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How Do I Write an Academic Term Paper?

by Dr. Heike Schäfer

First of all…do I really need to?

"Of course you do!" is the completely surprising answer. Not because it has to do with
some absurd academic ritual, but because the written development and presentation of
ideas and thought processes is a very essential part of academic discourse. Writing a term
paper does not have to be an ordeal. Writing can offer you the opportunity to take the time
to think about a topic that really interests you in detail - and that in a quiet and focussed
way.

Sure, it may be that you (like many others) are afraid of writing or it is difficult for you to
express yourself precisely and articulately. If this is your first term paper, you are also
faced with a task that is totally new to you. It is therefore not surprising that a project like ‘I
am writing a term paper’ would make you nervous. However, it doesn’t matter whether
your are really jittery, a bit worried or just can’t stop yawning - try to give yourself the space
that you need as a beginner to take on the new task (academic writing) and the new
format (term paper) so that you can become acquainted with it and can practice it. As my
gym teacher always so nicely grunted at us, “Don’t think ‘I can’t do it.’ Think, ‘I can’t do it
yet’.”

Perhaps it will help you to think of academic writing as a special form that tells a
meaningful and explanatory story about a particular topic. Or maybe it will be easier for
you to write your term paper if you don’t think about it as a cruel obstacle standing
between you and your course credit, but rather as a process of discovery and reflection. In
any case, I hope that you also have fun writing your term paper. And with that, we are
already in the middle of our topic and at the first steps…

Research
1. Finding an interesting topic
Think about what author, what work or what topic especially interests you. What would you
like to know more about? What ideas or aesthetic approaches do you find fascinating?
What would you like to work on more closely?

2. Limiting a topic / Formulating a research question

When you more or less know what you are interested in, you need to think of a concrete
research question. What do you want to find out exactly? What aspects of a work / topic do
you want to examine? This step is crucial because without a precise question, you won’t
be able to write an academic paper. If you don’t actually know what you want to
investigate, it will be very difficult for you to focus your thinking and make your arguments
to the point. If you don’t know what you want to find out, you cannot target your search - let
alone, then write about it.

It is likely that when you come up with your research question, you will also come up with a
title for your paper. Write down the title as this will make things more concrete.
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3. Talking to your instructor about your topic

When you have found your research question, go to your instructor during his / her office
hours or send an email describing your topic and question. Don’t start writing until you get
his / her O.K. on it.

If you are having difficulties defining your topic precisely, if your topic seems to be too big
or too small, too stale or overused, or too experimental - go to your instructor’s office hours
to get some counseling. Together, you will definitely find a suitable research question.

4. Reading primary literature / finding secondary sources / making first

notes
Now that you have found a clear question that you want to work on, read the poem, novel,
etc. or watch the film that you want to research again. Browse the library or the online
university library catalog (Primo or the MLA bibliography) to look for secondary literature
about your topic. What have others published about it? How have literary or cultural
scholars approached the subject?

Make notes during and after reading about your topic and the possible form your term
paper could take. Where does your topic appear? What aspects seem to be particularly
important with respect to your chosen research question? Why? What subcategories can
your topic be divided into? What aspects (e.g., cultural or historical background) do you
need more information about in order to understand the poem, text or film so that you can
work on your topic? Make a note of all your ideas.

How? Sometimes, jotting down key points may be enough, for instance when referring to a
particularly interesting text passage. However, other ideas that already pertain to your
argument or your structure should be written down in full sentences. Your flash of genius
could be exceedingly fleeting and a few weeks later, you may not know anymore what your
cryptic note on the margin “Language - me?” means. It is likely that you will be able to
work with more descriptive formulations such as “Relationship between language and
identity formation” or “I have to think more about how Momaday deems language to be
important for developing an individual and collective consciousness.” Of course, this is
different for each person.

Please consider the following explanations only as suggestions that should help you to
develop your own method of working. In the end, writing a term paper is a creative process
that does not fit into some rigid scheme.

5. Drafting a working outline

After you have reread your primary text, it is time for a little brainstorming in order to draft
an outline for your paper. There are not a lot of rules, and thus many ways to do this.
There are probably as many ways to think about a structure as there are brains. Look for a
method that is right for you. Do you prefer beginning with a big question and then breaking
it down into parts? Or do you first collect material and then sort it out and put it in order?
Refer at least once to relevant works about the subject of academic writing or also about
the subject of creative academic writing and try some of the suggested approaches such
as clustering or mind-mapping.
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One method that I personally find to be highly promising is this one:

★ Ask yourself - what are the individual aspects that I want to examine? Write down all
of the single points that occur to you.

★ In the next step, try to place these individual questions or topic aspects into a larger
framework of meaning. What is the general term / the other formulated questions
that all of your aspects fit under?

★ Think about whether the larger framework of meaning would make a good
subsection or a section on its own in your paper. Move the individual aspects back
and forth until a larger connection can be drawn.

★ Set these larger parts again in relationship to each other. Consider what logical and
content-related references connect them to one another. Develop them slowly into
chapters (or subchapters) in the structure of your paper. This structure provides a
working outline for your table of contents.

In order to test whether your outline - the skeleton of a clearly structured and logically
developed paper - is sound, you can do the following: write under every section and
subsection one or two full sentences that summarize what you want to examine and
present in this part of your paper. If these sentences form the basic framework of a
logically developed argument, then you are on the right path. Congratulations!

If they don’t quite do that, think about whether you have left out a step in between. Try
to be as clear as possible about how the individual parts of your paper hang together. It
is very tempting to just skip over this step and to just start writing without an outline. For
some, this could be the right way. For most of us, however, coherent interpretations do
not just flow out of our pens. Because, as already mentioned, when I do not know what
subject I actually want to investigate and what I want to find out, it will be very difficult to
think clearly and argue to the point. And then the next step (#6) will often not lead to
more understanding but rather, to complete confusion (for more help, see ABC's of
Style).

6. Reading secondary sources and evaluating them: Don’t get lost!

Only after you have found out what you want to know and the steps you want to use to
work on your topic should you comprehensively work with secondary literature. Naturally,
you can take a cursory look at what is available earlier in order to find a research question
for example. As already mentioned, it can be helpful to look at how others have already
dealt with the subject. Working comprehensively with secondary literature before you have
formulated your research question and have a more exact idea about how you want to
develop your paper means that you don’t know at this point from what perspective and
with what intention you are reading these texts. This can easily lead to not knowing how
you can bundle all that information and to feeling overwhelmed. This is understandable
because every thought leads to more considerations, every article and every book refers
to other research. When you don’t know what you want to know, it will be very difficult to
choose correctly and to concentrate on what is essential in the sea of possibilites. Your

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research question and your outline can act as your compass and guide you in choosing
the right literature that can then selectively inform your topic.

Also in this phase, it is essential to make notes. You can find suggestions as to how to
effectively excerpt from secondary sources in books about academic writing. No matter
how you evaluate your secondary literature, please be so kind and make a note of each
source that you take something from - be it a quote or a thought taken from a text, book or
internet site. If you don’t do this, you may later find yourself poring over a stack of papers
or internet pages for hours looking for that super sentence that you would like to use as a
key point in your paper. You can find more about this under ‘Quoting Correctly’ and
‘Avoiding Plagiarism.’

7.Further analysis of your primary literature

Read, interpret, make notes. Take into account that the texts, films and images that you
are writing about are aesthetic works. It is usually valuable to not only ask what is
presented, but also how it is presented.

8. Revising your outline

Does your original structure still make sense after you have dealt with your primary and
secondary texts? Are there some new aspects that you need to add? Should something be
left out? Can you think of section titles that are more concrete?

9. Organizing your notes

Look at all your notes, annotations and quotes that you have made or collected and order
this material in accordance with the points in your outline.

Writing
10. Writing
By now, you can get started and put your thoughts down on paper.

Just in case you are sitting in front of an empty screen and your brain is frozen, and you
can’t find words or thoughts, you can find a lot of suggestions to structure and make the
writing process easier in the many books that have come out lately about the subject of
academic writing. Take heart. You can think and talk. Therefore, you can also think and
write.

However, there are some special characteristics that you should pay attention to when
writing a term paper. Here are some of them:

10.1 INTRODUCTION
Write an introduction in which your research question and hypothesis are articulated and
you approach is described, i.e. the topic and the structure of your paper is explained.

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10.2 BODY
The body of your paper is comprised of the individual sections and subsections. Each
chapter should have a title and this title should also be given in the table of contents.

The body of every paper presents in principle the reasons for the argument. In this vein, it
is advisable to approach writing a section in this way:
Formulate a question, thesis or name a concrete topic that you would like to work
on in the following part.Then, write the section as an answer to your question, as a
test of your thesis, or a presentation of the content of your topic.

ORGANIZING YOUR TEXT IN PARAGRAPHS

Make sure that you structure your argumentation in paragraphs. The paragraph is the
basic means that will help you to structure your flow of text. As a ground rule, each
paragraph should present one idea. Each paragraph should develop this idea in a
coherent form through a logical ordering of its sentences. The core idea should be explicity
stated in a topic sentence that usually comes at the beginning or end of the paragraph.
Paragraphs in an academic text never consist of only one sentence!

INCLUDING EXAMPLES AND QUOTES IN YOUR TEXT

Remain concrete in your statements. Develop your argumentation by quoting from your
primary text or secondary sources. Be aware, however, that quotes should only serve as
proof or an illustration of your statements. Therefore, quotes add to your text, but do not
replace it - this is why you should give a short summary of the content of your quote in
your own words and why quotes should definitely take up less than half the space of your
total text.

In general, short summaries can be useful, but repeating what is said in your primary or
secondary sources is usually not helpful. It is often superfluous to describe the biography
of an author in a subsection.

When you include photographs or images in your paper, keep in mind that the photos do
not speak for themselves. An illustration does not replace an analysis of the image. The
best thing to do is to treat images as you would quotes from texts: interpret the content
and analyze the visual imagery.

Quotes that are longer than three lines should be given in a block and indented. Here, you
don’t need to use quotations marks.

Quotes within a quote are given with single quotation marks. For example:
He said, “Don’t think ‘I can’t do it.’ Think, ‘I can’t do it yet’.”

Titles of books, films and journals are usually written in italics or underlined (in your text,
footnotes and bibliography).

Titles of poems, essays, and articles from anthologies and the internet are given in
quotation marks.

All words of book titles in English (except for articles, conjunctions and prepositions) are
capitalized. For instance: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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GIVING LITERATURE CITATIONS / AVOIDING PLAGIARISM

Don’t forget to cite the sources for your quotes. In general, you need to provide references
to all sources from which you have take thoughts or statements that are not your own. This
is true for direct quotes (exact replication of the text in quotation marks), as well as for
summaries and paraphrasing (expressing the meaning or ideas in a source) which you do
not put in quotation marks.

Plagiarism is a deadly sin in academics and you should definitely avoid it. In contrast to the
USA, students are not kicked out of the university in Germany for plagiarism, but in the
English Department, there are serious consequences for plagiarizing. For some semesters
now, cases of plagiarism have been handled in this manner: those who hand in work they
have plagiarized will not receive credit for the paper and will not be given the chance to
hand in a new term paper. Instead of your receiving course credit, your student record will
note your plagiarism. To avoid this, work conscientiously and make sure that you give
references for all quotes and ideas and sentences you have used in your text either as
footnotes or within the text.

All term papers (Hausarbeiten) and theses (Abschlussarbeiten) must contain a signed
declaration of non-plagiarism. You can find this form for this on the homepage of your
course of study (BaKuWi, GymPo, etc.).

QUOTING CORRECTLY

A method that is commonly used in the English Department is taken from the ABC’s of
Style, which you can find online on the American Literature and Cultural Studies
homepage at: http://www.anglistik.uni-mannheim.de/anglistik_iii/documents_for_students/
index.html. Just follow the link under Documents for Students. You can also find a link
there for the MLA Style Guidelines. These are the guidelines conventionally used for
academic writing in the American Literature and Cultural Studies Department (Anglistik III).

Basically, there are two different ways to cite a source - either by using footnotes or by
including your sources within the running text.

LITERATURE CITATIONS IN FOOTNOTES

When using footnotes, put the footnote immediately after a direct or indirect quote and
then, give your source(s) in the footnote below.1 If you are citing a source for the first time,
give a complete bibliographic reference. In all succeeding references, it is sufficient to
name the source in short form where you give the author’s name, and a short title for the
cited work with the relevant page number. For example: (Joyce, Portrait 67).

1Footnotes should be numbered from the first to last page. You can also use footnotes to cite a general work
or to thank a researcher / author that has particularly provided pertinent input to your work. At this point, I
would like to express my gratitude to Martin Klepper, whose handout, “Wie schreibe ich eine
Hausarbeit?“ (unpublished manuscript,Universität Hamburg, 2002) inspired me to compile these guidelines.

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This is how a complete reference would look in a footnote in a work written in English:

1. Book from an author:

First Name, Last Name, Book Title (Place: Publisher, Year) Page Number.

Lutz von Werder, Kreatives Schreiben von Diplom- und Doktorarbeiten (Berlin:
Schibri, 2000) 34.

2. Article in an Anthology:
First Name, Last Name of the cited author, “Title of the Article,” Title of the Book, ed.
First Name, Lastname Vorname (editor) Place: Publisher, Year) Page Number.

Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction

Exclude Women Authors,” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago Press, 1986) 79.

3. Article in a Periodical:

First Name, Last Name of the cited author, “Title of the Article,” Name of Periodical,
Issue (Year): Page Number.

Paul Gilmore, “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American

Literature 76.3 (September 2004): 493.

4. Internet Source (as far as the information is available):

First Name, Last Name of the author, “Title of the Article,” Date of Publication. URL.
(date when you accessed this page).

Ira Gawlitzek, “ABCs of Style for Papers and Handouts,” 2004.

http://www.phil.unimannheim.de/anglistik/linguistik/ABCs-neu2004.pdf (24.01.05).

Please note that in English, the quotation marks come after commas and periods and in
German, they come before them. The example above is valid for a paper written in
English. For a term paper written in German, the following examples should be
used:

2. Article in an Anthology: Vorname Nachname des zitierten Autors, „Titel

des Beitrags“, Titel des Buchs, hg. Vorname Nachname des Herausgebers (Ort:
Verlag, Jahr) Seitenzahl.

Marianne DeKoven, "The Literary as Activity in Postmodernity", The Question of

Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory, hg. Elizabeth
Beaumont Bissell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 112.

3. Article in a Periodical: Vorname Nachname des zitierten Autors, „Titel des

Beitrags“,Name der Zeitschrift Bandnummer (Jahr): Seitenzahl.

Mary Austin, „Science for the Unscientific“, Bookman. 55.6 (Aug. 1922): 563.

4. Internet Source (as far as the information is available): Vorname Nachname des

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Verfassers, „Titel des Beitrags“, Datum des Erscheinens des Beitrags. URL (Datum,
an dem Sie die Seite aufgerufen haben).

Fachbereich Informatik, Technische Universität München, „LEO Deutsch-Englisches

Wörterbuch“, 2004. http://dict.leo.org/ (24.01.05).

CITATIONS WITHIN THE TEXT

When using parenthetical (in-text) citations, put your source information at the end of your
quote in parentheses. You should provide your reader with enough information that he /
she can easily find the referred to work in the bibliography or the passage in the source
text itself. This means that you should always give the page number, usually the author’s
name and shortened title of the book. For example: (Whitman, Leaves 52).

With sources that you often quote in your text, such as your primary source, you can use
an abbreviation. In this case, include a footnote after your first quote providing the full
bibliographical information and then state that all the following quotes from this text will be
abbreviated as XYZ. An example of such a footnote could be:

William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1990) 67. All further references to
this edition are cited in the text as LA.

TRANSITIONS AND ROADMAPPING

Think about your reader as you write your paper. Summarize your results at the end of
each section. In addition, explicitly indicate the relationships between the individual parts
of your paper by using transitions and roadmapping to let the reader know where you are
going. This helps to orient the reader and will make reading your paper more enjoyable.

10.3 CONCLUSION

After you have completed the body of your paper, put your results together in a summary
at the end. Do not limit your last section to just repeating the results of your research, but
rather draw a conclusion. Try for example to posit your paper within a larger framework
(literary, cultural, historical or even theoretical). Use your last paragraphs to think about the
further implications of your research. Ask yourself: What is the outcome of my research?
How do I evaluate my research results? In what way exactly do my results have meaning?
Do my results intersect with other topics and research questions?

10.4 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Now, compile or complete your bibliography. Have you included all material that you have
quoted, paraphrased or summarized in your bibliography?

Refer to the ABCs of Style, the Citation Guidelines, the MLA Handbook for
Writers of Research Papers or for German texts, to the book, Die schriftliche Arbeit
(Mannheim: Duden, 2000) when you are unsure about how you should cite a particular
source.There are different and equally valid ways to give literary sources in a bibliography.

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You can choose any one of these models, but then you must consistently stick to that form
of doing things. For example, this method is recommended:

1. Books: Author's surname, first name. Title. Place: Publisher, Year.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston:
Shambala,1986.

2. Articles in Publications: Author's surname, first name. "Title of Article." Titel of

Book. Ed.First name last name of editor. Place: Publisher, Year. Page numbers.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Ed. Nina Baym et al. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1989. 984-99.

3. Articles in Periodicals: Author's surname, first name. “Title of Article." Name of

Journal Periodical Number of issue (Year): page numbers.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly

18.2.(Summer, 1966): 151-74.

4. Internet sources: Author’s surname, first name. “Title.” date of publication. URL.
(date when you accessed this page).

“Webster’s Online Dictionary - The Rosetta Edition.” 2005. http://www.websters-

online-dictionary.org/. (24.01.05).

Even though you have now accomplished so much that you want to give yourself a pat on
the back, you still are not finished. Next, you need to revise your paper.

Editing
11. Revision: Is everything correct and satisfactory?

Revising your paper is also an important part of the writing process and you should plan
enough time for it.

★ Think about your paper once more as a whole. Have you actually examined and
found out what you described in your introduction? Does your title still fit your
paper? Do the individual sections and subsections follow in a logical order?

★ Read your paper through once more sentence by sentence for content, style and
formal aspects.

11.1 REVISING CONTENT

Do your statements make sense regarding content? Are the paragraphs logically
developed internally? Do the paragraphs relate to each other in a coherent manner? In
your opinion, is there a clearly structured argument?

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11.2 REVISING STYLE

★ Are you satisfied with your choice of words?

★ Have you avoided generalizations? (e.g. “He is a great writer.” “This is an important
story.”)

★ Have you justified your use of adjectives and adverbs? For instance, have you
explained just what you mean with the ‘unique’ quality of a work, what is concretely
‘fascinating’ about the story, or why and in what respect is something ‘interesting?’

★ Have you managed to avoid changing verb tenses within a sentence or paragraph?
If you are writing in English and wish to improve your forms of expression, I can
recommend the little style handbook, Elements of Style, ed. William Strunk und E.B.
White(New York: MacMillan, 1979).

11.3 REVISING FORMAL ASPECTS

Review the following points while referring to the ABC’s of Style, which you can find under
Documents for Students on the American Studies homepage.

★ Length: Does your paper comply with the instructor’s requirements regarding
length? (In the American Studies Department, for example, a proseminar (PS) term
paper should be between 10-15 pages and an advanced seminar (HS) term paper
should be between 15-20 pages long).

★ Layout: Font size 12 pts., spacing 1 1/2, margins 3 cm.

★ Cover page with the following information: type of seminar, course title, instructor’s
name, name of the institute / department (Anglistik III), semester, title of your paper,
your name, your course of study, your address and your email address.

★ Table of contents: are the chapter titles and page numbers correct?

★ Page numbers: are your pages numbered? Please note that the cover page and the
table of contents are not numbered. In literary academic papers, page one starts
with your introduction. In scientific or linguistic papers, the cover page and the table
of contents are counted, but they are not numbered (!) - here the introduction usually
starts as page three.

★ Is your spelling and punctuation correct?

★ Grammar: Do you have complete sentences (i.e. with subject, verb, object)?
“Coming from her sadness.” is for example, not a sentence.

★ Citations: Are your quotations in quotation marks or indented? Have you included all
sources used in the text and in the bibliography?

★ Declaration of non-plagiarism: this must be included and signed and dated.

“I hereby declare that this piece of written work is the result of my own independent
scholarly work, and that in all cases material from the work of others (in books,
articles, essays, dissertations, and on the internet) is acknowledged, and quotations
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and paraphrases are clearly indicated. No material other than that listed has been
used. This written work has not previously been used as examination material at
this or any other university. This written work has not yet been published.”

A copy of the Declaration of Non-Plagiarism can be found on the English Department

website under: http://www.anglistik.uni-mannheim.de/studium/formal_conventions/
index.html

★ Bibliography: is everything complete and correct?

When you are satisfied with everything, you are coming to the next step - submitting your
paper. 😎

Submission
12. Handing in your paper
Print two copies of your term paper and store one copy in a safe place. Give the other
copy - your term paper! - to the instructor or to the department secretary. Your grade will
be posted on the online portal. You are welcome to come to the instructor’s office hours to
look at your graded paper.

Congratulations! You did it!

© Heike Schäfer 2005(revised 2015)