College instructors expect students to develop informed opinions about important issues in their disciplines. To assess student progress, colleges require students to write source papers, that is, papers that draw on other people's reasoning and evidence.
Instructors may require students to use a combination of published sources (like books and databases) and unpublished sources, such as the student's own experience or an interview the student conducted, as evidence for their opinions.
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 they should 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 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 classes.
Author Info:
Linda Aragoni is a writer, writing teacher, and editor of You-Can-Teach-Writing.com, the guide to enabling students grades 7-12 to become competent writers. Get a free copy of all five articles in the series "Is Your Teen Ready for College Writing? just by signing up for Linda's free monthly ezine by Aug. 1, 2008. Details at http://www.you-can-teach-writing.com/ezine.html
Copyright 2008, Linda Gorton Aragoni. You may reprint this article provided the whole text, the author's name, the links, and this copyright notice remain intact.
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