Beginning Your Paper

Select your topic: Are energy drinks dangerous or helpful?

Develop your question: Is it an arguing a position, speculating about causes, proposing a solution, or explaining a topic?

How do you develop your introduction?

Specific thesis.

Developing Your Paper

Create topic sentences that frame your paragraph around a main idea or theme.

Use your own ideas and sources to support your reason, cause, solution, or explanation. Good paragraphs are usually 5 or more sentences.

Your last sentence can help transition to the next paragraph or it can rehash the rest of the paragraph.

Try to include a counterargument

If you’re doing a arguing a position paper, your counterargument can be the other side of the story.

Conclusion

You might begin with a summary, for example, and then extend it with a discussion of the paper’s significance or its implications for future study, for choices that individuals might make, for policy, and so on. You could urge readers to change an attitude or modify a behavior. Certainly, you’re under no obligation to discuss the broader significance of your work; but the conclusions of effective papers often reveal that their authors are “thinking large” by placing their limited subject into a larger social, cultural, or historical context.

References

Remember you can use text-based sources found through the library, through our WRIT 112 resources page, or on your own. Feel free to use images and videos.

How to write the paper:

Introduce the debate

Specific thesis with your three reasons and counterargument that explains why you are arguing for something

Reason 1 = paragraph

Reason 2 = paragraph

Reason 3 = paragraph

Counterargument = paragraph

Conclusion

Questions might help organize the paper:

Positive effect on the body?

Negative effects on the body?

Is it mental or it actually help boost our energy?

What are the substitutes for energy drinks?

6 PAGES FULL.

6 PAGES + COVER + REFERENCES = 8

Teacher comments:

First, write up an introduction where you introduce your “specific topic,” put the paper into focus, and create the context and purpose of the paper. You can start the paper off with a quote, a question, a surprising fact/stat, or a personal or anecdotal example. You should be clear in your intro about whether you are choosing to write an arguing a position paper, speculating about causes paper, or a proposing a solution paper or a speculating.

Make sure to include a thesis about your arguing, solutions, causes, or interesting findings (if you’re doing an explaining a topic paper).

Remember, your argument doesn’t have to be perfect: your argument only needn’t be fully proof, your solution doesn’t have to solve the entire issue, your causes don’t have to fully explain something and can have weaknesses.

Use the ideas of your thesis to create headings and topic sentences in your paragraph. Then, include several body paragraphs where you discuss your argument, solution(s) or causes, and remember to integrate the sources.

Make sure to synthesize sources at least a couple of times. See our homework assignments for further explanation about this.

Make sure to include a counterargument that addresses the weaknesses of the argument, solution or causes. You can counterargue a source. For example, let’s say you are writing a solutions paper and agree with a source that sports gambling should be legalized to help solve a problem of gambling addiction because money from legalizing it can go help addiction counseling. But, maybe a counterargument is that legalized gambling will simply encourage more gambling and lead to more addiction issues, broken homes, and trauma for the gambler. Maybe this makes your solution difficult because changing the law could have bad effects.

Remember that your paragraphs need organization. They need a topic sentence that explains the point of the paragraph, and/or a hook into the point the paragraph is going to make. The paragraphs should include details and ideas that are related to each other and the topic sentence. Using words like “also,” “in other words,” “therefore,” “however,” “but,” and “on the contrary” can help you connect and transition ideas. Sometimes your ideas and details are not that relatable so you might need to split them into two paragraphs.

The paper should be 6 full pages, not including a cover page and a References page, in APA format. Let me know if you have any questions!