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O.K. So you’ve gotten this assignment. It’s for a 5-page essay on a characterization of Sydney Carton in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, and you are thinking, “Five-page essay? Does he (the teacher) mean a paper?”

A lot of essay assignments leave options for students within generalized topic and type areas. For example, an instructor may simply say, “Write a persuasive essay on the topic of immigration reform.” The student is then left to identify a smaller topic within that general area, formulate an opinion on it, and then conduct the research and produce the essay.

I always thought I knew how to write a narrative essay. In high school, we wrote a few of them, and I always got good grades, I think, because my grammar and punctuation were excellent. Now I realize that my English teachers really were not grading on style or content and were doing me a dis-service!

Research papers at the university level can count for up to 50% of one’s course grade. It is a bit frightening to think that one project can be so important, but many professors believe they are more important than final exams or other coursework assignments.