Secrets to Writing Great Papers

STEP 3. Adopt an Approach

STEP 3 Adopt an Approach We said before that the point of writing papers is to express ideas, but until now we've been talking about topics, not ideas. You can't have any ideas until you know what to have them about. But in order to write a paper, you've got to know how you're going to approach the topic. The topic combined with the way you approach it is your paper's main idea. Choose a clever or interesting main idea, and develop it cleverly and interestingly, and you'll get an A. But try to write before you've got your approach figured out, and you'll have trouble even getting started. You can show your approach to a topic (often called the angle by published writers) by adding verbs that tell what's going on with the topic, and also by linking your topic with certain specific key words like how to, personal experience, and history. Topic: a death-defying adventure on a mountain face 14 Adopt an Approach 15 Approach: personal experience Combined: My Death-Defying Adventure on a Mountain Face Topic: South Carolina evergreen trees Approach: how to Combined: How to Recognize South Carolina Evergreen Trees Topic: interstate highway improvement Approach: history Combined: The History of Interstate Highway Improvement Programs Notice that the main idea of the paper also makes a good title for it. This is so generally true, you can test whether you've got a good main idea by asking yourself if you've come up with an attention-getting title. We'll give you some guidance with that in Step 4. 7TH PROBLEM: You can choose any approach and you don't know where to start SOLUTION: Select from the five basic approaches Choosing an approach is even harder than choosing a topic if you don't know where to begin. There seems to be an infinite number of ways of looking at anything. In reality, however, all the ways can be classified into five major categories : 1. giving directions 2. reporting events 3. explaining ideas 4. persuading 5. inventing a story 16      The first four categories are all nonfiction approaches; the fifth is fiction. It's perfectly acceptable (and often impressive) to deal with more than one category in a paper-for example, to describe something in a persuasive paper, or to report an event that illustrates an idea you're explaining. Later on we'll let you know when to stick in any secondary angles you'd like to include. But now's the time to choose just one main approach . It will practically guarantee that your paper makes a point and sticks to it, and that's important. To help you choose the best angle, let's review all five of them. 1. YOU'RE GIVING DIRECTIONS Papers that give directions are all around us, from the instructions on paint cans to the how-to articles in popular magazines. How to is often part of the title. In school, howI -did-its and how-they-did-its are more often written than how-to-do-its. If you've ever based a science research paper on one of your own experiments, you've done a how-I-did-it. Even the lowly science lab report belongs in this category. In addition to the papers that offer directions on how to do something tangible, this category includes papers that describe intangible courses of action: how to cope with stress, how to understand electronic music, now to "keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...." It's a good idea to choose an out-and-out how-to angle for your topic only if you've had personal experience with it. It's dangerous to give instructions to other people if you haven't done the thing yourself. One of our students once turned in a paper on using truss frames in building houses, when she'd never even erected a dollhouse or fixed a stuck door. Her research got all the facts right, but her writing jumbled them in an order that made no sense. In addition, because she couldn't herself picture what she was describing, she couldn't Adopt an Approach 17 describe very accurately how the trusses went together in a way that made sense to other people. The how-it-works paper is...