How to Write a Really Good Research Paper

Outlining a Research Paper CC By: Nic McPhee https://flic.kr/p/4zGJDo

“Okay class, for tomorrow, you will find a research paper and write 5 pages on it”. This is the last thing any college student wants to hear. Even if it is just 5 pages, research papers are usually boring. The stereotype of research papers are that they are boring, and most students think it will be on a topic that you are not interested in. Most likely these research papers are assigned to you by a professor or teacher on a specific topic. This may be the case for younger students such as in 7th through 11th grade. However, from my experience as I got older, the work I did became more about what I actually wanted.

Research papers can range from essays on Ancient European History to essays on politics to essays on whether or not marijuana should be legal. Some of these such as whether or not marijuana should be legal can be very interesting whereas essays on Ancient European History tend to be pretty boring. Students are used to research papers that are what professors/teachers want and not as much as what they want to research. I think that it is very important for you to pick a topic that interests you. This is the first step to creating a really good research paper.

In my opinion, the second step is being organized. Being organized is a key aspect in writing a good research paper, always. To stay organized, you must know what you are writing about, have a solid outline and have credible sources. Once you have all of these, you are off to a good start. Time management comes with being organized and if you can time yourself so that you are doing only small sections of the long research paper a day, you will be less stressed and more opt to write a better paper. I always write an outline of my “to do list” of what to do with my essay before I actually start it. I find this helpful because it is just like going through a checklist.

Another key to writing a great research paper is to have a great title and an interesting introduction. In the research paper I found titled, “Relax, Turn Off Your Phone, and Go to Sleep”, I thought this was a very good title because it is exactly what the article is about, how phones and other technology affects your sleep and how it is better to shut off technology and phones before you sleep. The introduction paragraph is a personal story about the author as a child, it starts out with “As a child, I was a terrible sleeper”. Personal stories are always a great way to start an introduction to really suck the reader in.

I found this research paper interesting and very well written. It has credible sources, hyperlinks connecting to other sites relating to this topic that went further in depth and in general, it was what I think the ideal research paper should look like. An example how you can tell it is a credible source and how to use hyperlinks is where it said “In our new, yet-to-be-published study of more than 700 college students”, study is hyperlinked to the actual study, which is helpful to site information. For this example, I hyperlinked study to the website I found a good research paper for. The paper is from Harvard Business Review which is a credible source and is written by workers at California State University.

In my Senior Year of high school I had to write a 4,000 word research paper on any topic that I wanted. The fact that I got to choose which topic to write about made it a lot easier to write. I first researched several articles on different topics then took notes on each article. After I did that, I chose my favorite article. I then decided how many “sub sections” would be in essay. Then I started writing sentences in each subsection turning it into paragraphs then pages. This made writing a 4000 word paper go a lot more smoothly than if I were to write it in one night or all at once.

Going off on the subsections that I found useful for my essay personally, I read a research paper that was well written and talked about breaking papers up into sub sections. The key to writing an interesting research paper is to break it up into sections. Also, include at least a few drafts of the essay. It is hard to write a perfect paper in just one draft with no outline or anything. As I read from “Shitty First Drafts”, there are three steps to a great research paper. The three steps to a great research paper are to 1) write down anything on paper, 2) fix up what you wrote and say it more accurately and 3) the “dental draft”, where you check to make sure everything is perfect and no loose or cramped or decayed information. Even authors can not write a great book or paper quickly, it takes time. Good things come with time and students need to realize this when writing papers. Once they do, research papers will become much easier and much more fun to write. There still are some hard parts about writing research papers, even if you have all the tools to write one.

I found hard parts to writing long essays and research papers. My first problem was that I did not enjoy writing research papers, or even the thought of writing onr for that matter. They are time consuming, sometimes can be boring, but most of all, I feel that people are just not usually taught to write a research paper, rather, they are told to write one. This is what makes them dreaded by so many. A study was done at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill about writing anxiety and it shows many types of anxiety that comes due to writing such as adjusting to new forms of writing, working on assignments that seem unrelated to life goals and working with limited time. These all can occur from writing research papers. However, they also spoke about ways to overcome it and that their are ways, you just need to find which one works for you.

In my personal opinion, the hardest part about writing about a research paper is finding one that you actually enjoy and want to write about. It is much easier to write when your professor gives you one to write however, you can definitely write much more if it is something that personally interests you. A helpful tip to finding the right research paper is to google “interesting research papers to write about” or if it has to be about a specific topic such as how media affects how women portray themselves, you could google “research papers on how media affects the way women portray themselves”. It is relatively easy and not too time consuming to find a paper that fits you. All you have to do is sit down with no distractions and just search for one. Once you do this, the rest gets easier from here.

I hope that after reading this article you realize that writing a research paper is not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. Teachers aren’t trying to give you an assignment that you hate. As long as you stay organized, stay true to what you want to talk about, find credible sources, take notes and manage your time, you should be able to write a research paper no problem.

 

Bibliography:

“Relax, Turn Off Your Phone, and Go to Sleep.” Harvard Business Review. 2015. Web. 07 Mar. 2016.

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