The research paper is the backbone of academic life, and it is the one thing that unites classes across the academic spectrum. No matter your major, and no matter what course you are taking, you are almost certainly writing a research paper.
Scholarly research papers, however, are a major challenge for students across the board, and there is hardly a student who doesn’t worry about writing a research paper. These essays are especially hard because they require a combination of skills that many students do not come to school having already developed.
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Manage Your Time Wisely
Time management is the hardest thing for most students to develop, but this skill will make research paper writing easier than any other. If you can plan out when to do your work and how to get all of it done on time and on schedule, you will be ahead of the game. This, however, takes planning. Using your phone’s calendar to block off time to work on papers is a great way to start, but it can be easy to ignore or move around material on the phone. Instead, you might find it beneficial to use a paper calendar, where it is harder to move things around or ignore what’s coming up. By setting up a regular schedule for working on assignments, you’ll avoid the last-minute rush that causes so many problems.
Make Friends with Your Library
Google is an amazing resource, but Google alone isn’t going to get you through the research paper. The reason for that is that Google indexes material that is available on the open web, but it does not provide free full-text access to scientific and scholarly journals, or most scholarly books. As a result, if you rely on Google, you are likely starting off with a less effective set of research.
Instead, using your school’s library will give you access to the most important sources for a research paper: scholarly journals. Colleges and universities pay good money for access to these journals through databases such as EBSCO and JSTOR. Take advantage of what your tuition money pays for! These sources will make it much easier to develop a strong research paper because they are already credible, vetted, and well-researched themselves.
Learn the Basics of Documentation
Documenting sources is an essential skill for any student and any essay, but in a research paper it is the kind of make or break aspect that can make the difference between success and failure. In this case, learning the niceties of your instructor’s chosen style of documentation such as APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian will give you a leg up in terms of impressing your instructor with a mastery of the research paper form. It’s also a handy way to make formatting your paper easier because each of these styles has rules for how to set up your paragraphs, where to put the title, how to format your headings, and other aspects of paper formatting. These rules make things easier, so you won’t have to waste time figuring out how to put your paper together.
Master the Art of Outlining
Outlining is the final skill that will help to take you over the top with your essay. It can seem like a waste of time to spend extra time developing the essay outline before you even develop your essay, but in the long run it will save you time. Even a basic outline will help you to determine what to write in each part of the essay, and this means that you will waste less time thinking about what to do next. Instead, you’ll just be fleshing out the outline by adding details to it. As a result, you’ll have a much faster trip through the essay writing process and smoother sailing overall.
Following these essay writing tips might not make writing your paper easy, but it will make it much easier and will take some of the uncertainty and the questioning out of the process.
Therefore, overall you’ll see improvements in your custom research paper writing from start to finish.