College - advice from the other side....

[CelticJourney]

Many of us worry about preparing our children to succeed in college, should they wish to go. Right now I'm working as a graduate teaching assistant and my job is to grade papers. So I thought I'd offer some suggestion for how to prepare your student to write a research paper:

Teach them about voice. Telling your professor you are going to give them the 'hot take' on a subject or reference TikTok as a place you learn a lot is not the 'voice' of an academic paper. Submitting a paper to a PhD. who specializes in women's health should not include verbiage such as 'you might be wondering if you should be worried about this...'

Teach them the difference between a research paper and a persuasive paper. Leaving out important information to make your opinion look like the only right choice is not appropriate.

Teach them to read the directions. If it says four pages, it means four pages. If it says five sources, it means five sources. Remind them to reread the directions before submitting the assignment. The first thing the grader is going to read before grading should be the last thing the student reads before submitting.

Teach them that writing does not have to happen in isolation. Ask people to read their work, listen to them read their work, ask for help when they need it. What we do as homeschoolers is optimal for improvement, it's not just because our kids are at home with parents.

Teach them to proof read beyond the spell checker. Check the basics - does it list the correct professor, for example.

If your topic had to be approved, do NOT change it without approval.

Make sure they know that a real person is going to read this paper and if you make things up, they are very likely to catch you (and it will magnify all the other errs you made). I just read a paper that discussed the beginning of Birth Plans in the early 2000s. Clearly having had babies in the 1990s when birth plans were very common place meant everything else she wrote was suspect.