Many students struggle with the question of how to begin an academic paper. Often, professors are quite helpful in offering you a prompt and directions that you can transform into subheadings. Professors rarely offer a bare prompt; typically, prompts are accompanied by follow-up questions, themes, and concepts that reflect your professor’s attempt to help you structure your academic paper. Therefore, read the directions to each academic paper carefully, approaching them as a kind of blueprint that gives you important hints on how to structure and begin your work.
Sometimes, however, professors do not offer detailed directions or structural hints that can help you begin an academic paper. In the absence of such detail, the best way to begin is often to identify what you find most interesting about a topic. One of the main reasons many students struggle to begin an academic paper is that they don’t have the interest to sustain the kind of time and attention a paper requires. Interest is key! Therefore, if you’re asked to write an academic paper that’s unaccompanied by detailed directions, begin by asking yourself what you find most interesting about the topic, and go from there. Professors are happy to allow you to explore your passion when you write academic papers, so, if you have any doubts about a topic you’ve proposed, submit it to them first.
Another reason that students struggle with starting academic papers has to do with scope. If you pick a narrow topic, you won’t struggle to begin. “Discuss MacBeth” is a very daunting prompt; “discuss how magic in MacBeth shapes MacBeth’s destiny” is much narrower and easier to begin. If you have to freedom to pick a topic for your academic paper, help yourself out by narrowing your scope. Ironically, the less you have to discuss, the easier it is to get started!
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