Writing a Master’s Thesis and Term Paper: 30+ Awesome Tips

Writing term papers and theses may seem too complicated when you don’t know what to expect from this assignment. These great tips and examples given by Ingrid M. Gende, Assistant Professor at the International University of La Rioja, will facilitate this process.

Get ready to end up with a perfect academic paper that will get you an A+!

4 tips to help you get started

Here are four useful tips on thesis writing that will prepare you for the process.

1. Think well about your topic. It should be a topic that would be interesting for you: you’re going to write about it for more than one month.
2. Try to define the exact boundaries of your work, the more broad your subject is, the more inexact and general will be the result.
3. Try to outline the period, cycle, or course that the practical part of your paper will or could touch upon.
4. Think about the title of your work, it will help you define its content. Keep in mind that this is not a title of a book, magazine, or movie: it’s an academic paper that should have a clear, concise, and descriptive title.

Look at a few good and bad examples of titles:

“IT” is too general. Are you really going to discuss all the new technologies and all their capabilities for an entire Preschool stage? Will you refer to all the disciplines? Are you going to write about it on ten or thirty pages of your theoretical part? Obviously, research paper online ’ll end up with a very poor result then.

6 tips for seamless writing

So, you’ve defined the topic, main focus, and the title of your work.

Approach your instructor/professor to ask for more details and establish a fluent cooperation to ensure an effective writing process.

These 6 general hints will facilitate writing a term paper or thesis:

1. Read all the documentation before it’s provided to you to start your work.
2. Keep in touch with your instructor/tutor constantly. In the beginning, it may seem that you have plenty of time but remember that if you’re given that much time, that’s because you really need it. Trust your instructor(s): they must have enough experience after guiding more than a hundred of papers writing.
3. Make sure to respond to your instructor’s messages quickly.
4. Meet the deadlines.
5. Carefully review all the information you’ve been given.
6. Feel free to ask any questions that would arise.

Avoiding common mistakes

Now it’s time to actually get down to your researching and writing. To make it smooth and avoid multiple corrections, pay attention to the 5 points below (and make sure to keep to them).

1. Table of contents. A good way to start your work is to create a clear structure of your future work. Remember that there are two fundamental parts: theoretical part and practical application. Make a draft of your contents including all its subsections from the start and till the end to get a general view of the work.
2. Writing a paper. If you have issues with your language, or with your word processor, ask for external help. Your instructor should guide you in the issues related to researching and writing, but you can’t have them as your proofreader. You’re going to perform your final work, so you should already know how to manage all these issues.
3. The punctuation is another important point: you should know how to use commas, periods, and align the paragraphs, as well as other basic aspects.
4. Learn from your mistakes. If your instructor corrects your mistakes, you have to consider and avoid them in all your further work, not just in a particular place where it was found.
5. Think about all the formalities before you start: names of sections and subsections, page numbering, table of contents, reference page, etc. These will be the first things that your assessors will evaluate. These are not the subjective features that one professor might like and the other one might dislike, but those basic issues that create the first impression about your work, along with it’s title. Your paper must be consistent and uniform.

Further to the last point,

Here is a table with the most common mistakes that students make in this respect.