Back to School Basics: How to Write a Research Paper

If you’re currently in school, it’s inevitable that you’ll eventually run into a class that requires you to write a research paper. Research papers usually involve picking a topic, looking up research done by other people on the topic, and finally writing a paper that includes both the research by other people that you’ve found as well as your own knowledge on the subject. This may seem intimidating at first, but the key to writing a good research paper is being well prepared. Not only will preparation help you write a great paper, but it will also save you tons of stress! If you find yourself with a paper due and no idea where to start, look no further! Here are some tips that should help you develop a plan of attack.

Read the Instructions

You know that pesky handout that you just about lost as soon as your teacher gave it to you? Pull it out! It will contain everything you need to include in your paper, from the word count to the amount of research articles you need to cite to the citation style. Read over this paper as soon as possible so that if you have any questions or are confused by any of the requirements, your instructor will have some time to get back to you. You will refer back to this document often while you’re writing, so keep it somewhere that you can easily access it while planning and writing.

Pick a Topic

Sometimes you will have a very specific topic you need to write about, but a lot of the time (especially in college or university), you will be given a very general topic that you need to narrow down. When you’re picking a topic remember these two important things: the topic needs to be interesting to you while still staying within the requirements, and the topic needs to be researchable. If your topic isn’t interesting to you, you’ll have a really hard time actually writing the paper. However, if you pick a topic that you like but it isn’t researchable or has very little information available, you’ll get stuck before you even attempt to start writing.

Research, Research, Research!

This is arguably the most boring (but very important!) part of writing a research paper: the actual research. While doing a quick Google search and citing the first pages that come up might be an easy to research something, that won’t normally work for this type of paper. All (or most) research papers in college and university requires you to include scholarly, also known as peer-reviewed, articles, which are articles written by the researchers themselves or an expert in the field of study that the research is done in. This means that you’ll be wading through tons of long, dry articles just pick out a sentence of two that relates to your paper. Find a method for reading the articles. My personal favourite is reading the beginning of the article and skim reading the rest if you think it will be useful to you. This way you don’t spend all of your time reading articles that aren’t relevant to your paper. Once you find some articles that you want to use, read through them and pick out lines that you can include in your paper. A good way to do this is to find the quote, write it down, and include the article name, author, and page number with the quote. Trust me, this will save you a lot of headaches later on!

Organize Your Notes

Doing all of your research will be useless you know how you’re going to use it in your paper. Organize your notes so you have the quotes you’re using, specific topics, and any other relevant information all in the same place. You can even go as far as writing the quotes and general topics out in the order that they’ll appear in your paper. Get a rough idea of how you want your paper to be written so that when you move onto writing, you can spend more time actually writing and less time trying to find information.

Start Writing!

Beginning with a rough draft is always the best way to write any paper. Start writing, not worrying too much about perfect grammar or formal language, and get all of the information written down in an essay format. This way you can see if you’re missing any critical information and it will be really easy to spot and areas that need to be fleshed out more or don’t flow as well. After you finish your rough draft you can edit, fix any grammar and punctuation errors, make sure you don’t use any colloquial language, and adding citations.

Though research papers can seem big and scary, having a system and starting right away will save you a lot of stress. If you have a plan and stick to it, you should have no problem writing a great paper!

Special thanks to sindie synclarye and silent hearts. for editing!