How to Write a Better Research Paper: Part 4

0 Comments10/05/11

The editors at Milestone Documents love reading and writing about history. Our goal is to channel our limitless historical zeal to students who may not share such enthusiasm. In this series on how to approach a research paper assignment, we encourage you to embrace history, explore the past with an eye toward the future, and listen to the sources. (They have a lot to say.)

In Part 1 of “How to Write a Better Research Paper,” we discussed the importance of choosing a compelling topic that begs for further investigation. In Part 2, we reviewed the search for sources. Part 3 focused on a sample topic and delved into the details. Our final installment provides you with tips on how to compile a research paper, including discussion of introductions, organization, and conclusions, as well as a brief note about bibliographies.

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty. You’ve picked a topic and gathered sources. You’ve got a pile of stuff you have to turn into a research paper. How do you compile everything into a paper that’ll blow the reader away? Electronic help organizing your materials is available at Zotero. Zotero can automatically index all your materials—from PDFs to images to audio and video files and more.

Research papers come in all makes and models. The purpose of some is to inform. Of others, it’s to persuade—or analyze, compare, contrast, refute, define, reflect, explore causes or effects. . . . The list could go on and on. It’s important to know your purpose because in large part your purpose is going to drive the organization of your paper.

Here are some tips.

1. Make a strong first impression. A good research paper has a solid introduction, like a firm handshake. Here, you announce not only your topic but also your thesis. A topic might be “Freedom Riders.” But that’s not a thesis. What overall point about the Freedom Riders are you making in your paper? Here’s one way to think about it: A topic is a word or phrase. A thesis is a sentence. It has a verb. It makes a statement. It draws a connection between A and B. For online help, you can check out Thesis Generator or Thesis Statement Generator.

A good introduction gives the reader a reason to care about what you have to say. Is there an unresolved controversy? Is your issue timely? Are you correcting a widely held belief that’s mistaken? Make the reader care—and assume that you’re addressing a reasonably educated, curious person who’s predisposed to take an interest in your topic.

2. Color in the background. The next part of your paper will fill the reader in on necessary background information. In the case of a paper on the Freedom Riders, give your readers the details of who, what, when, where, and why. Assume your reader has only a general, perhaps vague idea of the story behind the Freedom Riders. Here you provide the facts, the history.

3. Chunk it. (No, not “chuck it,” which you might sometimes feel like doing.) This is where organization gets tricky, for you have to think of the exposition of your thesis not in terms of a big gooey blob of writing but instead as a sequence of constituent parts that make sense. If you’re writing a persuasive argument, you might have three or four reasons for taking a particular position. You address each reason in turn, usually building toward your best argument. If you’re analyzing a historical document, you let the structure of the document guide the structure of your paper.

Note-taking skills come into play. Back when some of us here at Milestones were living in caves, we took research notes on—gasp!—paper note cards. With a pen. Really. Then we could organize our notes into sensible sections by shuffling the cards. Most students these days take notes on the computer. You can block text and then copy it onto an electronic “note card” and KNOW that you’ve captured the quote accurately. Use your Notepad feature to do this. Set the margins to the size of a note card (maybe four by six inches). You can use “Header” or “Footer” to identify a group of cards from the same source. Then print them out and shuffle them as necessary. For help, consult How to Make MLA Research Paper Note Cards on the Computer. If you want to get fancy about electronic note taking, consult the website ndxCards.

4. Wrap it up. The standard advice to writers is to use the conclusion to “tell ’em what you told them.” Sure, your conclusion should sum up your thesis in different words, but conclusions shouldn’t stop there. Again, depending on your research paper’s purpose, you might conclude with a call to action . . . or a snappy quotation . . . or a new vein of inquiry . . . or a solution to a problem . . . or a prediction . . . or a recommendation. The possibilities are endless. The conclusion may turn out to be the most creative part of your research paper.

5. List your sources. A research paper needs a bibliography, a list of all the sources you’ve used in writing the paper. Writing an alphabetized bibliography is something of a mechanical process, so there’s no excuse for getting it wrong—though even professional scholars botch it. Yes, it’s a little boring, but it’ll be good practice for writing the twenty-page bibliography for your history PhD dissertation! Tons of print and online sources, including Zotero, can help with bibs. You might also check out Joseph Trimmer’s book A Guide to MLA Documentation.

There you have it: everything (well, almost everything) you need to know about research papers but were afraid to ask. Now go make your history teachers look brilliant.

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