Research paper writing could be a real burden for college students. Due to procrastination, a student might feel lost, anxious, and stressed out about writing. They may be able to do any type of task but writing, because, for them, writing a research paper has already been associated with negative feelings. Well, we do not have to use magic to accomplish research paper writing, but we can make use of certain magical creative writing techniques.
What makes one research paper different from another is the employment of writing techniques and their management. You might have felt like: Oh my God, I have many good ideas and I am so knowledgeable about my topic, but I have failed to write an appropriate research paper! Indeed, in order to succeed in writing a high-quality research paper, you need to focus on content and structure. A research paper has never been a mere block of ideas. The flowing of ideas, the structure they follow, and the way you present them contribute to the production of an outstanding paper.
Planning
Jumping to the writing process without preparing beforehand is not the best way to start off. You might be able to successfully complete your task though, but it would not look as excellent as you might have expected. The time you spend on brainstorming and mind-mapping will certainly save you the effort and time of painful editing and re-structuring of your paper at a later stage. The prewriting step is the drawing of a plan of what I will be writing in each part: introduction, body, and conclusion. I would classify my ideas into categories and organise the sources and citations that I am going to use according to each idea. How I do that? Whether through handwriting or on a computer, that’s not a problem. The aim is to visualize the structure of the research paper before proceeding.
Research Topic
The dilemma of how to find an original research topic is omnipresent when it comes to academic and scientific research. A key rule of this issue is information and knowledge. The more informed and knowledgeable about your area of study you are, the more original and authentic your research idea might be. For instance, if you are studying Applied Linguistics and you are struggling to find a topic, it could be clever to work on dialectal changes and music through the application of some statistical measures such as probability to study if there are any correlations. This topic could be second to none if it was not approached precedently by other researchers. Yet, if there are others who have worked on that topic, a genial idea could be to maintain the same concept and approach it from a different perspective. The change in terms of angle of view could be done through a different linguistic tool, such as conversational taxonomies or pragmatic typologies.
Quoting, Paraphrasing, or Summarising?
You may want to adhere to one strategy to cite the sources you used in your research paper. You may also like to use paraphrasing, for no specific reason—perhaps just because you like it. Personally, my citing preference is quoting. I like to quote because I like to maintain the original author’s terms as I feel that they transmit a stronger meaning. Notwithstanding, these preferences may backfire, in the sense that they may reflect the inability of the student to vary their techniques. While writing, we have to write with our minds using the critical eyes of our advisors. How is that possible? Just think about the eventual criticism you may receive once your advisor reads your paper. As such you can avoid most of the negative remarks. For example, you should think that your teacher does not know that you prefer paraphrasing, so for them, your overuse of paraphrases might mean that you are unable to summarize in the right way. Hence, it’s better to keep the balance of the research paper: quotes, paraphrases, and summaries should be equally distributed through the paper.
Repetition
Needless repetition would create redundancy. A research paper that revolves around one central concept could not be void of some repetition in terms of expressions. Yet, whenever a synonym is there to save you from the repetitiveness, why not use it to add some freshness to your content!. Boredom is the ultimate feeling your advisor would feel when they read the same word being repeated ten times in one paragraph. Using alternative expressions is an optimal way to avoid repetition. In fact, the best way to reflect the image of a good research paper writer is to make use of the rich lexical field of the subject matter.
Sweeping Generalisations
Showing that you are knowledgeable about the subject matter in your research paper should be reasonable. If you are in the analysis section, try to stick to the results obtained from your analysis. If you are in the discussion section, you can express your opinion, comment on the results, and maybe relate them to some prospective research topic. However, be mindful not to use overgeneralisations, or what’s also called sweeping statements. What is an overgeneralisation? Look at the following statement: “All of the students hate writing because it is boring”. This sentence could ruin your research paper simply because you are overgeneralising: who said that all of the students hate writing? Who said writing is boring? According to which research? How could you justify that? Did you conduct any piece of research that gives you the authority to hold that what you claimed to be true is really true? That said, in order to avoid this embarrassing feedback, you have better avoid overgeneralisations.
Wrap-up
To put it in a nutshell, the secret behind an outstanding research paper lies in the effective employment of planning, original topic selection, the appropriate use of citation techniques, as well as the avoidance of needless repetition and overgeneralisations.