Accounting Term Paper: The Most Effective Writing Strategies

Written assignments such as essays, term papers, research papers or reports are an essential part of accounting classes because they teach students presentation skills that are critical for success in their professional career. Lots of great ideas fail in the business world just because they are poorly presented. So when you are given a task to write a term paper in accounting, you should treat it as a very important business presentation and just imagine that your job depends on your doing it the proper way. You should do your best to express your ideas effectively.

Academic writing and business writing are not easy and requires a lot of reading and thinking so to help you get started, we offer you a complete guide to writing a term paper in accounting where we are going to discuss different aspects of the writing process and give you advice on how to choose a good topic for your accounting term paper, write an outline, what to include in different parts of your term paper, and how to revise and edit your content.

What Is an Accounting Term Paper?

The purpose of writing a term paper in accounting is to communicate important information to the readers. It may be reporting research findings, arguing a certain issue, proposing a research, reviewing literature, solving a problem or defending a position.

The process of writing an accounting term paper, just like any other academic paper, involves certain stages that you should follow in your writing. But you should keep in mind that the actual writing process can be often messy and recursive so you should use this article as a flexible accounting term paper writing guide.

Step 1. Clarify Your Assignment and Choose a Topic

If the topic for your term paper was given by your instructor, you should read it carefully to understand what your assignment is. Your assignment question is most likely to set out what type of information you should include in your term paper and what steps you should follow to complete your task. For example, you may be required to analyze some process, to comment, to evaluate, to make recommendations, to identify some issue, etc. If your instructor has not specified what format you should follow, for example, APA, MLA or Chicago, ask him/her about it. Your instructor may have some specific requirements that you have to follow when formatting your paper.

If you are responsible for choosing a topic for your accounting term paper, you should select a topic that you are interested in, taking into account the amount of time you have to write your term paper, its length, and available resources. You should also avoid controversial or sensational topics that are not scholarly. You have to narrow your topic to a manageable size and pose it as a problem to be solved or as a research question to be answered. If you have no idea what to write about, you may choose one of the topics from our list.

Accounting Term Paper Topics

1. A Company’s Cost Volume Profit Analysis
2. 2017-2018 Budget Research
3. Key Financial Accounting Concepts
4. Advantages and Disadvantages of Accounting Convergence
5. Income Taxes in the USA
6. Accounting Fraud Risks
7. Impact of Accounting Information on the Decision-Making Process
8. Creating a Bankruptcy Plan
9. Debt Financing
10. Role of Accounting in Innovation Management

Step 2. Do Research and Document Sources

First, think about the general outline of your research. Use brainstorming techniques and make a list of subtopics and keywords that will help you organize your research and stay focused on your topic.

A good research is a foundation of your accounting term paper so you should use a broad variety of the most credible and most up-to-date expert resources. You should gather information from databases, libraries, scholarly journal articles, scientific books, online sources, government publications, newspapers, and newsmagazines. While reading, you should make notes and keep track of all your sources. Make sure that you write the whole reference so that you can use it for your reference list or bibliography and citations or if you need to double-check the information.

Organize your data and group it into categories that are variations of some sort of outline – you can write a working outline, make a mind map, arrange group notes on a large table, use file cards or combine these techniques. Your point is to organize your information and identify connections among the categories to determine the structure of your future term paper.

Step 3. Prepare an Outline and the First Draft

Write your thesis statement or statement of purpose and make a final outline that will help you stay on the track when you start writing. An outline is necessary to set out your accounting term paper structure and guarantee that your paper is complete and logical and covers all the relevant information and key arguments. Your outline must reflect how you are going to develop your argument so you should specify every step from your introduction to conclusion.

Your term paper should include the following sections.

• The title should be informative and concise and include keywords of your topic.
• The abstract should explain your objectives, significance of your paper and your approach to the problem, and summarize your findings. Your abstract should be about 200 words or even less and it is usually written when the rest of a paper is completed.
• The introduction should provide background information, give definitions of key terms and concepts, explain your specific purpose and organizational plan. If the explanation of the context in your introduction is too long, you should include a separate section that can be called Context/Background/Key Terms. If you need to provide an overview of the existing research on your subject, you can include a separate section called Literature Review.
• The body of your accounting term paper should present your ideas in a logical, systematic and concise manner. If your paper is long, you should divide your body into sections using headings and subheadings to help your reader see the organizational structure. You should support your argument with relevant evidence and integrate your sources into your discussion. When necessary, provide statistical data, figures, tables, and diagrams with legends. Your task is not just to report the information that you have found in your sources but summarize, explain, analyze, and evaluate it.
• The conclusion should present a summary of your ideas and suggest some directions for further research, and recommendations. Your recommendations can be written in plain text or presented as “bulleted” information. You can also explain the significance of your term paper.
• The references should list sources that you cited in your accounting term paper in an alphabetical order in a proper format specified by your instructor.

When writing your first draft, you should keep in mind that it will be revised so there is no need to worry about spelling or focus on punctuation. Write your thoughts freely. At this stage of the writing process, you should focus on the content of your term paper, following your outline and developing your ideas, and use information from your notes.

You should use categorized research notes to develop your argument and support the points that you want to make. Include quotations and examples to support your explanation, discussion, argument, and comparison. You should avoid self-editing at this step.

Use transition words to link sentences, paragraphs, and sections. You can use single words such as however, but, similarly, phrases or clauses. To make your links more explicit, you might even require using whole sentences. And if your term paper is based on an extensive research, you should use headings and subheadings to make transitions.

When you have finished your rough draft, put it away out of sight before you start revising it and making improvements.

Step 4. Points to Consider During the Writing and Editing Process

When we speak about a well-written paper, we mean that it has to communicate your ideas because if it fails to do it, then it doesn’t matter how profound your research was. In this case, your writing will have no impact on your readers. So the clarity of your term paper is extremely important. How can you achieve that? There are three things that make good writing: effort, style considerations, and technical matters.

Write Multiple Drafts

Writing drafts and polishing them takes time and efforts and you can never complete a good paper if try to do it on the night before it is due. You should write multiple drafts. Complete your first draft, make it smooth, and put it aside for some days so that you can look at it with a fresh perspective, as objectively as you can. Then reread your draft and improve it. You can repeat this process with your third and subsequent drafts. You will be surprised how many ways you can find to improve what you have written.

A good idea is to find a second set of eyes so you may ask someone else to read your accounting term paper, for example, your family member, your friend or classmate or hire a professional editor. Fresh readers can help you notice technical errors and inconsistencies in your argument and organization.

Improve Your Style

You should also take care of your style:

• Use active tense and action verbs that generate more interest.
• Take care of your sentence structure and avoid long and complex sentences. Instead, use simple, short sentences which are more powerful.
• Watch your paragraphs length. Don’t write making too long paragraphs of over one-page length. Such paragraphs may have more than one idea or redundant statements. You should rewrite them and delete unnecessary text or make additional paragraphs for separate ideas. On the other hand, you cannot write in paragraphs that have only one sentence. Each paragraph should include one topic sentence and a few sentences that develop that sentence or support it with evidence.
• Always use transitions between your paragraphs because they smooth the reading process and help readers get from one idea to the next one. Use such words and phrases like however, as a result, nevertheless, still, on the other hand, etc.
• Avoid vague expressions and emotion-laden words. Use words with specific and clear meaning and try to avoid clichés.
• Remember that the purpose of your accounting term paper is the content. The style can help convey your ideas but it should not distract your reader from the content.

Consider Technical Issues

You should take care of the technical issues and make sure that your term paper is free of some common mistakes.

• Check your spelling. You may try to use a technique of professional proofreaders who often read a manuscript backward to check the spelling. Use a good dictionary and spell check software.
• Be careful of verb tenses and keep them consistent within your paragraphs.
• Avoid sentence fragments. Make sure that every sentence you write has a subject and a verb.
• Avoid split infinitives when “to” and the verb are separated by an adverb.
• Don’t end sentences with prepositions because that indicates the poor sentence structure.
• Always make sure that the subjects and the verbs in your sentences agree.

Step 5. Revising Your Final Draft

When revising your draft, you should check your accounting term paper at every organizational level. First, you should check the overall organization and improve logic and flow. Review the introduction and the conclusion to check their logical flow and effectiveness and review the body to make sure that the discussion is coherent. You should also check your term paper against the outline and verify the logical order of your paragraphs and your ideas.

Then you should check the structure and logic within your paragraphs. Make sure that each paragraph has a topic sentence and includes details to support generalizations. Check transitions within and between paragraphs.
Check every sentence and improve structure, word choice and fix grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes.

Your revision may require many readings and each of them may have its specific purpose. At the final stage, when proofreading your accounting term paper, you should also check your documentation and the consistent use of one citation system that was specified by your instructor. Cite all the material that is not considered common knowledge to give credit to the primary sources of information. Check the accuracy of the references list at the end of your term paper.

2 Technical Accounting Term Paper Writing Tips from Our Writing Gurus:

Always have a copy of your paper. You will then be able to add it to your graduation portfolio, reference them or highlight the impressive grades.
Make sure to save changes in your accounting term paper every 5-10 minutes. This way you will not lose the valuable information.