It is my last semester of college; I think I have taken all the classes there is to take at ASC. For the past six years, I have written countless papers. Some were good, some were bad, or at least not well formatted in MLA. However, I have decided to pass along some of the knowledge I have gained for writing papers. My hope is that in the future, it will become increasingly easier for you to write research papers.
First off, you must realize that you are not talking in the research paper. You can not have an opinion about anything. Therefore you will never use "I" or "me." Instead, any claim you wish to make about a topic must be supported by someone else. It does not really make a lot of sense since you are not creating anything new; you are just presenting an idea supported by what other people have said.
Second off, Wikipedia is only good for one thing: starting a paper. You will be hard pressed to find a teacher who will let you use Wikipedia as a credible source. Teachers tend to make it sound like a horror story about the things you can find on Wikipedia, but nowadays, you can find some excellent information. The trick is that if it is sourced on Wikipedia, you can go find what ever material the Wiki author used to make the statement on the Wiki page. A lot of times they will source books which can not always be helpful. If you are really lucky, they will have sourced some well known newspapers which you can source.
Third tip is start your paper. You may have no idea where to start, but the perfect place to start is with the format of the paper. You would be surprised at how something as typing your name, your professor's name, your course, the date, and a title can suddenly allow you to jump into the paper. Staring at a blank screen gets you no where, so at least with the initial formatting, something can get done. You can add the last name page number header into the list as well.
If it's a research paper, do the research. A good tip is to have your paper already open when you do this. If you find a cool quote, copy and paste it into the document and mark where it came from. If you find an interesting concept, write it down. Eventually, you will end up with a hopefully good sized list of ideas and quotes. They may need to be rearranged for the paper, but just by researching and making notes along the way, you will already have and outline of sorts to work with.
Always proof-read. Even the best skip over a word that their brain thinks is right, but it is totally wrong. Some people write differently. Some like to make everything perfect as they go along, others like to crank out whatever stream of thought they had and not let certain things like spelling corrections hamper their creative juices. That is fine as long as you know to go back and fix any mistakes you made along the way.
The English language may be one of the most difficult languages, but it has a wide variety of words to describe something. Thesaurus.com can be a helpful tool for finding the perfect word to use. Excessive use of words really do show up for the reader, so it is important to provide a variety of words in your paper. This does not mean finding exotic words to say something simple.
As far as paper requirements go, there are ways to expand and limit your paper depending on your needs. If you have written a paper that is three pages long with four lines into the fourth page and the page count must be under four, there are a couple things you can do to bring that page count down without hurting your paper. First off, hit Ctrl+f to open a find/replace tool. Search for "that" You would be surprised at how often some people type that when it is not even needed. If it helps, say the sentence with it included, then say it out loud without the word "that" in it. Something like "He was to be the General that everyone loved." "That" really does not need to be there.
A tricky way to increase the size depends on how the paper is being submitted. If you absolutely cannot find enough information to meet a certain page number requirement, and the paper is only submitted in hard copy, there is a trick for you. Hit Ctrl+f again. For the find field type a period. For the replace field, type a period. Somewhere in the window, depending on which program you are using, there should be an option for Advanced Options. What you want to find is the button for Font. Inside you can specify that you want to replace the current periods (assuming it is in 12-point) with 14-point font. To the naked eye on a piece of paper, it is very difficult to notice the increased sized. Since the paper is most likely double spaced, the spacing will not look weird. It will, however, increase the page length considerably.
Another tip for increasing both page length and word counts is do not use contractions. Most day-to-day speech is chock full of contractions of won't, don't, can't, etc. Spell it out. Would not is longer than wouldn't. Because not using contractions is considered a higher level of diction, your paper will actually "sound" smarter without contractions.
A tip for increasing or decreasing page length is look at where your paragraphs are ending. If you have only a couple words left on a paragraph, reworking a sentence somewhere in the paragraph is more likely to remove a line and shorten the page length. Same goes for extending the paper. If it is pretty close to the edge of the line, adding a couple filler words will bump it down. Doing this over the whole paper should increase or decrease it by 3-4 lines.
Get to know what a teacher likes in a paper and write your paper how they want it. If they like good quotes, fill your paper with quotes (don't forget to properly cite them). Typically, the quote is going to be a complete sentence. All you need is a dependent clause to precede the quote.
With most films made by Sorsese, his style has "a sense of authenticity rivaled by few other directors in the business" (Author 58).
The above is a proper MLA in-text citation. Obviously, I made up the quote, but you get the idea of how to interpose an introductory clause, followed by the quote.
These are just some of the tips I could think of right now. Hopefully they help.
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