Academic paper

In this course you are supposed to learn about how to write an academic paper, or research paper, or scholarly paper. This kind of paper focusses on some kind of research, or some kind of source material that you investigate.

This slide-show gives much of the information that you need.

You should prioritize making up your mind about the topic of your paper. Choose something you find interesting.

Suggestion

A good idea is to write about something you know something about.

Additional resources

Link to ideas for research topic

Basic structure of a scholarly paper

A research paper in its most simple form

Below you will find a very simple report. This is what a report is at its core. You should do something more ambitious, though.

TASK

An international development agency has been looking into attitudes to aging around the world. The research director has asked you to conduct a survey and write a report. Your report should discuss how young people where you live feel about older people in the community and the prospect of growing older themselves. You have also been asked to make recommendations about how attitudes could be changed.

Write your report in 220-260 words in an appropriate style.

Report – Model answer 1

Introduction

The main objectives of this report are to describe how young people in Gava feel about elderly people in their area and aging themselves. I will present results of a survey I conducted with a random selection of 200 young people at a local high school and in the final section I will include recommendations as to how attitudes could be improved.

Attitudes to older people

According to my survey, a significant proportion of young people never or hardly never spend time with someone aged 65. Reasons that respondents gave for this included: they have nothing in common, the elderly don’t like teenagers and lack of time. More promisingly, nearly three quarters of those surveyed (74 percent) agreed that they could probably ‘learn something’ from older people.

Attitudes to aging

Those responding to the survey were almost equally split between preferring to think about it as little as possible and those who never thought about it. For those who did think about it, the prime concerns were loneliness, poor health and boredom.

Recommendations

Clearly more could be done to bridge the gap between young and old in our community. I would make the following recommendations:

• Set up volunteer tutoring opportunities for elderly citizens to help younger people at the high school with academic work or practical skills.
• Invite young people to tutor old people in technology use, e.g. how to text/send emails in return for a donation to be used for social events.

Hopefully, increased contact between the groups will lead to greater understanding and more positive attitudes.

Examples of previous papers

1. Example 1

2. Example 2

3. Example 3