Writing a linguistics term paper

Writing a term paper is obligatory, if you wish to acquire credits for a seminar at the MA level. At the BA level, it is a requirement in most of the seminars we offer. This is, because we strongly believe that writing term papers is the best preparation for your BA or MA thesis. It also helps you focus your thoughts. And practicing how to summarize huge amounts of information enhances your communication competence - one of the skills required in many careers.

Since we are also convinced of empirical linguistics, your term paper will need to have an empirical component. This simply means that we expect you to apply what you have learned in the seminar to an authentic piece of language. For example, you might study whether a particular speaker of Indian English uses exactly the same pronunciation or grammar features that have been found to characterize Indian English by analyzing a recording. Or you might be interested to find out whether a particular Reggae artist uses the features which are characteristic of Jamaican Creole. In this case, you would investigate a number of her/his lyrics.

Working with language data is not much different from working with, for example, a number of poems for a literature term paper. We are aware that most of you will not have prior experience in empirically studying language. But please do not worry. Individual slots in our BA level seminars are devoted to giving you hands-on instructions. You will be encouraged to collect your own data (this is simply more fun), but we will be happy to provide you with data whenever necessary.

The literature search is another crucial step towards successfully writing your term paper. You will have gained some experience in school, but if you need more input, the Robert Gordon University's "Library skills / Search techniques " page is a very good resource. If you require more personal assistance, Dr. Karolin Bubke at the University Library offers a special office hour, on Mondays between 2pm and 4pm.

Whenever you write a term paper, either at BA or MA level, please make sure that you negotiate your topic, the table of contents, your literature list, and your methodological approach with your course instructor. We have developed clear guidelines for grading your term papers, which allow us to make this process as transparent as possible. Here is how we grade your papers.

After your course instructor has graded your paper, s/he will be happy to give you feedback to help you improve, if necessary at all.