As a college student, writing papers will be very common in most courses. Some papers will be more complicated and require more research and some papers will be easier and require less research. In any case, writing a college paper takes some time and practice to earn a good grade and the more effort you put in to your word choice, grammar and punctuation, the higher chance you get of a professor being impressed with your paper.

From my experiences writing papers, most of the most vital aspects is to make sure you are following the directions of the assignment and answering the question in the prompt. You should make sure to answer the question in your own words, but it is important to be mindful of the question being asked within the assignment. The more a student progresses through their college years, the higher the professor's expectations become as far as how to write properly is concerned. Certain professors in my college courses stated in the assignment's directions that they would take points off for poor writing, so in my opinion, utilizing spell-check is a good idea to make sure your grammar and punctuation is appropriate and correct.

When you write your paper, make sure that your introduction and conclusion are consistent with each other, meaning that your conclusion should repeat what your introduction said in the sense that it finalizes your paper's main point. I learned that at my first college in a Writing course, which I am grateful for that professor pointing out in one paper that what I wrote in my conclusion did not match what I said in my introduction. I remembered that input and have been self-aware of it in every paper I wrote after that.

As far as in-text citations are concerned, those are absolutely necessary because as high school and college teaches students, not giving someone else credit for their original ideas in a paper you write is called plagiarism. Plagiarism is an academic blunder that comes with severe consequences, so my tip to avoid those consequences is to provide a lot of in-text citations. This information should include the last name of the person or people you are quoting, the year the person or people said the quote and in a separate page at the end of the paper, you should also write the title of the paper or book the quote comes from. Also be mindful that when you put a quote in quotation marks, the period at the end of the sentence should go within the quotation marks.

When it comes to doing research for a paper, make sure to use credible sources such as a scholarly peer-reviewed journal article and other well-known publications that are pertinent to your paper's topic. A thesaurus can also be helpful to know of different ways to word your ideas instead of using repetitive phrases, which could impress a professor as well. Remembering all of these details and continuously developing these skills will help your academic papers stand out and go a long way in earning good grades.

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