College Essay Writing Tips

This is a continuation of article on key features of research paper.

The final part of our definition says that when you write a research paper you need to cite sources in a scholarly fashion. We used a word "scholarship" a moment ago, what is scholarship? Scholarship is what scholars do, and scholars are people who practice the arts of scholarship, they practice in scholarly way, which means building new knowledge by analyzing and learning from what others have done and adding fresh insights to it.

Now when I say "scholars" what do you think, what kind f person does that bring to mind? Of course, may scholars work as college and university professors and those are the folks who are most often described as scholars. Scholarship is most often described as what college and university professors do, but when you think about, many people who discover and research also have different kinds of job. For example there are people doing scholarly work or work in private business, for instance researchers for technology companies such as pharmaceutical or computer firms. Some people who do scholarly work work in government. For example there are CIA analysts whose job is to study foreign cultures, so that we could anticipate what's likely to happen overseas in terms of political or economic developments. Some scholars work in non-profit organizations such as think tanks or advocacy groups. And still other scholars are journalists, filmmakers or book authors. What all these people share is the practice of reading, study and other forms of research which they then use to develop conclusions and ideas which they then share with others in written form.

So this all broad population of people can all be defined as scholars. What they do is scholarship and when you write a research paper, you are participating in the same kind of activity that all these people spend their lives doing. Together all these people who can loosely be called scholars have created a culture of scholarship that has evolved overtime. It includes a set of practiced that encourages people to build knowledge on other people's work. And that means making it easy for others to see how and when one scholar is borrowing ideas or information from another. And this is what we mean by citing sources. It simply means telling people who read your work, where you got the information from and doing it according to specific standardized forms. So when you teacher asks you to write a research paper and to cite your sources in a scholarly fashion, he or she is not just being fussy for no good reason. The idea is that you're participating in this larger community of scholars, you're contributing a little bit of knowledge to the vast body of information that has been developed over generations by all these scholars and all these different walks of life. And to communicate clearly with others in a scholarship community, you need to write in their language.

Now, the length of a typical research paper varies greatly depending on the purpose. We've given some indication of the various forms that research can take and that certainly influences that format and length of writing that scholars will do under the guise of a research paper. Some scholarly magazines or journals may publish research papers that are very short, just three to five pages in length. By contrast, a PhD thesis which is a lengthy scholarly research paper that someone would do in order to earn a doctor's degree, is usually hundreds of pages long. But for high school and college practice it's normally assumed that you need to write a research paper that's 10-15 double-spaced pages long and contains 3000-5000 words. This is a length of typical term paper for upper-level high school of lower-level college course. Most students asked to write a research paper will probably write something of about that length.