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College Essays: Taking the Mystery Out of Writing

It's time to write your first college paper. You haven't written in a while and your palms are getting sweaty just thinking about it. Where do you start? How can you possibly know what your professor expects from you?

Your concerns are valid. If you haven't been writing for a while or if you were never very good at writing papers in high school, your first college paper can seem like a daunting task. And you're right, there is no way of knowing what your professor expects to see in your paper. Every professor grades slightly differently. They have different pet peeves. One hates when you use the word it, another will circle every time you use passive tense, and another gets all bent out of shape over contractions. The key is to realize that if this is your first paper, don't sweat those things. Do your best to avoid the list of common pet peeves (we'll revisit this later) and concentrate on writing a well-written paper. If it is a well-written paper, you won't have to worry too much about all the rest.

So where do you start? You need to choose a topic and develop a thesis. Your topic is just what it sounds like- what content will you be focusing on? Let's say you're in a film class. Your topic might simply be the movie you are watching. Your thesis, on the other hand, is a little more complex. A thesis is a strong, defendable, debatable sentence that embodies the whole argument of your paper. If your thesis statement is not debatable, it isn't a very strong thesis statement. For example, your topic is the movie The Hours, a thesis that reads: "As the story unfolds, The Hours reveals itself to be a complex story entwining the lives of three women." That is a statement that would be very hard to argue with; thus, it makes a weak thesis statement. If you expand the same statement to read: "As the story unfolds, The Hours reveals itself to be a complex story entwining the lives of three women through the artful transition between scenes," you now have to prove how the scene transitions connect the lives of the women in the movie. Since you have something to prove, you have a debatable thesis.

If you are writing a research paper, you should explore the literature available on your topic and choose only the information that directly supports you thesis statement. If you are writing an interpretive piece, be sure to familiarize yourself with the work you will be interpreting, reviewing, or critiquing. Because research

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