Welcome to college. Get ready for some of the best four years of your life. Adjusting to college life can be hard. Having to learn how to live with another person, living on your own, and most importantly adjusting to your work load. It can be hard but trust me it will all be worth it.

I am sure the importance of a thesis statement has been drilled into your head since a young age. Your teachers expected it to be located at the end of the first paragraph, contain at least three sub topics to support your opinion on the one main topic, and required you to back it up with specific examples and information. Well have no fear college writing is pretty much exactly like that. You are still forced to form your own opinion on the topic at hand, place the thesis statement at the end of the introduction, and most importantly evidence is always required to back up the assertion in a thesis statement. A thesis statement is like the starting line to a race it is where everything starts and where everything ends. Starting out with a strong thesis statement and valuable evidence to back it up can be everything you need to win the race.

Now that a strong thesis statement is developed its time to collect evidence to back up the thesis statement. Evidence backing up the assertion in a thesis statement is what makes the paper. Evidence in a paper is like the meat to a sandwich. Without the meat in the sandwich there would be no sandwich, and without the evidence to back up the thesis there would be no paper. Throughout the paper evidence and information is always related back to the thesis statement. All evidence that is gathered

In order to find valuable information to back up a thesis statement research must be done on the topic. Make sure the source the information is gathered from is a valuable source. The library provides several resources that can aid in finding reliable information for a paper such as academic journals, books, articles, and much more. When adding evidence to your paper it starts out with an introduction to the quotation.  This usually informs the reader of what the quotation is about. When putting the evidence into a paper make sure everything is cited correctly so risk of plagiarism is lowered. Typical English papers are written in MLA format for more information on correctly citing sources check out A Pocket Style Manual Sixth Edition by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers. This provides great information in correctly citing sources.

After the research is gathered and everything is cited in the correct format your paper will have all the evidence needed to back up your thesis statement. See I told you it is exactly like high school writing. So coming into college there is really not anything to worry about, just use what you have learned from high school and apply the new things you have learned throughout college and you should breeze through college English papers like a champ.