Week 1: The Basics: The College/University paper format. What is it for? A survey of the key components of the paper: introduction, main body text, conclusions.

Week 2: The paper's scope. This is about formulating your sense of purpose and picking a topic. Do not make it too wide, do not make it too narrow - it is a balancing act, and the challenge is to pick a topic that can be handled in the space the instructor provided you. You only have so many pages, so you cannot cover everything under the sun. On the other hand, you do have to fill out those pages. Writing half a paper will not be good enough.

Week 3: Present your topic choice. We analyze the choice you've made together and I provide advice on how to improve if needed.

Week 4: Write your Introduction/plan your paper. The introduction is the most important part of the paper, as it presents the reader with the the sense of urgency (explain to the readers why this topic is really important), the purpose of the paper (thesis statement) and how the paper plans to achieve its objective (the outline). All academic papers follow this format, and but neophyte writers often struggle with this format. I have seen so many undergraduates lose grades because the introduction was not well written and I will show you the most common mistakes they make and how to avoid them. Moreover, a good introduction sets down the structure of the paper - your plan for it, so mastering the art of writing a good introduction is also an exercise in planning the paper's structure.

Week 5: You submit your introduction to me - it only needs to be 2 paragraphs long. We will also talk about conducting research: what are good sources? In this class, we discuss how to find good sources, and why peer review matters for the quality of the source. We will discuss what sources to avoid, as well. Finally, we will discuss how to format your references correctly and why that is important.

Week 6: This week, you present 3 sources that captured your interest for your writing project, formatted correctly. If they are not formatted correctly, I will help you see how to correct any mistakes. This class, we will also talk about grammar. I will admit, I hated grammar in school, but becoming an academic writer, it is hard to under-estimate how important it is! In this class, we address your particular struggles with this, and also have a look at why active voice often makes for clearer writing than passive voice.

Week 7: We read your first drafts together. I will examine your papers, locate issues you have with writing, and give you the pointers you need to solve those issues. We will also pay particular attention to using references/citations in the text - when are they needed, when are they not needed, and how do we format quotes?

Week 8: Constructing paragraphs. Papers are built from paragraphs, and I have seen so many undergraduate students with poor paragraph management skills lose grades when a few simple tricks could have avoided making some glaring mistakes that always make professors react poorly. A good paragraph consists of one idea, and it has a lead-in sentence at the beginning, and a wrap-up sentence at the end, and the value-adding information that moves the paper's argument forwards in the middle. We will also consider in what order the paragraphs should be presented to make your argument stronger, as each new paragraph should build on the information provided in the preceding text.

Week 9: Sentence management and vocabulary/word choice. Sentences should not be too short, nor too long. The art of crafting an accessible sentence is, like everything else here, a balancing act. An academic paper is not a newspaper article, a blogpost, or a tweet. It requires a certain level of sophistication - you are a scholar talking to other scholars, after all. On the other hand, some scholars are known for using too inaccessible language, making their writing hard to understand even for other professors. I will show you how to avoid both problems.

Week 10: We look at your papers again, and note the incredible improvement you have made in mastering the art of academic writing over the past 10 weeks.