Writing a term paper requires intellectual as well as technical skills. Students should therefore make sure they begin to develop these skills early on in their studies by careful reading and learning from texts written by more experienced scientists.

A few general points should be considered by all students of linguistics:

(1) make sure you know what the formal and intellectual requirements are for papers and any kind of submissions;

(2) make sure you always have a clearly specified and feasible research question or project; talk to your professor about this!

(3) do plan ahead by studying the literature and required resources early on in a project;

(4) make sure you learn all the skills necessary for your project including use of word processing software as well as any software aiding your research process e.g. concordancing software, annotation tools, spreadsheets, statistics software, programming, etc.; learn these skills ahead of any larger projects;

(5) make sure you develop these skills without pressure, i.e. familiarize yourself with tools and techniques outside the pressures of a looming project;

(6) research takes time, make sure you learn about your own time management.

There are numerous resources aiding the scientific writing process in books as well as on the internet. Here are some links that might be useful to you:

The Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource that addresses all aspects of the academic writing process including advice on the organisation of different academic genres as well as the application of different style guides such as those made available by the American Psychological Association (APA) - widely used in linguistics and cognitive science - and the Modern Languages Association (MLA) - widely used in literary studies.

Writing APA style term papers in linguistics, corpus and computational linguistics Term papers in linguistics, corpus and computational linguistics - i.e. any papers written in my field - must follow the style guide of the American Psychological Association (APA) or Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) as specified in individual classes. The APA style is well described in the respective section of the Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL).

In order to facilitate the use of the APA 6 Style Guide, I have prepared a Microsoft Word 2019 (docx) template with instructions on how to employ the template. Please read the document contents first, then delete the main body of the text leaving the title page, front matter, table of contents and bibliography in tact. Modify any sections according to your needs and requirements. Make use of the formatting styles embedded in the template, e.g. for headlines. [Download Word 2019 docx template].

Note: papers not adhering to the style guide specified for a course are not accepted in linguistics, corpus and computational linguistics. Negligent layout and formatting as well as careless writing (incomplete sentences, avoidable errors, failure to use a spell-checker) are unacceptable as well as easily avoidable. Please do yourself a favour and aspire to high quality submissions.