Starting since January 5th, Mr. Atkins’ senior classes have been working on an enormous multi genre research project. For those who don’t know what a “multi genre research project” is, it’s basically writing a long research paper on a given topic, but must also include a few genres (such as writing an article about the topic, or writing song lyrics about your topic). For Mr. Atkins’ classes, seniors must write an 8 to 10 page (about 2400 to 3000 words) long research paper about an American author who is alive and who has not been chosen by another classmate, meaning 2 people can’t write about Stephen King.  Along with this research paper, students also must have 4 different genres, such as making a quiz about the author, a newspaper article, a portrait of the author, or many other selections. Since this is such a big project, seniors are seriously stressing about it, but they’re confident about getting it done. Here’s a few tips on how to prepare for a multi genre research project when you have to do one:

Don’t Procrastinate: Seriously, procrastinating is a big no no in English, especially with a huge project like this. There are deadlines here and there and each thing needs to be done in time. People always think “Oh, this won’t be too hard! I can do it a couple days beforehand and it won’t be a problem.” Wrong! Start when you can, so that you won’t be stressed out 2 days before the deadline date.

Don’t Make Up Things and Expect it To Be Right: It’s crazy, but people will actually try to just make up stuff and hope that it’s right. Mr. Atkins and Ms. Harper do know if you make something up and it won’t be pretty if they find out.

Don’t Plagiarize: Plagiarizing is the biggest rule breaker in the history of anything to do with research papers. Be sure to cite everything that you find on the internet. Again, English teachers will go the extra mile and Google sentences that seem out of the ordinary, and they will go insane if they catch you plagiarizing.

Finally, Don’t Cite Wikipedia…: English teachers hate to break it to you, but Wikipedia won’t be your guardian angel for research papers. Teachers will refer to Wikipedia as one of the most unreliable sources you can gather info from. Even spending time and going to the 32nd page of Google to find info for your paper is better than trying to copy something from Wikipedia.