You’ve introduced your ideas, set up an effective thesis statement, and written a solid body to support what you said in your introduction. Your conclusion should just write itself at this point, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. In fact, you can blow a paper by messing up the conclusion badly. So it’s crucial to spend a while crafting your conclusion so that it wraps up your paper effectively and leaves your audience in awe . . . or at least willing to give you an A. Fortunately, conclusions are pretty formulaic. Most of the them are going to look the same, so once you’ve written a couple of them, you should be able to develop a conclusion for any paper relatively quickly (this isn’t necessarily the case with the introduction or the body).

One thing I’d like to note before getting into those two things I mentioned. Many, many people recommend writing your conclusion early in the paper-writing process. Instead of writing introduction-body-conclusion, they recommend going introduction-conclusion-body. Or even conclusion-introduction-body. In fact, some suggest conclusion-body-introduction (this is much less common, however). And while this may seem counterintuitive, it actually makes a lot of sense. If you know what you want to conclude at the end of your paper, you can make sure that the body supports that conclusion. Some people work better the other way, but it’s worth trying. Give it a shot once or twice and see if it helps your writing. It can be a little weird, but if you work better that way, you’ll be glad you tried it.

The first part of almost every conclusion is a recap of the paper. Give a short version of your thesis and summarize the main points of the body. Be quick about it, though—the reader did just read your entire paper. They may have forgotten some of it (especially if it’s a long one), but they haven’t forgotten the whole thing. Don’t go into too much detail—just keep it quick. In addition to reminding your reader of what you just said, it also has the benefit of reminding you what you just wrote (or what you’re about to write), and that can help you with the next item.

The ultimate conclusion of your paper is of great importance. This is where you bring everything together and prove to your audience that you made your point. This is probably best shown by example. Say you were writing a paper about L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. Your thesis could be something to the effect of “Jonnie’s journey from the mountains to the city ruins represents the human race’s coming loss of innocence” or something like that (don’t take that too seriously—I just made it up). You then support it with examples from the book, other works that Hubbard has published, or whatever else you can use to prove your point. Your conclusion statement, then, would be something like “taking into account Point A, Point B, and Point C, it becomes clear that Jonnie’s journey to the city foreshadows his people’s coming loss of innocence in the forthcoming war.” As you can see, the conclusion statement is really just a reformation of the thesis statement that takes into account the evidence that you’ve provided to support it.

And there you go. You’re now ready to write a college paper. Go to it!

Now that you have a great introduction written, you’re ready to take on the biggest and most important part of the paper: the body. The body is essentially everything between the first paragraph (the introduction) and the last (the conclusion). You can have more than one paragraph in either of these two parts, but that’s beside the point. If your paper is two pages long or twenty pages long, the vast majority of the writing will be the body.

Because the body is the most significant part of the paper, you might think that it’s also the most difficult to write. This usually isn’t the case, however. The body, for the most part, is pretty easy (at least to start). If you’ve done your research (or read your textbook, talked with your classmates, watched a production, or whatever you had to do to get ready for this assignment), you’ll be well-prepared to write a body that supports your point, whatever that may be. So make sure that you do whatever you have to do to be prepared. If not, you’ll have a really tough time, and you’ll end up spending many more hours than you need to on this assignment.

One thing I’d like to point out right away is that you should avoid limiting yourself when you’re writing. The five-paragraph essay is something that is taught in many secondary schools around the country, and people get used to writing it. You can, however, write more than one introduction and conclusion paragraph, and more than three body paragraphs. In fact, you’ll have to at some point. Get used to it. You can even use different structures; your introduction may come first, but you maybe you find it more effective to break out your points between all of the paragraphs, leading up to one final killer one before the conclusion, instead of addressing your first point in your first paragraph, the second point in the second, and so on.

Writing the body is pretty simple: support your thesis. Write whatever you told your audience that you were going to write about. If you’ve created a thesis statement that’s an argument, lay out your points, a couple of the opposition’s, and show why your view is better. If it’s an exploratory paper, talk about the things that you’ve learned and how they’ve changed the way you think. If it’s a compare-and-contrast, show the similarities between the two subjects, and then the differences.

There isn’t a whole lot else to say about the body. Make sure your writing is clear, the structure of the paper makes sense, and that the transitions between your points are smooth. That’s about it. Now, on to the conclusion!

There are many ways in which college differs academically from high school, and paper writing is one of the significant differences. In high school, you usually just have to show that you’ve put forth some effort to get at least a decent grade. In college, things are a little different. You’ll have to come up with a well-crafted paper that is easily readable, makes sense, and is put together in the proper manner. It’s this last part that I’ll be focusing on for a while. I can’t help you with the content of your paper, but I can try to help you put them together well.

The first part of a well-crafted paper, obviously, is the introduction. And while this may seem like the simplest part of the paper, it can get quite complicated. There are a lot of things that should be done in the introduction, and it’s easy to miss a few or try to cram too many into a small space. The most important part of an introduction is the thesis statement. The thesis of your paper is, essentially, the point. It’s why you’re writing the paper. Many high school students are taught that the thesis of a paper is an argument—and while this is often true, it isn’t always the case. For example, I’ve written “exploratory” papers, in which my thesis was something along the lines of “I started with this idea, but through research, analysis, and some exploratory writing, I ended up with this other idea. This is the story of my exploration.” (In essence, anyway.) There’s no argument in this statement, but it clearly tells the reader what I’m writing the paper about. The thesis statement should be pretty obvious, but you don’t need to say “my thesis is . . .” Make sure your reader knows what you’re writing about and why, and you’ll end up with at least the beginning of a solid thesis statement. During the pre-writing stage of the paper, it can be helpful to figure out exactly what your thesis is so that it’s easier to explicate it when you start writing.

One part of the introduction that many people overlook is the establishment of credibility. This is the same as in speech writing: you have to prove to your audience that you know what you’re talking about. Did you spend hours and hours researching the migration patterns of the Russian snow zebra? Was your cousin a pioneer in the field of one-handed cartwheeling? Show your audience that you have some special insight into the topic, and they’ll be more likely to take you seriously, which is good.

Once you’ve gotten these two parts of your introduction written, you can move on to the body of your paper. Be sure to come back to your introduction to make sure that it supports your paper well and that it has a good transition into the body, though. You can really kill the flow of your paper (and the interest of your reader) if you have a choppy transition early in the paper.

It’s about that time of year when college applications are due, and you may be wondering what your chances are of getting into the schools you applied to.  While no one can see into the future, it’s nice to get an idea of whether you’re going to get in or not so you can sleep at night.  StuVu recently released an iPhone app that allows you to calculate your chances of getting into the colleges you applied to.  The StuVu College Admissions Calculator takes advantage of the six-thousand plus colleges in the StuVu database along with the admissions information from past years for each of those schools to estimate your chances of getting into the schools you applied to.  It also gives suggestions on how you can improve your chances as well as where you can get more information about the colleges you’re applying to.  Click here to get more information about the College Admission Calculator and stop stressing about your college application chances and put your mind at ease.

Now that the middle of the semester is fast approaching, you’ll probably start thinking about the classes that you’ll be registering for next semester. In addition to this, you’ll also probably want to think about if you’re going to take a J-term (“January-term,” also known as “winter term”) class. There are many reasons that you might consider taking one.

First, and probably most likely, is that you need the credits. Some schools require a number of credits that include four full-time years as well as at least one J-term or summer class. If this is the case, you might be trying to get that one extra class out of the way. Another common reason for taking a J-term class is for exploring some options outside of your major. Because they’re so short, they make for great “curiosity” classes. You can get a pretty good idea of what it takes to study another subject, and see if you like it enough to add a minor or even another major (or maybe you’re considering changing your current major to another one, and want to see if you really like the subject first). Studying abroad is also another reason for taking one of these classes; instead of living in another country for a whole semester, you’ll only be there for four or five weeks (not that this isn’t a significant amount of time—I think it’s awesome).

No matter why you think you’d like to take a J-term class, you probably have a few questions about them (I know I did before I first took one). So I’m going to provide a few quick answers so you can make an informed decisions.

First, don’t think that J-term classes are remedial. Many people take them for many reasons. Yes, sometimes it’s because they failed the class during the semester. But that will rarely define the class. In fact, you’ll often find that everyone in the class is highly motivated, because they’re taking a class outside of the normal semester schedule.

J-term classes can be difficult. You’re packing a full semester’s worth of class (or pretty close) into about a month, so you can bet on having a lot to read, probably a lot to write, and certainly a lot to be tested upon. Don’t worry, though—your professors know that it can be tough, and they’re usually pretty good about preparing you for the hard parts of the class.

Class periods are significantly longer during J-term because, as I said, you need to fit a semester’s worth of content into a shorter period of time. Again, professors are sensitive to the needs of restless college students—you’ll usually get a break or two, and many professors will encourage a lot of conversation during class to keep everyone awake.

You can take just about any class during J-term. You won’t be limited to non-traditional classes or exploratory seminars. You can take an introduction to calculus or first-level geography (of course, you usually can take those off-the-wall classes, as well; I took a class on hard-boiled detective fiction over a J-term once).