Tales My Teacher Told Me: Study Habits That Don’t Actually Work From the time you enter first grade, your teachers and parents and just about every other adult you know are telling you how to study, thinking that you have study habits that don’t work. Your older brother has notebooks full of highlighted colors cluttering […]
So your teacher just told you that for your final paper, you need to write eight pages on a course-related topic. Let’s say it’s a course on race and ethnic problems in the United States. That’s a really big topic, and as a result, too many ideas start to spill into your mind. You could […]
So you’re taking your first online college course! It may seem easier than an in-person class: no commute; you can eat while you study; you don’t have to get dressed; you can log in whenever from wherever and still get your work done. However, with that level of freedom there will also be some costs. […]
Too many students have been trained into stressing out about the minutiae of citation styles. They worry that a misplaced comma, or an underline instead of an italicized string of words, will bring their grade down or fail them on a paper. Fretting about MLA, Chicago or ASA style takes up more of their time than […]
When students get an assignment for a “paper,” many times they don’t have a clue what kind of paper it is. Too many times, they assume it’s an essay, full of opinions, like just about every paper they’ve written in high school. They think a college paper is just another paper. But there are several […]
One of the biggest problems students report with college writing assignments is choosing a paper topic. In college, you’re expected to pick your own topic, most of the time – but most college students have never had the training in how to do that. In high school, they were always provided with a topic and told […]
Many students see meeting the page count or word count as the goal of writing a paper. They have to churn out 1,000 words or 10 pages to meet some standard that isn’t made clear to them. As a result, they turn in badly written, hurriedly written, rapidly typed, non-proofread pages full of words. They […]
Too often, college students are stressing out about how to get good grades, instead of focusing on what they’re learning. This is a backwards method of trying to succeed, and it often sets students up for failure instead. For one thing, it sets up grades as a competition for scarce resources – “If I want […]
Too many undergraduate students are afraid of making mistakes. It’s not surprising. They’ve spent years in a system where memorization and spitting out information was more important than learning and understanding: the high-stakes standardized testing environment. In that environment, students learn that the person who makes the fewest mistakes gets the best scores, the most […]
If you’re a brand-new college undergraduate, the chances are good that high school didn’t teach you what your professors expect you to know about doing college research. Instead of research papers, you were probably taught the inverted-pyramid essay, the five-paragraph essay, or the expressive essay. This means that when the dreaded research paper rears its head […]