Sritama Chatterjee is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. You can find her on Twitter @SritamaBarna. Given this situation, it may be challenging ...

Require many reliable sources to back up your thesis/claim. Take up a position and support it with evidence. Usually about events (historical or current), textual arguments, or personal interests.

The typical approach to the research paper -- the generic term for pretty much all academic writing -- is to assign it as a summative assessment at the end of the semester. Faculty members normally ...