How to write your final paper?

Writing a final paper or essay might be frightening for most of you.

In this piece I will try to summarize how you can make writing an essay easier.

This piece is a simplified introduction for beginners intended to help my students for a specific class. So different parts of this piece might be irrelevant to readers who are planning to write essays for different classes or purposes.

 

Step 1. Deciding your topic:

Chose one of the topics among our previous class discussions such as migration, women in Turkey, nationalism etc. After choosing this general topic you have to cut it down into a smaller topic: “Problems faced by women accessing equal job opportunities in Turkey” or “current debates in Turkey regarding Syrian refugees” or “rise of Kurdish question during early years of Republic in Turkey” etc.

When you cut down your topic in small parts you will realize you might find it easier to focus on couple of aspects of your new topic. Let’s follow one of the above mentioned topics to make an example:

“Current debates in Turkey regarding Syrian refugees”

Although being cut down, this topic still includes many aspects such as:

• Problems faced by Syrian Refugees
• Issues faced by Turkish host community
• Government’s response to refugee issue

As you see these different topics can be a issue of an essay by themselves. However since you will be writing a general discussion for our class you might want to touch upon all these issues referencing our class readings and additional research.

All of these topics now can be among your discussion and among your different paragraphs.

Step 2. Introduction

In the first paragraphs of your essay you are expected to state a research question.

Which question or questions will you be trying to answer in your paper?

Following the above mentioned example we can formulate a RQ as follows:

“What are the current debates in Turkey regarding Syrian refugees?”

Regarding your own topic you are expected to write down a research question in your first paragraphs. And following statement of the RQ you are also expected to how you are going to discuss these research question.

E.g. I will focus on common problems faced by Syrian refugees in Turkey, possible solutions as well as Turkish community’s reaction to them. I will refer to data and previous studies throughout my essay…

Step 3. Introducing your argument

Argument is a claim that you state when starting introducing your topic.

After stating the issues that you are going to discuss you have to make certain arguments about your paper. This might be a open end argument at the beginning however, when you continue researching, reading and writing, you will certainly realize you will have some ideas about the topics. These ideas can be called as arguments. Your research might prove that your argument at the beginning was wrong. You might discuss this aspect in your conclusion part.

Eg. I argue that problems faced by Syrian are mainly caused by economic deficits and unemployment. / OR …because of host government’s inefficient efforts…

When you summarized your discussion topics and arguments, you might start your discussion.

Describing the major concepts and topics might be a good start after giving your arguments.

Step 4. Development of your essay.

Development is the largest part of the essay. Since you have stated the different aspects that you will be discussing in your essay, now you can start introducing these aspects to your reader. In this part, you are expected to write all the information you gathered from articles, books or websites on the different aspects of the issue. You are also expected to detail the background of your points that you are discussing. In this part, you might need different sub-titles to make your discussion points clearer.

E.g. These are the issues that you will discuss.

• Problems faced by Syrian Refugees
  • Main problems and background about these problems
• Issues faced by Turkish host community
  • What are the issues that the host community raising?
  • Background and development of different tensions between refugees and host community
  • If so, changing reactions by the host community.
• Government’s response to the refugee issue
  • Background of government’s response
  • How do you evaluate the response?

Step 5. Referencing

While explaining different aspects of your discussion you are expected to refer to different resources that you found in class discussions. You might find further resources among your class readings’ bibliographies.

• Refer to Data that you found about these problems
• Refer to Articles and books that you read about these problems
• Refer to Websites or news that you read about these problems

Step 6. Conclusion

In the conclusion part, you are expected to discuss what did you find about your topic? What is new? And does your findings match with your arguments? Any surprising facts? Or any comments that you want to make about the topic. All these issues are expected to be discussed in the conclusion part. Conclusion is also the part that you share your opinion about the topic and make concluding remarks.

 

I finished my paper!