many prefer to make it the penultimate sentence and to make the last sentence into a road map or preview of the paragraphs to come. Commentary also is the entire concluding paragraph.
- (The final paragraph) The concluding paragraph should be your most artful, be more utilitarian and you should save all of or most of the "five dollar words" (obviously very lengthy, technical and esoteric terms are not five dollar words in the context of that given class) for the ending. Or best of all, in my view, take a hyrbrid approach and recap the essay with more utilitarian language and then quickly transition and restate and summarize everything that was said but in a very artistic and stylish manner. make the professor remember that you used obscure words, if he or she had to check his or her dictionary near the end of the paper, it will stand out from the 200 others that drew upon the same sources and reached the same conclusions.
- (Style and more about the conclusion) While most of your grade will be based on the quality of the research, as reflected in the concrete sentences and the works cited page(s) and the ability to deilver meaningful comentary (that reflects that you have learned what is being taught in the course, in my case with economics, if my concrete detail was that x changed and y changed, I should have able to show a solid and plasuible casual connection or say that "it is likely that a, b or c or some combination thereof did it." You can help your cause and maybe improve your grade with your the ability to have an interesting and attention grabbing intro, commetary that is tied to the facts and a memorable flourish at the very end.
- (Sources and Diversity of Sources) Try to have diverse sources for your topic. One of the great things about econ is that you could place a graph or chart in your essay as concrete detail, I am sure you could do the same in some chemistry classes or anatomy courses and for econometrics, I would put in a table with markings related to confidence intervals and for art history, I put in images of painting and statues. Writing is what matters the most but having some visuals and writing well about them can make your paper stand out without using any gimicks. For history, especially when writing about an important even in classical hisotry such as the Pelloponesian war, include one who was there like Thucydides and then maybe a Roman historian's view and the view of someone from the Italian Reniassance and some from the enlightenent and some archeological work and something from a medical journal about the plague of Athens and maybe Sociologist's theory about why Spartan culture was hyper militarist even by the standards of a very militaristic Ancient World. Do not just have six books by Victor Davis Hanson (as wonderful a writer about the classical world he may be).
-(placement of body paragraphs) Array you weakest points in the middle and the average ones near the beginning and the best near the end.
-(modifying for the circumstances) Know the audience, every field of study has its protocols and every professor is different, ask people who got good grades or bad grades in his or her previous classes.
-(It is an asset to worry about staying under the maximum length limit and not try to bulk up the paper just to not fall short of the minimum). You should be struggling to stay under a page or word limit. You should do enough research and drink enough coffee on the day that you actually write the rough draft that you over write and have to cut it down to fit within the maximum. It will leave you with the academic writing equivalent of a distilled liquor compared to the watered down beer of someone, who could barely meet the minimum despite having only three sources, four facts, a big font and used the period trick.
-(on deviating from the basic intro-1 concrete-2 commentary-repeat two more times-concluding setence) Stick to the fundamnetals but once you feel really, really comfortable with them, you can deviate a little bit, try to maintain the two to one commetary to concrete but you can bunch up three sentences of facts and then have a six paragraph mini essay with the essay or have six and then three sentence of facts or have a very fact heavy sentence where the facts almost speak for them selves, save for a laconic intro sentence, conclusion sentence and one or two laconic sentences of commentray and then in the next paragraph or some pther paragraph, give a speech with just one or two facts.
(though not required, providing a "road map" for the essay can be useful) I am paraphrasing Mark Twain when he said "tell them what they will be told, tell them and then tell them what you told them," refering to the intro, the body and the conclusions, respectively.
( On scaling up.) Essays are scaled up paragraphs and non fiction books books are very long and modified essays. Everything abour academic writing is about scaling up fro msomething smaller. In Kindergarten, you learn letters, in Elementary you learn to combine them into words, those words become sentences, those sentences become single paragraphs and by middle schools you write very short essays, high school has you doing short essays, freshman comp., should have you doing the same but are judged by more excacting standards and then you might finish with a 20 page essay and maybe by your senior year you might have to write something around 100 pages and by your post graduate years it was 600 pages for my masters and some PhD students write well over 2,000 or 3,000 and maybe over 9.000! Get very comfortable with the steps of essay writing and with time and an adequate source for research and enough time and with a steady dedication, a book of hundreds of pages is something is within your grasp. It is all about just scaling up and and up and up until you have an entire book.
Feel free to add more items and/or to ask questions. I suggest that if you are an undergraduate, especially an incoming freshman, you should save this thread, not just my post but the quality items that should be coming in from others.
Love or hate my politics, writing style and what you know of me personally, I can write and write a great deal and to all of the incoming freshmen, let me tell you how to write well for college. Your professors are likely to do a very good job for Freshman composition (many of you probably took AP English but there really is no substitute for college writing than freshmen composition. This post is not meant to be a substitute, nor is that the case with this thread. I hope that this post can be something that you save and read over once and keep on hand so you can look at the reference section for additional input, input derived from professional and academic writing on my part and the part of who ever posts in here with some ideas of their own or experiences of their own.
I do not even have to suggest that you take Freshman composition but since you have to take it, take it seriously. It is not likely to be extremely entertaining (the other required freshman level English courses, Literature and Critical Thinking and Writing were fun though) it can and will; if you put in the work, have tremendous utility. The people on NT and in other forums, enjoy, dislike or sometimes simply take note of how many paragraphs I often times type out but I usually post the lengthier posts, where the subject matter being discussed is something that I know well.
If you must do research for your paper. General knowledge for academic writing is not going to get you very good grades. Even if you know the subject matter's general ideas very well, still do a lot of research and not just as a means to that very immediate end of ending your paper but also to learn new things and even something that did not get into your paper can useful be in a future paper or debate or may simply exist to enrich your life. After putting in some serious work in the library, you should be able to develop a good thesis and have a good deal of points (you should have enough that if your commentary on the other facts/points, derived from research, is going well and you have a lot of quality commentary, you can simply drop a point or more from your rough outline if there is a page maximum and you are afraid to exceed it. You should not drop the final point in your sequence, you should drop the points that you feel are the weakest). After you have informed yourself well through quality research (that should take up about 60% of the time spent working on the paper and maybe more in some cases) with another 2.5% for coming up with your thesis, 2.5% for forming the rough outline (when making your outline, place the weakest points at the middle of the papper, your average points at the front and your best at the end), 5% for speed writing the rough draft writing (In my case, I speed write, I write very quickly for reasons I am about to explain) the first draft and 30% for editing. If it is non fiction, keep the content that came from your well informed speed run over the page or screen but if it is fiction, it may be the caes that you change and connect many times ad some potes will write a short poem and make hundred or more edits in order to come up with the perfet word choice. This post is about non fiction though I suggest keeping the content even as you make grammatical and spelling corrections.
When I write on Niketalk, I write on topics about which I know a good deal and ask questions or just read through threads where I am not knwoledgebale about the subject matter. This means that my posts do need the requisite research as an actual essay and if I do any research is limited to getting certain names and dates correct and I do not edit very much. Some people, who tend to dislike the content of my posts gleefuly point that there are grammatical errors those "essays" that I spent an hour or more to write they are one third correct, I do make grammatical mistakes and speeling errors because it takes me up to four time as long to edit as it does to actually write. If you now your subject matter very well, it should only take a minute or two to type a short paragraph or three to five for a longer paragraph so the research portion is not there and it takes me a minute, at most, to form the basic thesis and if the post is going to be really long, I will think of a half dozen to a dozen points in my head and then just write the post. They are also wrong about my "essays," I am not writing an essay and if I were writing an essay, I would edit it exstentively and as much as I like some of my fellow NTers (and the ones that do not like me, I regard as friends who will one day either become more like me and my views by watching enough election cycles and the broken promises contained therein, start a busines here in California or other deep blue-anti free enterprize states, get a job that pays so well that they actually feel the bite of higher federal income taxes or if they stay who they are politically, they will come around and learn to seperate political views from personal feelings towards someone else) I am not willing to spend as much time as it would take to be flawless, from a technical stand point.
In my case and for others, it is a fact that I write very quickly and if I slow down, I will get too esoteric, too vanilla, too willing to seek the consensus and too weak in my convictions. So when it comes to academic rough drafts or Niketalk final products I am willing to give up some technical fidelity. I could write perfect posts but it would take me an hour to edit what took me 15 minutes to write and even if it is the equivalent of a half page and took me 5 minutes, it would take me 20 minutes to edit. I wish my writing could be perfect and just as quick so that those who read it have a smoother experience but I do not have the time and even if I did, not many people do not read it so to those who do read it, I hope you understand that technical limitation. I also hope that you will enjoy the content and feel free to learn from, disagree with it a little bit or to disagree with it completely and to write something with convictions of your own, I would put up with some bad grammar and typos in exchange for something with feeling. You should do the same in writin that rough draft and just allow feelings to flow onto the page or the screen and in an academic setting and then later on edit it laboriously and to all of you freshmen, spend the time and edit and then edit it again to get the grammar perfected, to get the spelling perfected, to use the thesaurus if a certain word comes up over and over again and to avoid the temptation to change the content (the one exception is if you heard something or read something credible, that is brand new information or something from the news media and it is very pertinnt to your paper and that should be added if the paper is about current events and that should be added but treat that new paragraph or portion of the paragraoh as its own mini essay and speed write and then edit and plug it into the final paper).
For an exam, which I did so under time pressure, I would make grammatical errors but I was speaking from the heart (with an informed brain to go along with that heart) and it produced better content than when I wrote terms papers and better than qwhen I would write very slowly and sop to correct anything wrong with the grammar or spelling. I would edit the content and not for the better so the grammar and spelling were flawless but I usually harmed the content and after the course was over I would ask about the exam versus the term paper amd more then one professor said that they liked my exam essay and not the term papers and not one said the opposite. So to all of my NT bretheren entering college, especially if you opt for history or poli sci or econ or another social science, get informed, devise a very loose plan but a very clear thesis and defend the thesis forcefully and without regard for consensus or conventional "wisdom" (which events tend to prove as folly every few years) or what your professor would want you to say. When you edit your term paper to remove all technical flaws, leave the content untouched.
Believe it or not; before had the experience of taking freshman comp and AP English during my senior year and I learned how to research well and how to follow the process I just described, and AP English in my senior year of HS, I actually had trouble trying to meet the page mimimum or if I did know the subject, I just wrote a lot of random things with no unifying thesis. This poor writing was despite the fact that I had read a lot during my teenage and preteen years. When you do not do any drugs or drink and without online video games and the fact that I could not drive to any places (my parents live a few miles out side of town and it was terrible before I had a car), I worked out at home, took my jump shots and did some other drills and maybe swam in the pool and played some video games and did some chores but that left me hours and hours every day during summer time to read and read and read some more.
By 17 or 18, I did have a lot for information (for my age at least) on a variety of social sciences and humanities and some of the arts and I was exposed to many fine writers and I still needed some actual training, specifically on the topic of how to take a lot of information in your head and refine and distill it into a tract, with a unifying thesis (Later on you add to that foundation and learn how make it clear that you have more one thesis in a given paper or to change the conventional ratios of commentary to fact blend them or to change the number of paragraphs or to deliberately write an incomplete sentence). You also will learn how to methodically research and that is especially helpful for topics, with which one is not very familar. Take your freshman composition class seriously because it will influence everything that comes thereafter. If you know very little or failed to prepare you can still salvage an essay exam question with quality writing, bluffing and if you are informed about the subject, you still must be a good at writing for your passion and knowledge to matter in terms of your grade.
I hope this helps, good luck to you guys.
Quick Reference Section
-(Research) Research is the foundation and the keystone of a good paper and a great paper and lack of research will doom your paper unless you have a very soft grader. Get in the library, well ahead of time and schedule at least 45-60 minutes of library research per page and 90 minutes if you really do not know the overall subject matter, So if you know Greek history quite well, a paper about Epaminondas should warrant 45-60 minutes per page of time but if you do not know Ancient Haistory and only know World War Two, Epaminondas would have to be situated so you would need more research about his world and the daily life and the customs and the back story and how the Ancient Greeks farmed and how they organized their polis and how they fought wars and their cultural views towards war ect. That requires 90-120 minutes per page.
-(Thesis and outline) formulate a thesis, formulate a rough outline (just the thesis sentence, and bullet points for the facts/quotes/concrete details) and then write what comes to mind. The Thesis is the unifying theme of the paper, everything is ultimately in service to this one sentence. This sentence is best kept as simple as possible and that is because almost any decent thesis will be complex so in all likelihood, the thesis statement will already be lengthy and contain at least a pair of commas to serve as a qualifier or modifier. If your thesis is simple and direct, the rare, short and grammatically simple sentence will convey that.
- (Introduction) Aside from the intro and conclusion paragraphs and the intro and conclusion sentence to the paragraphs, the body of the paragraphs should average a one to two ratio of concrete, research derived deatails and it should show that you did real research and put real thought into your commentary. Do not give into the temptation to make your "commetary" just a restatment of the concrete detail.
-(Body/sentence clusters or "chunks) Like I said, commentary also includes, all of the first/intro paragraph, including the thesis (it must be early in the paper and in the intro sentence if it is less then 20 pages or so although you rarely will make the thesis statement in the very first sentence. Aside from the first sentence, place it where you think is ideal for your particular paper, the last sentence of the intro paragraph is my prefrence but many prefer to make it the penultimate sentence and to make the last sentence into a road map or preview of the paragraphs to come. Commentary also is the entire concluding paragraph.
- (The final paragraph) The concluding paragraph should be your most artful, be more utilitarian and you should save all of or most of the "five dollar words" (obviously very lengthy, technical and esoteric terms are not five dollar words in the context of that given class) for the ending. Or best of all, in my view, take a hyrbrid approach and recap the essay with more utilitarian language and then quickly transition and restate and summarize everything that was said but in a very artistic and stylish manner. make the professor remember that you used obscure words, if he or she had to check his or her dictionary near the end of the paper, it will stand out from the 200 others that drew upon the same sources and reached the same conclusions.
- (Style and more about the conclusion) While most of your grade will be based on the quality of the research, as reflected in the concrete sentences and the works cited page(s) and the ability to deilver meaningful comentary (that reflects that you have learned what is being taught in the course, in my case with economics, if my concrete detail was that x changed and y changed, I should have able to show a solid and plasuible casual connection or say that "it is likely that a, b or c or some combination thereof did it." You can help your cause and maybe improve your grade with your the ability to have an interesting and attention grabbing intro, commetary that is tied to the facts and a memorable flourish at the very end.
- (Sources and Diversity of Sources) Try to have diverse sources for your topic. One of the great things about econ is that you could place a graph or chart in your essay as concrete detail, I am sure you could do the same in some chemistry classes or anatomy courses and for econometrics, I would put in a table with markings related to confidence intervals and for art history, I put in images of painting and statues. Writing is what matters the most but having some visuals and writing well about them can make your paper stand out without using any gimicks. For history, especially when writing about an important even in classical hisotry such as the Pelloponesian war, include one who was there like Thucydides and then maybe a Roman historian's view and the view of someone from the Italian Reniassance and some from the enlightenent and some archeological work and something from a medical journal about the plague of Athens and maybe Sociologist's theory about why Spartan culture was hyper militarist even by the standards of a very militaristic Ancient World. Do not just have six books by Victor Davis Hanson (as wonderful a writer about the classical world he may be).
-(placement of body paragraphs) Array you weakest points in the middle and the average ones near the beginning and the best near the end.
-(modifying for the circumstances) Know the audience, every field of study has its protocols and every professor is different, ask people who got good grades or bad grades in his or her previous classes.
-(It is an asset to worry about staying under the maximum length limit and not try to bulk up the paper just to not fall short of the minimum). You should be struggling to stay under a page or word limit. You should do enough research and drink enough coffee on the day that you actually write the rough draft that you over write and have to cut it down to fit within the maximum. It will leave you with the academic writing equivalent of a distilled liquor compared to the watered down beer of someone, who could barely meet the minimum despite having only three sources, four facts, a big font and used the period trick.
-(on deviating from the basic intro-1 concrete-2 commentary-repeat two more times-concluding setence) Stick to the fundamnetals but once you feel really, really comfortable with them, you can deviate a little bit, try to maintain the two to one commetary to concrete but you can bunch up three sentences of facts and then have a six paragraph mini essay with the essay or have six and then three sentence of facts or have a very fact heavy sentence where the facts almost speak for them selves, save for a laconic intro sentence, conclusion sentence and one or two laconic sentences of commentray and then in the next paragraph or some pther paragraph, give a speech with just one or two facts.
(though not required, providing a "road map" for the essay can be useful) I am paraphrasing Mark Twain when he said "tell them what they will be told, tell them and then tell them what you told them," refering to the intro, the body and the conclusions, respectively.
( On scaling up.) Essays are scaled up paragraphs and non fiction books books are very long and modified essays. Everything abour academic writing is about scaling up fro msomething smaller. In Kindergarten, you learn letters, in Elementary you learn to combine them into words, those words become sentences, those sentences become single paragraphs and by middle schools you write very short essays, high school has you doing short essays, freshman comp., should have you doing the same but are judged by more excacting standards and then you might finish with a 20 page essay and maybe by your senior year you might have to write something around 100 pages and by your post graduate years it was 600 pages for my masters and some PhD students write well over 2,000 or 3,000 and maybe over 9.000! Get very comfortable with the steps of essay writing and with time and an adequate source for research and enough time and with a steady dedication, a book of hundreds of pages is something is within your grasp. It is all about just scaling up and and up and up until you have an entire book.
Feel free to add more items and/or to ask questions. I suggest that if you are an undergraduate, especially an incoming freshman, you should save this thread, not just my post but the quality items that should be coming in from others.
