May 22, 2015 - Posted to Research papers

The High School Research Paper – No Need to Panic

If you are a student and grades on your high school research papers have been average to below-average, you may be discouraged. Your poor grades may be the result of a number of things – difficulty in choosing an appropriate topic, a tough time with research, inability to organize your research information into good sub-topics and create a strong outline, and, of course, struggling to write the paper using good structure, grammar, and punctuation. Writing a good research paper is a step-by-step process, and somewhere, in an English class, you were taught this process. And, if your want better grades, the first step now is to review those steps and figure out where your issues are, so that you can get the help you need to correct them. They are not going to go away.

Steps for Research Paper Production

1. The Topic: Usually, you will have a choice of topics within some kind of range. How you find a topic is really important, because if you just take any one that a teacher, parent, or fellow student suggests, you are giving up your right to research something that really interests YOU. To find that topic, look through your textbook; get online and do a simple search for topics within the range you have. Do not settle on a topic until you are certain that it is one in which you have an interest. Reading and writing is so much easier, when you like the topic.
2. Start your Research: Be certain to check your teacher’s requirements for resources. Most teachers will not allow Wikipedia, for example, and some even require a certain number of types of resources – maybe one book, 3 journal articles, and 2 Internet resources. Follow the “rules.”
3. Take good notes as your research and be certain to note the author and the page number of information, data, or quotes you intend to use. You have to give credit to these authors!
4. If you take your notes on note cards, it will be easier to organize them into sub-topics. So, if your topic is the causes of the Great Depression, for example, you put all of the notecards that relate to risky bank lending in one pile, and so on. This organizes your sub-topics for outlining and writing.
5. Create your outline from the sub-topics and then begin to write your rough draft. Skip the introduction for now – you can write that at the end, once you have the whole picture of your paper’s content. Remember, you must have a topic sentence for each paragraph and a good transition from one paragraph to the next.
6. Have someone else read your rough draft and make corrections. If you are not a skilled writer, this is really important. And, you may be too “close” to your own writing to catch awkward sentences, run-ons, fragments, and other errors.
7. Write your final draft and make certain that you have accurate cited all of your resources correctly. Your teacher has a required format style – use it!

All of this looks like a great deal of work, and it is if you are going to do it right. You may have much to learn about producing good research papers, and it will take time, especially if your writing skills need some improvement. If you need some interim help with your papers, one option is to get some assistance from an online research paper writing service. A good one has degreed writers in all subjects, and you can order an original paper on any topic. When you receive that paper, moreover, you can study how it is organized and written, and use it as a model for your future writing. You can become a better researcher and writer – it will just take motivation and practice.