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What Happens If You Choose The Wrong Term Paper Structure 

There are many different paper structures out there. You might use a different structure for a persuasive essay compared to a research paper or a literature review. Almost all of the structures are similar in that they have an introduction of sorts, a body, a conclusion, and reference page or works cited of some sort.

Every institution will provide students with the structure they need to follow for their term paper. Some teachers may change the structure after you have started writing, while others failed to provide it in a timely fashion leaving you having selected the wrong term paper structure. Still, other times you just dove right in and ended up using the wrong term paper structure from the get-go.

If you find that you have selected the wrong term paper structure, you can fix it. Don’t despair! Fixing your term paper and changing the structure is thankfully just cosmetic. You won’t often have to change anything in the body of the text, save for an extra title page or something depending on which incorrect structure you used. The process of fixing this error is merely time consuming and meticulous.

Whatever structure you used, you should make sure you have the correct structure in front of you. Follow this to the letter. Start with the title page. Change this and re-format it as necessary. There are different requirements for APA formatting versus MLA or Chicago, so make sure that you ask what format the university or teacher requires before you start editing. This will save you time.

After you have fixed your title page, add your abstract if it is necessary and you don’t have it already. Some papers will require an abstract and others won’t. This is why it is important to have a copy of your required term paper structure with you as you go through and fix the mistakes. The next item to tackle is your introduction. So long as you wrote a decent paper, there should be no reason you will need to change the language or the content, just the placement or length. Some structures require a short introduction while others may require something longer than what you have.

The next step is adding a methods section if it is required, listing the results, and including your discussion. If you wrote a body and failed to divide it properly, you can just find a good breaking point where you listed the steps you took and add the sub-headings for methods, then add the subheadings for results after your findings. Obviously, this is contingent upon whether your institution structure requires either of these sections.

In the end, wrap up your conclusion and include any revised references, in-text citations, appendices, tables, and graphs.