December 2010 You are subscribed as %%emailaddress%%

Rene Thinking Ahead

The beginning of a new term is an exciting, but sometimes daunting time. It's important to take advantage of every opportunity you are given to plan ahead. By being prepared, you can save yourself a great deal of stress and anxiety during the busiest times of the school term, and you'll more than likely end up with better grades. That's how it happened for Rene, with a little help from us.

When Rene's professors handed out their course syllabi Rene immediately began to plan ahead. Which assignments were the most difficult? Which ones had due dates that were bunched together?

By planning out which assignments were likely to require our help at the beginning of the term, Rene was able to discuss the whole term with our Academic Advisors, even placing basic orders in advance, which we followed up on later to get the details in plenty of time to finish everything early. Rene told us later that it was one of the best school terms ever.

Planning ahead with us allowed Rene to budget time and money, and guarantee a stress-free term ending with high grades. This January, ask your professors for assignment information at the beginning of the course.

Use Wikipedia with Caution

The online encyclopedia Wikpedia is like the apple in Paradise – an alluring temptation that can easily lead to trouble.

Here's why: most college professors or instructors frown on the use of Wikipedia for research papers, because its entries are not subject to academic peer review. That's a fancified term that essentially means everything listed in Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate or actually exists. Such baggage does not accompany the Oxford English Dictionary or a Norton Anthology, which are written by professional scholars.

Indeed, some instructors will lower grades or even fail a paper if Wikipedia is used as a source. This occurs not only due to the occasional suspect sourcing, but because they want students to go out and do some extensive digging, sifting through the various resources and exercising their own judgment as to which ones are the most informative and reliable.

That is not to say that Wikipedia is not an excellent starting point for doing solid research, so long as it's used the right way. Think of it as an apple that should be eaten as an orange – properly peeled and divided.

For instance, Wikipedia is a good source for the "what," where," "when" "who" and "why" of historical events, rapidly providing crucial facts that may easily be confirmed elsewhere.

From the Wikipedia home page, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) type in "Hindenburg disaster," for example, and it provides a 10,000-word-plus entry regarding that epic 1937 disaster. The date, fatalities, locale and historical consequences are all in the first paragraph – a good starting point.

But the most important part of this voluminous entry begins after it ends. Like most other entries in Wikipedia, it contains citations and active links. There are 66 in all for the Hindenburg, and that does not include bibliographical references to books.

The vast majority of those citations and links lead to perfectly legitimate material. On the Hindenburg entry list, number 31 leads to a website called airships.net. It includes an excerpt into the U.S. Commerce Department's original inquiry as to why the Hindenburg caught fire. Such an historical document may be cited in a paper. The external links section includes ways to examine newsreel footage of the disaster, as well as original news reporting from The London Times and Life Magazine. Again, both are completely legitimate sources if properly cited. They also contain relevant facts, including an interview with the captain of the airship.

If you need to find actual books about the event, Wikipedia lists 15 of them, including author, title, ISBN number and publication date. That makes it particularly easy to see if your university or local library has it on the shelves, or possibly evenly an online edition.

So if you are writing about this or other events, Wikipedia can provide you a reliable and academically safe gateway to most of your relevant research.

Creativity Has its Place in Essay Writing

One of the wrong assumptions many people make is that creativity in writing only belongs to the literary genre. This is not correct because any type of writing, literary works – both in fiction and nonfiction genres, or academic writings such as essays and to some degree term papers in fact require creativity on the part of the writer. First, creativity is an important element of any business; even more so in the area of writing. Essays are generally written from the point of view of the writer. There are many forms of essays, such as descriptive, narrative and persuasive essays. Most student essays use the narrative and descriptive formats. Let us go a little deeper into the descriptive and narrative forms of essays, to illustrate the need and role of creativity on the part of the author.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive essays, as the name suggests, use vivid details to describe the essay subject, which could be an object or a person. Creativity plays a key role in constructing descriptive essays. Creativity allows the writer to define and illustrate with great detail, so as to enable readers to clearly feel, sense, hear and smell the subject. Creativity enables the writer to present their ideas in clear language and a format easily read and understood by the reader. A creative work is very engaging – it creates elevated levels of interest in the reader. Student essays should reflect the creativity of the writer and hence keep the reader wanting to read more. Unless essays retain the interest of the reader, the reader or the professor, as the case may be, could lose interest. Although professors would normally read students' essays to the end, a disorganized and non-planned piece of work may not get the student the grade they desire. Good and creative descriptive essays help the writer disallow their emotions from interfering with their work.

Narrative Essays

As in the case of descriptive essays, narrative essays require creativity as well. Narrative essays address a sequence of events or actions which happened at some time in the past. A creative writer is best positioned to provide an authentic and engaging account of the event. Creative essays are generally rich with things such as imagery, and modifiers. Creative writers also use fresh language with variable syntax.

Use of Creativity in Term papers and Research Work

Other forms of academic writings such as term papers or research assignments may offer students less room to utilize their creativity in their work. This is because these forms of academic writings deal with facts which are often referenced or cited through the student's work. Facts remain factual in the true sense of the word and students should not change or misrepresent factual information. Nevertheless there are ways the student's creativity can be utilized in such subjects such as sciences, geography, history and others, where factual information is needed. Students may demonstrate their creativity through the paper's structure, including the research design and methodological approaches. Good and creative research papers are well organized in line with the instructor's requirements and guidelines.

An organized literature review section often presented in chronological order is another form of creativity. Creativity can be demonstrated through literature review which helps to convince the instructor not only that the student is very organized, but also demonstrates the student's understanding and comprehension of the subject matter. Creativity enables the student to clearly present their points and arguments supported by references and other factual data. Student's creativity could also be demonstrated through the concluding section. The instructions provided by the instructor are a guide for the student in drawing their concluding remarks or recommendations.

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