How To Be Awesome at Writing a Paper

Not to brag but I can write an awesome paper, in fact I can probably write the shit out of your paper.  I am a graduate student, that means I graduated from being a student but I was so good they were like "No, don't leave us, come be a student more, 'cause your so awesome!"  Hell they even pay me to be a student.  Anyways, I know at this point you are like "woah, I can't believe someone so awesome that they couldn't get a real job after university, someone who goes to school professionally would be willing to give up the secret to their success."  Well guess what, I am.  So here it is so you don't have to keep lurking around my blog trying to steal my knowledge.

How to Write a Paper

1.  Choose a topic:  A lot of people will mislead you to believe that you should choose something you enjoy learning about.  This a lie that will probably cause you to waste valuable "study time" learnging about Gavin Rossdale and cupcake recipes.  Contrary to popular belief this is not because nothing interesting is worth studying, rather it is that studying makes anything you like boring.  Don't believe me, here are some REAL journal article titles.

• Physical properties and consumer liking of cookies prepared by replacing sucrose with tagatose. Journal of Food Science
• Acceptability and stability of no-sugar-added cupcakes containing encapsulated aspartame.
• Isolation and Nucleotide Sequence of Canine Glucose-6-phosphate mRNA:  Identification of Mutation in Puppies with Glycogen Storage Disease Type 1a.

I hope you enjoyed that, because those projects undoubtedly ruined cookies, cupcakes and puppies for some poor souls.  So really you should just choose something that sounds vaguely familiar and has lots of hits come up when you google it or put it in pub med (sorry Arts kids, I'm a Scientist suckers!)  Luckily sometimes the unexpected happens and when you study something that seems boring it will actually turn out interesting (ie/ I now happen to think that Yeast-Two Hybrids are cool (double bracket, that's right, I said cool)).


2.  Wikipedia your topic and read about it (note many profs, TAs, asshats, will say wikipedia is not a valid source, this true but I will tell you a secret once you get to step 4).


3.  Check facebook/myspace/twitter/blogger/msn/porn sites (don't judge, maybe xxxslutbutt3000 is a proteomics genius by day).  Make sure you talk to everyone you know somebody may have something valuable to say about your topic.  You don't have to do this step but my years of experience has shown me that the majority of undergrads do.


4.  Follow the links at the bottom of wikipedia!!!!  Did you get that, see all that cool stuff you learnt on wikipedia, reference it to the proper reference as given at the bottom of wikipedia.  Hell maybe even take out that reference at your local library and learn more about your topic.  Or just trust wikipedia and copy the references, that's still better than referencing wikipedia.


5.  It's Tuesday so watch Lost.  What if it's not Tuesday you say?  I dunno call your friends or something, your in undergrad, shouldn't you be drunk already?


Tomorrow I may give you more tips, or I may write a paper about Yeast-Two Hybrid systems, who knows?!?!