Planning Your Term Paper

 

Part One: Planning your Term Paper

Introduction:

Welcome to the training program on planning your term paper. This is part one of the five series Training Program on “How to write your Term Paper”. Setting Up Microsoft Word for your Term Paper. In this training, we will be analysing the term paper question to understand the cope and task given. The training is divided into 3 practical steps to guide you analyse, identify the task and scope of any term paper at the Master’s Level. 

How to write a term paper


Step 1: Knowing the Question and Requirements

It very essential to take note of the term paper question as the first step in planning the term paper. For this step, let’s work with this term paper question:

Question:

Select an organisation of your choice, preferably where you work, discuss the effect of COVID-19 on your chosen organisation.

Requirements:

Font: Times New Roman

Line Spacing: 1.5

Font Size: 12

Word Count: 3,000 excluding References

All sources must be properly referenced

NB: Referencing style: APA 

Step 2: Analysing the Question

To write a term paper, you must plan it first. Planning out your term paper involves analysing the question to break it down to sub-topics or questions that will aid you meet the overall aim of the term paper. This is a very important step.

Break the question into its individual parts. The parts of the question are two namely the TASK and the SCOPE.

TASK:

The task is what you have been asked to do.

SCOPE:

The scope defines the boundaries in which you are supposed to answer the question.

The key to identifying the task and the scope is to look for KEY WORDS in the question. Ask yourself a very simple question; What am I being asked to do? The answer to this question is the TASK.

In this case, we have been asked to discuss the effect of COVID-19 on our chosen organisation.

Key Word(s) in the above question: Discuss

So, the TASK is to Discuss. But to discuss what?

The answer to this question defines the scope of the task: … the effect of COVID-19 on my organisation.

 

In academic writing, the key word discuss means describe, explain or analyse. In other words, to discuss, you can either explain, describe or analyse. Let’s look at what each of these means.

To Explain: describe the phenomenon with supporting reasoning.

 To Describe: Identify what can be seen or what happens in time.

To Analyse: Break an idea, concept apart and find out how each parts relate. 

Step 3: Developing an outline for your Term Paper.

As such, the various sections that we must cover in order to answer the question includes:

·         Cover Page

·         Table of Content

·         Executive Summary

·         Introduction

·         Body:

o  Brief Profile of Chosen Company

o   Positive Effect of COVID-19 on the Chosen Company

§  Point 1

§  Point 2

§  Point 3

§  Point 4

§  Point 5

o   Negative Effects of COVID-19 on the Chosen Company

§  Point 1

§  Point 2

§  Point 3

§  Point 4

§  Point 5

o   Recommendation

 

·         Conclusion

·         References

 

Next Steps

Thank you for reading this post. Kindly look out for the next part on how to set up Microsoft Word for your Term paper, the techniques to get the required word count, part four on getting sources for your term paper, part five on how to synthesise your sources to answer the term paper question to complete the entire training.

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