Tips on Writing a Research Paper

So you're in class on the first day of the week attentively listening to your professor giving a lecture. In the morning announcement the professor informs the class that two months from now a research paper will be due about some ambiguous topic causing the entire class to moan in agony. After much disbelief and complaint the professor continues on with her lecture for the remaining of the session while you think to yourself, ‘Two months is a lot of time.'

Wrong. Two months is definitely not enough time. Thinking you can procrastinate for something like this is what eventually gets you kicked out of school. The professor gave you a two months period to write this research paper because that is the average time it takes for someone to write a well thought-out, well written paper. If you think you can write an A-grade paper in less than a month, then you're either a prodigy or an idiot.

Considering that many of us are more or less well defined by the latter and therefore it is a much more responsible decision if we decide to start off on this project as soon as possible. But where do we begin? Well, first off we need to find a specific topic to write about. You can do this whenever you have free time because it doesn't require you to sit in front of your desk while you think of nothing. Just keep it in your mind as you go about your day when you have time to think of other thoughts. Once you find a topic to write about the hard part begins.

Now that you have a topic, you have to decide on how specific or ambiguous you want to write about your topic. To help you decide on this, you need to go about researching on about your topic and giving a day or two to see what is available on the internet and in print. If your topic barely has any information it might be a good idea to try to come up with a little broader topic making it a bit easier to write your research paper.

Once you decide on how thorough you wish to write your paper the time for research, as the name of the paper suggests, begins. This is the part where most of your time is spent. A good month or possibly even more can be spent on researching on what you are writing about. Many people think the research part comes easy, and it sometimes does. But the one fact people tend to ignore that is that not all the information given out there is true.

With faulty research you can write something in your paper that you may think it's true because someone else said it was while you were researching but that person may have been in the same position as yourself and was ignorant to the fact it may have been a false statement to begin with. To prevent this, it is better to find out about a fact and cross reference it multiple times with various dependable sources, mainly print as the internet has all kinds of faulty information.

Once you think you have enough material to write your paper you can now begin. Write your draft early so you have lots of time to revise it because your first draft is usually your worst draft. After you have had it edited and revised multiple times, once you feel with full confidence or the deadline is now you can at least hand in something that is college material.