Speaker 1: Hi there. Welcome to The Smart Student. My name is Chelsea Seaborn and today I'm going to teach you how to organize your papers so you can write fast, effective, high-scoring papers on any topic every single time. More specifically, I'm going to teach you how to organize your large papers like your final projects and your research projects. These are your heavyweight champions that are usually worth a large portion of your grade. I personally have a bachelor's and a master's, both of which I completed online and they were both heavily based off written assignments. I used the same system to organize my papers whether I was writing about finance, marketing, leadership, the topic didn't matter because this system worked every time. So in this video I'm going to show you a real-life example of a project to reference. I suggest not paying too much attention to the material of the assignment but more so how I structure it. If it's your first time here and you're excited to learn this system, make sure to give this video a big thumbs up and subscribe for more videos like this every week. If you do subscribe, don't forget to hit the little bell notification so you get notified every time I post a new video. But alright, let's dive into the computer. Quick disclaimer, if your professor gives you any specific instructions for how to organize or write your paper, you should follow those first and foremost. Anything your professor says trumps what I say in this video because they're the ones that are grading you. But alright, let's dive in. Alright, so here we are. We have our big assignment pulled up. The first thing I suggest doing is splitting your screen between your assignment and whatever you're choosing to write your assignment on. I'll be using Microsoft Word. If you're using Google Docs, that works well also. The reason I suggest splitting your screen between the two is because this will allow you to organize your paper to the exact way that it's outlined in your project description. But moving on to the first official step and that is to set up your paper under APA formatting. For time purposes, I'm not going to go into detail on how to set up under APA standards, but if that's something you need help with, I've posted a link to a video where I explain how to do this in the description below. Moving on to step number two, which is to locate your assignment objectives. Your assignment objectives is what you're supposed to write your paper about. It's what your professor will be grading you for. Therefore, this is what your outline should be based on. A huge mistake college students make when writing is write about things that aren't actually asked about in their assignment. Either they get stuck or they need to add in more material to meet their paper length or their paper wasn't organized from the start so they run off topic. So please note when you run off topic or write about things that aren't in the assignment, it's just more work for your professor and it takes away from the material that actually matters. When you have a large assignment like this, the quickest and easiest way to locate your paper objectives is to ask yourself one question and that question is, what will I be writing about? If it doesn't answer your what, then it shouldn't be included in your outline. To make this simple, I like to say that your assignment leaves clues and I like to call those project indicators. Project indicators usually say something along the lines of, your project should consist of the following, your writing should include, the following should be discussed, conduct the following. So when I read through this large assignment, it makes it easy if I look for the project indicator which when scrolling through is going to be right here. Write the report. In this sentence it says, after selecting your organization, write a 20-page company analysis that includes all of the following sections. The end of this sentence that says includes all of the following sections is my project indicator because it lets me know that in my 20-page company analysis I need to include the following one through six sections in my writing. Since we've located the objectives, it's time to move on to step four which is to copy and paste your objectives into your document. We'll go back through and organize this into an outline, but the reason you want to paste your instructions word for word in your document is because it ensures that your outline will include all of the information you need in your paper. Now that we have our instructions in our document, it's time to move on to the next step which is to organize this into an effective outline. Our outline is going to use a combination of APA's level 1 and level 2 section headings. Sectioning your paper is important especially when you're writing long papers because it helps differentiate the distinct portions in your paper. It will keep you on topic when you're writing and it'll give your professor easy cues when grading. When your paper is sectioned from the exact objectives that are in your project rubric, all you have to do is go through and fill in the correct material and you're bound to score really high papers every time. When you create your outline, you want to keep the order as close as possible to how it was assigned to you in your assignment. Spoiler alert. The project rubric that your professor uses to grade your papers follows the same outline to the way that your project is assigned to you. My formula for outlining high-scoring effective papers is to base your paper headings off your objectives. The first thing you'll do is section your paper into level 1 headings. Level 1 headings are the main headings signifying each new section in your paper. In this particular assignment, there will be six different headings. Once I'm finished with the level 1 section headings, I now have the bare bones to my outline. Moving on to the next step, which is to go under each section and break this down further into subsections, also known as level 2 headings. Level 2 headings are only necessary when a section has distinct different topics that need to be discussed under each one. To see how I do this, I will walk you through these first three sections. In this first section, they're asking for a company history and a current overview. When you read the instructions, it asks to include the background of the organization based on my research. It also suggests to include the basic information such as product, organization size, years in existence, and any other foundational information a person would need to know. So basically, after reading these instructions, it's clear that no subsections are needed because these tie into the main section. So from here, I would italicize my instructions and we'll come back to that later. Moving on to section number two. Here, it asks for an evaluation of the mission, vision, and value statements. In the instructions, it also says to include an evaluation of each of them. This indicates that there should be three subsections, so I'll go ahead and make a section for each of those three. After I have my three subsections set, again, I'll italicize my instructions and we'll come back to that in just a minute. Moving on to this third section, which is to create a SWOT analysis. If you're not familiar with what that is, that's all right. It says it right here in the instructions. It says to include at least three strengths and weaknesses and three opportunities and threats. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is what SWOT stands for. Since I need to include three examples for each of those categories, this should indicate that this one has four subsections underneath this main section. Since I know I need to include three examples of each one, I'll go ahead and include one, two, three in here, so I don't forget to include the appropriate amount of examples later on when I write the paper. Here, I will italicize the instructions and move on to the next section. For time purposes, I'll go ahead and finish up these next sections on my own. All right, so here we are. I've gone through and broken down each section into the subsections where it's necessary. If you've noticed, I left the project instructions under each category. I do this so when I come into each section, I can refer back to the instructions as I'm writing my paper. When I'm finished with each section, I'll delete the italicized instructions and I'm left with nothing but my outline and my writing. Since my outline is organized to the exact way it was assigned to me, you can see that this paper is outlined to ensure that I include all the information that was asked for in my assignment. The reason this is important is because it'll match the project rubric that your professors used to grade your assignment. To see what I mean, let me show you an example. All right, so here's the actual project rubric that my professor used to grade this assignment. If you notice, the points are based off these six different sections. When compared to the outline, they match each other almost perfectly. This also makes the process of writing your paper very simple. All you have to do is come in here and plug in the correct information and your paper is bound to score really high. Organizing your paper outlines is one of the most valuable things you can do because it gives you a clear direction when working on your larger assignments that are usually worth a lot of your grade. It also makes it really easy for your professors to grade your papers later. As you can see here, all you have to do is go section by section plugging in the correct information and you'll have a really high scoring effective paper. Guys, if you're still here right now, I hope that's because you found this video useful. I hope you can apply these tips to your own college paper writing. If you did find this video useful, please give this video a big thumbs up, share it with your friends, and of course subscribe for more videos like this every week. Thank you.