Introduction
So you retro-prom'ed, Old Duked, Nashqueraded, Chronicle-partied, and semi-formaled like it was your job all weekend-and now you have a stack of papers and deadlines that even a lifetime supply of Red Bull can't fix. Or maybe that's just us. Yikes.
So after four years of the stressing and the turmoil, we got together and made our favorite tricks of the trade for getting the research papers/thesis accomplished. Our record is 26 and 19 pages of prose in one night, respectively. That was a bad idea. We don't recommend it.
The Title
Perhaps the most important part of the paper, even more so than the actual content.
The title is to the literary oeuvre as the frosting is to the cake. The sequins to the prom dress. The crazy to the Cameron. The Dick to the Brodhead. The point is, without it, the reader has no basis with which to superficially judge your work. Ideally, a title should include one or more punctuation marks. Use of the colon, hyphen, or if you're feeling particularly bold, a semi-colon is always preferred. When you're in a class of 10-200 people, superficiality is the only judgment that matter.
A great title sets you on the proper path to intellectual stardom, if only falsely and for a modicum of time. Your acuity to the changing social paradigms comes through in your essay: "Falling from Grace: How Nancy Grace and Anne Coulter are foiling the Women's Movement. A Case Study". Or, you will illuminate your superior grasp of postmodern (PoMo), meta concepts in your play "Satirizing McCarthy: Instructions for an interpretive dance of the graphic novel of Arthur Miller's The Crucible." Because even the illusion, nay, expectation of brilliance is still worth fighting for.
Vocabulary
Many will tell you that the key to good vocabulary in a research paper is to use fancy words, but in context, and appropriately. They would be wrong. There is only one way to be that kid in your major with the 150 page behemoth of a thesis. You must embrace multitudinous words as freely as Ted Haggard embraced heterosexuality. Some will tempt you into the male-prostitutedom of terse and concise language, but spurn them! And come back into the loving arms of the Evangelical Church of unnecessary complexity and unparalleled verbosity. Use long words as much as you can. Employing the lengthy brilliance of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious can be tough to do in a paper about the meta-narratives of high school play versions of Vonnegut's dystopic short stories. Yet, throw in a reference to how simple musicality and Julie Andrews make the medicine (of intricate words such as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious) go down, and you are 34 characters closer to the end of your paper. Much as we are to the end of this column.
Sources
We all know the general drill: Wikipedia is not a source, articles from websites are generally treated with skepticism, and the Interweb is an evil place where hacks and wannabes promulgate ideas for free that academics get paid to think about. Ahem, sorry, will disengage from rant mode. As much as professors love to claim otherwise, a long laundry list of sources is integral to the paper. Do you honestly think people would have paid any attention to Martin Luther had he only nailed to a church door a list of 35 theses? 95 is infinitely more impressive. Most people can barely name the 10 commandments, much less all of Luther's exhortations, so like all other things in life, it is size that mattered. Yes, we did just vaguely imply that Protestantism flourished in its break from Catholicism because Martin Luther had it where it counted. Some might say that the quality of the source also matters. You should bite your thumb at these people and then crush their skepticism with the weight of your bibliography.
Conclusions
The conclusion is typically where you throw an amazing curveball at the reader, one that will leave them breathless. And with no other choice than to offer you an A and their first-born in recognition of your brilliance. At this point in the paper, your reader has suffered through pages and pages of your going on and on about something only you care about. Throw them an unexpected bone: let's say your writing about the encroachment of Western intellectualism into traditional folklore. Compare it, in your conclusion, to the seduction of the Tsarina by Rasputin. Or to the effects of absinthe on Van Gogh's mind (and/or ear). It's okay if the comparisons don't really make sense.the thrilling surprise of finding references to sex and drugs in an academic paper will surpass any confusion that might ensue.
James and Joyce LOVE the waiter at Sclafani for his drink pouring skills. Jessica Ballou and Suparna Salil don't want to graduate.
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