It's a rare person who is born with the ability to write engagingly, clearly and logically. More often than not, people cultivate and hone their writing skills as they study. In high schools, colleges, and universities, students are taught to fashion torrents of fragmented ideas into coherent arguments and structure their writing properly.
Unfortunately, a good many students find it difficult to translate their thoughts into words. They may spend long hours staring at the blinking cursor, unable to produce at least a single line. It's not just the lack of experience and expertise that make young learners languish in front of their monitors, but also the psychological inability to overcome mental barriers to successful writing. If you also feel stuck and disheartened by your previous writing failure, don't give up. Below are three simple tips that will help you put together a perfect research paper.
1. Start Effectively
Most students argue that writing an introduction is the most difficult part of the writing process. Not only should you come up with an engaging hook, but also establish your authority as a writer. So, you want to open your paper with a keynote quotation, anecdote, rhetorical question, or even an image, if your assignment permits it. Also, take care to explain your audience what you're going to write about. In other words, you need to present your main argument as effectively as possible and convince your readers of its validity.
For this, you need to establish your paper's context, which represents the frame within which your topic will be discussed. After that, familiarize your audience with the central issue you're going to discuss. You may want to raise a question or draw your reader's attention to some problem and then suggest an answer or a workable solution. Furthermore, orient your audience, locate them in your discussion and make sure to provide them with the necessary information to facilitate their understanding of what's being discussed.
2. Structure Properly
No academic paper can be regarded as successful it doesn't meet standard structure requirements. You must know that a standard research paper should contain a introduction,body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. But there are also such parts as background material, summary of relevant theory, data analysis, counterargument, refutation, and others. You may want them to appear in your paper to shore up your argument and lend scientific weight to your writing.
Unlike the intro and conclusion, these parts don't have fixed places. So, you need to be mindful of that when working on your paper. For example, you may make counterargument a separate section or incorporate it into introductory paragraph. Historical context may appear at the beginning of your paper or in the first body paragraph. As for rebuttal, it usually follows the counterargument section.
If you come up with a strong and debatable thesis, you readers will be bound to ask questions and they go along. So, your research paper will benefit if you think of each section of your writing as answering a series of questions your audience may ask once they familiarize themselves with your main argument.
3. Revise Carefully
It's not a secret that many students forget about their papers once they finish writing the last line. Of course, the writing process can be very tiresome and overwhelming, but you should make it your rule not to abandon your research paper after completing the final draft. Put the draft aside and let it sit there for a little while.
Once you gain the perspective of hindsight, you'll be able to improve the flow of your ideas, add more evidence to prop your arguments up, and polish on the structure. Moreover, it will be much easier to identify the weaknesses and incoherencies in your work and eliminate them after you get some rest and look at your paper with fresh eyes. And one more thing worth noting. Don't rely excessive on your spell-checker. Though enabling this feature will help you avoid a bunch of spelling mistakes, make sure to read through your final draft carefully and check for other types of mistakes, logic, and style.
