Product Description: Updated to conform to current standards and computerized research sources, this succinct, easy-to-follow guide gives students clear directions for writing papers in virtually all academic subjects. The authors describe how to determine a subject, formulate and outline a provisional thesis, prepare a bibliography, take notes from sources, write a draft, then revise and edit the paper, bringing it to its final form. Added advice includes avoiding plagiarism and making the most of library resources.
Good The title was what made me purchase this book. The title was interesting since I need to write so many papers.
Roberta H. Markman, Ph. D.: good writer, bad teacher. Markman is a much better writer than teacher. I'm taking an Advanced Composition class for high school and we're using this book as a guide. Markman gets off to a great start, in fact, the first few pages are simply inspirational. But after that, it's all downhill. The section on bib cards is just confusing. Instead of providing an outline of how to set them up and examples (like the MLA Guide to Writing a Research Paper), she provides only examples (and many of those examples contain an unbelievable amount of Spanish text). The example on how to reference a casebook were so confused, I ended up just going to looking at the MLA's Reference. The section on taking notes is also unorganized and hard to follow. While I believe she could do an excellent job of guiding us through this procedure, she makes it much more complex than it needs to be. Also, I was reading her sixth edition, published recently. In my opinion, she should have revised the notecard section to show how easy it is to use a computer to take notes. My final complaint about this book is the section on plaigerism. Basically, it teaches a student the best way to plaigerise a book, especially at the high school level. If you're really interested in writing a good research paper, seek another book.
Hideous book Written by a woman who believes that the size of the index card you use to takes notes matters more than what you write on it.
Excellent for High Schoolers This book is an excellent source of informationfor high school students writing research papers!I highly recommend it for anyone who needs to do research. Whether a first-time writer or someone who has do countless papers, this book shows you step-by-step how to write an excellent paper.