6 Tips to Write a Killer Research Paper

At some point in college or university, you must face the hurdle of writing a research paper. You can either push the thought to the back of your mind or prepare yourself for the many challenges that you might face when writing your research paper.

What Challenges Can You Face When Writing a Research Paper?

When you know you’re prone to catching cold easily during winter, you’ll naturally take preventive measures to avoid becoming bedridden. After all, prevention is always better than cure.

Similarly, when you’re familiar with the challenges of writing a research paper, you can take the required measures to overcome them without a hitch.

Some of these challenges include the following:

• Choosing a good topic for the research paper
• Coming up with a decent thesis statement
• Maintaining coherency in arguments
• Finding reliable resources to support your points
• Conducting literature review
• Managing time to avoid late submissions

The road to writing a research paper is filled with many other obstacles, excluding the ones mentioned above. Over the years, many students have struggled with their papers and have relied on professional book report writing services to help them overcome these hurdles.

But even if you don’t hire such services, you can write a decent research paper as long as you plan ahead and prepare for these challenges beforehand.

6 Tried & Tested Methods to Boost Your Research Paper Quality

You don’t need to be a genius to come up with a research paper that will sweep your professors off their feet. I’ve interviewed hundreds of students who were frozen in fear at the thought of writing a research paper. But they eventually overcame this fear and managed to write a top-notch paper by following the tried and tested methods suggested by top experts.

1. Think twice before choosing a topic

Did you know that the starting position is crucial for swimmers to improve their best time? A little fumble will immediately affect their overall performance. Similarly, choosing a topic for your research paper is equivalent to that starting position. A single mistake in this step can have horrible consequences for your assignment.

If you want to avoid this scenario, take the following tips to heart:

• ALWAYS choose a topic you’re familiar with. It’ll reduce your research time significantly.
• Do NOT pick a topic because you think your professors will like it. If you don’t feel strongly about the subject, writing your paper will be torture.
• Go over published papers on your chosen topic to address research gaps.
• Ensure you have enough time to do justice to our chosen topic.

2. Conduct in-depth research on the topic

It seems quite self-explanatory, but in-depth research is an absolute MUST if you want your research paper to leave a mark. But many students mess up this step and end up relying on paper writing services to complete their research papers.

According to some students, the two major mistakes that affected their research paper quality were –

• Not using a wide range of resources
• Sticking to sources that complimented their argument

You can easily resolve the first issue by expanding your research scope. Don’t stick to academic papers. Browse through your university and local library for books related to the topic, and go through some reliable websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, and academic journals to find more information.

Secondly, don’t rely only on papers that agree with your opinions since the information you can gather would be quite limited. Instead, seek out papers that contradict your ideas. These will open your eyes to newer ideas and interesting debates that you can explore in your paper.

3. Write the draft before tackling your research paper

Deadlines can be a nightmare. But when you let the fear of an impending deadline prevent you from writing a draft for your research paper, you’ll end up wasting more time fixing the errors that are bound to crop up.

Before constructing a house, architects and engineers always come up with a blueprint. Similarly, before writing a research paper, you must compose a draft (ideally, multiple drafts) which would be the skeleton of your assignment.

This draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be rough around the edges as you figure out the points you’d like to include in your paper. In this stage, your primary focus should be to –

• Organise your ideas logically
• Ensure you’ve included enough counterarguments
• Check whether you’ve expressed your ideas properly

You can polish your drafts later once you get to the writing stage.

4. Allocate specific time for each section

Time management remains one of the biggest challenges that students must overcome when writing their research papers. Almost everyone knows the importance of time management, but only a few take their deadlines into serious consideration when writing their research papers.

As a result, most students take so much time researching and writing drafts that they rush through their papers at the last minute, naturally compromising the overall quality of the research paper.

You’ll find hundreds of tips online to manage your time more effectively. But the most effective one out of the lot is to divide your task into segments and allocate time limits for each. For example, you can assign 7 days for research, 2 days for drafting, 2 weeks to write the paper and another 3-4 days to edit and proofread the assignment. According to this schedule, you can complete your paper within a month.

5. Keep track of the resources used while writing

You must cite every source that you include in your research paper to maintain academic integrity. But if you don’t keep track of these resources, there’s a high chance of missing a few when including them in your reference list.

You can ote down the reference details on a piece of paper or use a note app if you’re scared of misplacing the paper.

6. Edit and proofread your research paper

The final nd arguably the most important part of your research paper writing journey is the editing and proofreading phase. During the writing stage, there’s a high chance of you making spelling and grammatical errors. So, when proofreading your paper, you can focus on correcting these mistakes and ensuring you maintain an excellent flow in your assignment.

To sum it up,

Writing a research paper comes with innumerable challenges. But the secret to acing such papers is to prepare for every challenge that you might encounter during this journey. Don’t let the fear get the best of you. As long as you follow the suggestions highlighted in this blog, you can overcome the challenges and compose a high-quality research paper that you’ll be proud of.

Author bio:

Charley Reiley is a renowned academic scholar providing academic assistance at one of the most reputable paper writing services – MyAssignmenthelp.com. He has completed his PhD in Psychology and offers online tutoring sessions every weekend.