What Are the Differences Between the Kinds of Papers I'M Assigned? (Aka "How to Tell the Essay from the Research Paper"?)

Do you occasionally suspect that your professors think you're clairvoyant? Do you wonder if you were sick the day they passed out the cheat sheet entitled "Vocabulary of Academia and You"? They assign various papers and assume that you understand exactly what a “critique” entails, and why it is different from the “essay” you wrote last week. Well, read on, before you get another assignment you don’t understand and try to stab your professor with his dry-erase marker.

Why, you ask, do professors have so many words just to assign you a paper? All these words exist so that your assignment can subtly tell you what the focus of your work should be. As a direct result of the Smarter Than You Act of 1932, colleges and universities are forbidden from giving their assignments in plain English. And so based on what the professor wants to read, he or she chooses from a list of words that are intended to tell you what to produce. All of these words, amazingly, mean “paper.” But since not all papers are alike, each of these identifying words and phrases have subtle differences.

What exactly is an “essay,” first of all? Technically, an essay is a short paper written on a specific topic. So basically, anything can be an essay that’s not a dissertation or thesis or something else really, really long. So as a student, the meaning to you of this definition is that when you are assigned an essay, the professor expects you to give your views on a certain topic, supported by the appropriate number of sources. Many professors will specify this appropriate number. If not, and you know that you are expected to support your argument with outside sources, one per paragraph is usually a good number. 63% of scholars think so (Anonymous). The total number of sources depends on the length of your paper, but three is a good starting point. From there, find what you need to support your point.

But what about the more specific paper types? The research paper, for example. Most students...