How To Write a Term Paper

[randomness]

My friend nihilistic_kid is a published novelist who used to make something vaguely resembling a living as a term paper artist. In the above titled post, he gives some advice to undergrads:

Spring Break is over, at least in the US, and so now the shank of the semester has begun. Time for term papers! As a former term paper artist I've learned a few things about papering. Things you will not learn from other sources simply because almost nobody has the experience I have. Composition specialists, your professors, and writing center tutors have not written 5000+ model term papers in virtually every field and in every length and format.

So, if you hear different from what I am saying, remember that I am right and they are wrong.

Note: this is "How To Write a Term Paper" not "How To Learn Something." Learning is your problem!

The remainder of the post outlines the process in eight steps.

I also recommend his piece about writing for a term paper mill, "The Term Paper Artist" published in The Smart Set, at Drexel University.

I think if I'd read his post when I was an undergrad, I would have handed in more of my papers on time.

Comments

[latvianchick.livejournal.com]

Cool! I've read the article in the Smart Set but I had no idea the guy was in my extended social circle =)

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

Creeptastic. I am seriously scared by the person who said in the comments that they planned to write their dissertation this way.

I wrote a lot of papers in college and I never had trouble getting them in on time. I agree with him about not outlining, especially for a short paper, but not doing the research ahead of time? That is going to lead to some seriously bad scholarship.

I wonder what the guy would say about writing a math term paper. Somehow I just don't think his method would work.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

The point that students are asked to write term papers without ever reading them is really personally important to me. A lot of the reason I hated the sciences in high school was that I really didn't understand what a "Lab Report" was supposed to be like; it was described ad nauseum, but showing samples would have been cheating, or something. (In lab bio when I was TAing it, we pushed hard to restructure the pedagogy of lab reports to be more example driven, and section by section, and to get the students reading scientific papers so they'd understand what the lab report structure was based on.)

The second point, about schools basically cheating students, is a lot more complex and depressing.

[dpolicar]

(nods) This pretty much describes how I wrote term papers, except (a) I was pre-Internet, so I used libraries, and books are much harder to mine for relevant quotes, and (b) it never occurred to me to match angle to professor (and I probably wouldn't have anyway, although it definitely is a good idea for its stated goal).

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Er, wow. Why isn't a chunk of scum like that in JAIL for fraud? "Hi, I help(ed) people cheat their way through school for a living" doesn't strike me as being a positive credential.

A technical solution to this problem

[marginaleye.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that there is a technical solution to this kind of academic misconduct. Presumably, everyone's has a characteristic writing style (sentence length and structure, word and punctuation choice, and umpteen dozen other variables, gross and subtle), that could be analyzed electronically. While I doubt an individual's writing style would be as unique and distinctive as their fingerprints or DNA, any noticeable changes in writing style (particularly from a poor paper to a good one) would "raise a red flag."

Also, if every paper were submitted to "electronic stylistic analysis," and a database were maintained that cut across department lines and was maintained indefinitely, you would eventually be able to identify "phantom authors" whose body of work don't line up with any known student's transcript. Presumably, a "professional term paper author" writes many times more papers in his or her "career" than any student, and would thus give the software plenty of material from which to build an unusually detailed profile. Recently submitted papers could then be routinely checked against a blacklist of "known bad profiles" to identify the cheaters.