Position Paper Guidelines

Purpose

Delegates are strongly encouraged to prepare and submit position papers for the conference. A distinctive plaque is awarded each year for the best position paper submitted and they may also count for points toward other awards as well. All submissions will be blind evaluated prior to the conference, so there are some basic style details that must be followed. In addition, we are offering some suggestions to help ensure your submission is the best it can be.

*All submissions remain the copyright property of the author, with appropriate authorship credit given when published. The author grants DAYMUNC the right to publish any submitted position paper on its website or by hard copy and also grants the right to edit where necessary without exception.

Style Details

Margins should be set to one inch all around and use 10 point Times Roman font and single spacing. Position papers must not exceed one side of one sheet of paper for all topics. In the top margin (Word header), please list your name and school on the first line and the committee and country on the second line. It is not necessary to leave any blank lines--feel free to cram in everything you can as you really have very little space to work with. Make every word count! Each topic must begin on a new line and start with the topic title followed by a colon and space. Footnotes and citations are not necessary in position papers.

Suggestions

The following suggestions are offered to help guide your research and writing effort and are not the criteria for awards. Position papers serve to suggest how a Member State will act during the conference. They are necessarily prospective, forward looking, statements of national policy.

Give your country's formal name once and only in the first line of each topic--subsequently, the use of appropriate acronyms is acceptable.

Position statements are generally expressed in plural first person but use care in your choice of verbs. For example, the government of a country can "know," "value," "think" or "believe" but it lacks the capacity to "feel." Third person can also be used to provide sentence variety.

It is a good idea to avoid using up space with flat facts (things like population, location, area, etc) as this information is readily available and really is not policy.

It is not meaningful to provide historical accounts of what the country has done in the past. While historical policy may inform us of present policy, what is really desired are clear concise statements of what the county intends to do now and in the future. Thus, long lists of ratified treaties and supported resolutions waste precious space and should be avoided.

The most important question a great position paper answers is what the country believes is the best solution to the problem being addressed. Think of it this way--if your country was authoring the working paper and could do anything it wanted, what would that be?

Research Aids

A variety of research aids are provided on this website in the resource area in addition to those provided in the background guides. Within that section you can find information regarding UN resolutions, general country information, NGO resources, and links to a variety of current events sources as well. New resources are being added regularly, so keep checking the site frequently. We hope these resources and suggestions will help you write an award winning paper!