How to Write an "A" Paper

1. Write draft of paper by free writing – don’t worry about style or grammar, just get down the points you want to make, in the order you think you want to make them.
2. Reread the draft, making sure you made points in the most logical order. Also look at paragraphing. Should long paragraphs be broken up? Should some paragraphs be combined? Make sure you can identify the topic sentence of each paragraph, and check to see that all other sentences in the paragraph relate directly to that topic.
3. Once you are satisfied with the content and order of the points in the paper and with the paragraphing, start to revise for style:
1. Look to see if your sentence length has some variety. Ideally, you will want to have combinations of long and short sentences for effect. Long sentences may need to be broken up into two or more shorter sentences. And short sentences may read better if they are combined (using conjunctions like and or but) or if one or more sentences are imbedded in another sentence (as subordinate clauses, using pronouns like that, which, or who/whom).
2. Try to avoid repetitious statements by combining or subordinating. If you see several sentences in a row that begin with the same subject (e.g., “the coaches”), this may indicate a place where you can eliminate repetition by combining several short sentences as one longer, complex sentence, about the subject (“the coaches”).
3. Also try to avoid repetitious language. If you can, vary the way you phrase an idea or concept, by replacing phrases you’ve used repeatedly with synonymous words or paraphrases.
4. When you’ve made changes, re-read the paper in its new form for smoothness and flow. Read it out loud, so that you can have a sense of what it will “sound” like to a reader. This is the best way to identify awkward places.
4. In your final revision of your draft, you should look for corrections or changes you’d like to make in spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
1. Spelling errors can usually be caught with “Spell-check”. However, be sure to look for homonyms that are sometimes confused and that your spell-checker will not pick up: example, “passed” and “past” or “affect” and “effect”.
2. Punctuation should be checked a sentence at a time. Most so-called “run-on” sentences and “sentence fragments” are just a matter of poor punctuation. That is, you will have failed to separate two thoughts with a comma or semi-colon, or you will have put a period when in fact what was called for was a comma or semi-colon, thus creating an apparent fragment. Remember, punctuation is the reader’s guide to how phrases, clauses, and sentences are connected to one another.
3. Last but not least, check your final draft for grammatical errors like these common ones:
5. 1. confusion of person: using “you” and “they” in the same sentence, or “one” and “they”.
6. 2. confusion of tenses: switching back and forth from present to past tense, or from present to future (sometimes this is okay, but most of the time it is just careless)
7. 3. subject/verb agreement: if the subject is plural make sure the verb has a plural inflectional ending (“they believe” or “he believes”)
8. 4. noun/pronoun agreement: if you use a singular noun, like “a mother” or pronoun like “one” make sure the pronouns you use subsequently to refer to this noun are also singular (thus, “she” and not “they”)
9. 5. who/whom vs which or that: check to make sure in subordinate clauses that you’ve used the appropriate pronoun – who or whom refers to people, which or that to inanimate objects.

http://learningcenter.unc.edu/Resources/Handouts/Papers