Need help with writing

[mo42]

Hello Fellow Students!

I am in need of desperate help when it comes to writing essays. I have always been a poor writer and have struggled, to say the least, every single time I have had to write a paper. I am currently in my first semester of graduate school and and my midterm assignment consists of writing a 7-10 page essay. My prof is giving us a break though, if we cannot make the 7 page minimum it will not be a big deal. I managed to squeek out just 4 pages. We have to choose a minimum of 2 questions to answer. So I have answered one so far and I am stuck with the second. This is due next week and I am feeling the pressure!

Any advice would be so helpful right now!

Thanks

Mo;)

[llg, PhD, RN]

I suggest you explore the resources that your school probably has to help people improve their writing. Many universities have writing centers, tutoring services, etc. to help struggling students. You would probably be assigned to a graduate student in the English Dept. or something who could teach you how to select a central idea (thesis) for a paper, find pertinent information on the topic, and develop an argument to support your idea -- and/or write a summary of the literature you reviewed for the paper, etc.

There are steps and skills involved in creating a paper and those can be learned. If you haven't had to learn them in your undergraduate program ... you should probably invest a little time and money in learning them now. Fortunately, most schools have some resources you could tap into to learn those skills.

[chagermany]

I need a lot of help as well. English and this school system is not my first language and I am so lost in APA even with Perla and tons of books and paper examples.

[Annaiya, NP]

It also depends what type of help you need. Is it grammar or the structure of the paper that you are talking about? Learning how to write well can't happen overnight, and even when you do write well, it takes a lot of time. Are you budgeting enough time for your writing? Assuming the assignment you're talking about is an APA, research type of assignment, I'd probably spent around 25-40 hours working on it. (Time can vary a lot depending on how easy it is to find the research you need.) My process is to find all of the research I can on the topic, then create an outline of the paper, make sure I've got articles to support each one of my points, if not find more articles, then write the paper, then go through and edit it. First edit is for clarity, second edit is to make sure I have all of the support I need for my statements, third edit is to make sure all of my APA is correct (including sentence structure, not just citation), and the final edit is to make sure the paper flows, that the arguments are logically sound and that is it easy to read. This system has worked well for me.