How to Write Your First Research Paper

Composing a long, researched essay is a rite of passage for students. Your teacher will have specific requirements for the assignment, but if you've never before written a research paper, you may be feeling overwhelmed by such a large project. To put yourself at ease, read through these basic steps in writing a research paper and you'll know what to expect.

Step 1: Pick three subjects.

Perhaps your teacher has assigned a specific subject, such as the effect of Dickenson's literature on 19^th century England or the advances in cancer treatments in the last twenty-five years. Consider yourself lucky! Your teacher has saved you the effort of one of the most difficult aspects of writing a research paper: deciding what to write about.

However, if your teacher has given you free reign to write on any subject, you're on your own. Picking a subject can be both an exciting prospect and a daunting task. To begin, pick three topics for which you are either passionate and knowledgeable or at least interested in learning more. If you have three topics, you'll have a little wiggle room when you're doing your research. If you want to write about the mafia, you may be overwhelmed by the amount of information. If you want to write about rare coins from Greece, you may not be able to find enough.

Step 2: Browse for information.

Once you've picked three topics, it's time to start browsing for information. The Internet is the perfect place to start. Yes, the Internet. No doubt, your teacher has warned you about the perils of misinformation on the World Wide Web, and your teacher is absolutely correct. You won't be able to conduct your research totally online, but it's a great place to begin. Start reading about your chosen topics. You may find you weren't quite as interested in the death penalty as you thought. Or you may be reading a summary for Pride and Prejudice and come up with the idea to write about how social manners have changed in the past two hundred years.

Step 3: Narrow your topic.

Okay, once you've gathered all this information, and you've filled your brain with all the possibilities, it's time to narrow it down. Pick the subject that interested you most: for example, the social customs of the 19^th century. Now narrow it down even more: The female social customs of the 19^th century. Now narrow it down even more, make it even more specific: The expected behavior of teenage girls in the 19^th century.

Step 4: Compose a thesis statement and title.

A thesis statement is a direct sentence asserting your thesis, your main idea. This is a common mistake most first-time writers of research papers make. A research paper with such general, ambiguous titles such as Child Abuse or The Death Penalty will receive a groan and a weary eye from your teacher. Base your title on your thesis statement. Going back to our behavior of teenage girls in the 19^th century, a thesis statement might be something like: Teenage girls in the 19^th century suffered many more responsibilities and anxieties than modern teenagers.

Step 5: Collect sources.

Now is the time to check your Internet sources to see that they are legitimate. Now is also the time, if you haven't already, to make friends with the librarian. Librarians can order books, through inter-library loan, from any library and have them sent to your local library. That's why it's important to take care of this step several weeks before your paper is due. This allows plenty of time to receive your sources and look through them.

Step 6: Make notes.

Don't read every page of every book. Skim the table of contents and the index. Read the introduction. You will be able to extract information from books without spending hours upon hours reading. If your teacher requires notecards, then write each piece of information on a separate notecard with the page numbers from which you got the information, and make a photocopy of the book's copyright page (one of the first pages of every book with all of the book's publishing information). Also consider other sources of information. For example, if you're writing about the impact of the Civil Rights movement in your hometown, you might want to interview people who lived through it.

Step 7: Write the first draft.

When it's time to write, put away your notes. Don't try to incorporate your research while you're writing the first draft. You will end up copying the source word for word, and that, my friends, is called plagiarism. By the time you've researched your topic, you should know the information well enough to write about it in your own words. After you have written the desired length your teacher assigns, go back and add in direct quotes, only if you need them. For example, to include statistics, dates, or an extract from a famous speech.

Step 8: Revise and Polish.

You should have the first draft written at least a week before the final essay is due. This gives you time to put the first draft away for a couple days, forget about it, and then come back with a fresh perspective. Cut extraneous information. Add more information to clarify ideas. Make sure you have included transitions and that the essay flows easily from one idea to the next. In short, make sure it's an essay that is enjoyable, and informative, to read.

Step 9: Double-check your citations.

Format your Works Cited page and check your citations, using the method your teacher requires (most likely, the Modern Language Association method, or MLA). This is a tedious, but necessary step. Just remember that you don't have to memorize these formatting techniques. Consult your textbook, or the MLA handbook for proper formatting requirements.

Step 10: Read the finished paper before you turn it in!

Read through your essay at least three times: once to add everything you forgot, once to take out all the unnecessary wordiness, and once more to polish it and make it look like writing it was easy. Then have a friend or a parent read it. They will spot typos or misspelled words that you and the spellchecker didn't catch.

Once it's passed several careful readings, the paper is ready to turn in. Take a deep breath and bask in your accomplishment of having written your first research paper!