how to write a term paper proposal

How to write a term paper proposal

A term paper proposal is a common type of assignments given to students that require to do some research on a particular topic of interest. The main aim of term paper proposal is to create a scheme of structuring the future term paper. They are usually written in order to compress the global field of interest to a very specific topic. If you have the task to write a term paper proposal, it means you are supposed to combine the most meaningful parts of the whole paper and combine them in the unit outline. You should also offer the description to each of the parts. It is usually made to let your instructor understand what the purpose of your work is going to be and give him an opportunity to make some improvements.

Main components of the term paper proposal

If you are struggling to find out how to write a term paper proposal, you need to know which components it should include. The main of them are three:

  1. A working title. A working title is the topic of your paper that expresses the theme of your work and lets the reader understand what your paper is going to be written about. The main requirement that is stated for your title is to be capturing and interesting to your readers. Your aim is to make everybody want to look inside your paper. Your topic should also be accurate and exhausted enough.
  2. Thesis statements. Your thesis statements clearly express your ideas that you have on the chosen topic. It is usually only several sentences that state your arguments and serve as topic sentences in the content. They are supposed to be accurate and be supported by the details and facts in the following sentences. Thesis statements are needed to develop your thoughts easily and smoothly and to create a clear structure for the paper.
    In order to complete good thesis statements, you need to distinguish what questions you are going to answer in your paper. All of them should be connected by the one main idea and be competitive enough to argue about. If you want your arguments to be strong, state the thesis that would show the reader your conclusion on the topic.
  3. A bibliography. A term paper proposal should obligatory include annotated bibliography. In simple words, it is a list of sources that have at least 4 points, including books, articles, chapters, and lots of other sources of information that you are going to use while completing a paper. Be careful to organize everything in accordance with the needed format style.

A step-by-step guide on how to write a term paper proposal

Completing a term paper proposal is not a simple task as you have not yet the whole paper but need to explain to readers what the theme and purpose of your paper are going to be. You need to be as accurate as you can and place strict information to create a proper opinion about your work.

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  1. The first thing you are going to do is to choose a topic, which would be familiar to you, interesting and obligatory fit the requirements given by your instructor.
  2. Place your thesis statements that would serve as an answer to the question about the problem that you are going to solve in your work. Give your audience a picture of what they should expect to meet in the whole paper.
  3. Give an explanation of the purpose of your topic. You are supposed to explain why it is the one you decided to pick up and why this problem is appealing to you. Place an accurate and exhausted description of the future use that your paper may have and define what problems it could help to solve.
  4. Give a description of the used methods. Define how and with the help of what you are going to find the answers to your problems and test your arguments on the rightness. Show the readers the way how to achieve the mentioned goals stated in the paper.
  5. Outline of the future paper. An outline could be completed in different ways. For instance, you can make a list of sections that will give the main ideas you are going to extend in the whole paper. Name the parts of the work and place a short description of what which of them include.
    Your outline may consist of the “Background” (a section about the topic), “Purpose” (a section which helps to understand the questions which the paper is going to answer), “Results” (a section which gives a description of the concluding part of the process of fulfilling the stated questions), “Significance” (a section, which show the importance of the results that the research has), and “Conclusion” (a section, which gives a summary of the content and ideas that would be broadened in the whole work. Completing the last section, try to be accurate and write shortly as it is not the real paper but only a proposal.
  6. Place Bibliography and References. It is an important part of the whole work, and you need to pay it enough attention. Bibliography means all the text and online materials that you can find on your topic. They can be textbooks, articles, journals, chapters, websites and lots of others. Speaking of References, we should accentuate that is slightly different from the Bibliography and means only those materials that you are actually going to use.
  7. Revise your work. Make confident that you have mentioned everything that you wanted to include in your work and check if all this information is expressed in the logical order. Make sure you have not omitted any sections from your outline and stated all components that should be obligatorily presented in the term paper proposal. Additionally, check your work for mistakes and improve all of them if you have found some. Be confident you have not misspelled any word, and your paper is perfectly written.