How Many Paragraphs In An Essay?

How Many Paragraphs In An Essay? Proofreading and copy-editing are the last steps in the completion of your essay. Comb your essay for areas where formatting and style can be improved. You should have already edited for content after finishing your rough draft. Performing a spell-check is the first and easiest part of this process. Most find it helpful to then mark up a print-out of their essay, as this is how your instructor will encounter your work. But the exploration phase is essential; it simply takes time and patience. Scholarly versus Popular is an important distinction and one you need to keep in mind. You want to make sure your secondary sources are sound, and the way to do that is to make sure they are scholarly. Most things in the University Library or available through the University Library's website are scholarly, but not everything. Assess whether you have enough information to proceed.Some of the information you have gathered will be of the most general, factual kind. They are the things that you needed to learn to understand the basic narrative of your subject. All paragraphs should make a specific point and contain specific evidence. Most should also make an obvious link to your thesis. Making sure that all these elements are present is easiest if you actually outline your paragraphs in advance. Most scholarly journals use a process called peer-review to ensure they only publish quality research. Each article that is submitted is reviewed by subject experts to make sure it is of reasonable quality. A spell-check will not catch the improper use of homonyms, so manually check to make sure you have used the right ones, such as “their” and “there” ; affect and effect ; than and then . Once you have looked over every element of your paper carefully, enter the corrections into the computer. Evaluate your introduction before you begin writing the rest of your paper. Try giving your introduction to friends or family members to read and ask them to explain to you what they think your essay is about. If they cannot do this or if they do not know what you plan to argue, then your professor will also likely be confused. An adequate introduction should be roughly ten percent of the overall paper, but it can be shorter. The more attention you pay to structuring coherent paragraphs, the easier it will be for your reader to follow your logic. Whether you like it or not, essay writing is part and parcel of completing a degree. Even those who usually excel at written work can find themselves feeling the fear when faced with the prospect of putting together a lengthy essay or dissertation. With a few handy hints, you can get on the right track to writing a masterpiece. Look over your essay methodically, looking at one element at a time, such as proper indentation, spacing, footnotes and bibliography, formatting, etc. Next, read your paper for things like voice, word choice, contractions, proper use of quotation marks, etc. While you might need this information to introduce your theme, it probably will not help you to make your specific argument. Other bits of information will no longer be specifically relevant to the topic as you have now narrowed it down. Look at your notes to determine if you have enough to sustain your argument, likely you will need to do some directed research to support your thesis. Developing a thesis statement is the first major writing step and is crucial for directing both your research and how you formulate your argument. Research shows that students frequently feel unproductive during this stage because it may not seem like they are moving forward with their research. The Calgary Public Library contains both popular and scholarly books, and if you use books from there you should be more careful about examining their quality. Books that you use for your essays should have footnotes or endnotes and a bibliography. You should be able to easily determine what evidence was used to make the argument. Journal articles will be similar, and should be in a scholarly journal.