Just as with the majority of things you’ve ever tried in your life, your first attempt at formatting a term paper was most likely less than stellar. The exercise requires adherence to many rules which appear arbitrary and can be hard to fully grasp without a usable template. Here are some methods you can use to acquire a sample so that your own work can benefit:
Writing samples are just one of the many types of academic resources that a proper college should provide its students with to ensure that they are successful. Failure to do so can result in less competent graduates who gradually tarnish the college's names and this can lead to a loss of profit. The extent to which such resources are made available will, of course, vary from institution to institution but you can safely assume that the materials will be view-able. They just might not be given to you permanently.
If you want to gain additional resources or your college has not been very forthcoming, the internet is full of templates and well formatted papers for you to observe. The average search engine will provide you with many results on this topic. It can even point you in the direction of a lively academic forum where other college students like yourself may be discussing the best samples they’ve come across and where they were found. This has the added benefit of being vetted by people who think similarly to you.
If possible you should be searching for samples with others in your class like a team. This can double or triple your efficiency because each of you can look for errors in different papers simultaneously and at the end, there would be samples for each party to use that someone else had gone through. This saves time that would otherwise have been wasted judging the worthiness of each paper before accepting it. Each students research method may also be slightly different so that members of a team can end up finding far different tools than they would have on their own.
Admittedly, most samples aren’t perfect. With regular use, you may be able to look beyond what flaws they do contain and benefit from the good formatting skills they exhibit.