19 Research Process
Research Process Overview
Writing a research paper is often the most complex writing task you’ll engage in during your college experience. The process of locating sources, note-taking, drafting, and editing offers you the opportunity to delve into a specific question on a topic. The result can be deeply rewarding; when you finish a well-researched and well-crafted paper, you’ll feel as though you truly own your material and your assessment of the topic as an expert.
In some classes, your professor will assign a topic. In other classes, you may be asked to choose among selected topics. And, sometimes, your professor may leave the topic entirely up to you.
Whichever strategy your professor uses, you’ll need to know how to get started and how to ultimately create a polished piece of writing. For your paper to be successful, you need to think through the steps of the research process and make sure that you give yourself enough time for all the stages of research and writing that will be explained in detail in the pages that follow.
It’s important to remember that a good research and writing process is recursive. This means the steps are not always linear. For example, when you revise, you may realize you need to go back a few steps and add more research to your paper. Or, perhaps, as you edit, you realize you need to go back to the beginning, to the analysis stage, and reconsider your audience, as you think about the language choices you make. These steps are signs of a thoughtful research process.
Writing a research paper is not exceedingly difficult if one remains considerate of the process, plans carefully, and stays on task.
In the planning stages of the research process, you will want to complete the following steps:
- identify and narrow your topic to suit the size of your writing assignment
- identify research questions
- establish a working thesis statement
- identify the subdivisions of your paper
- locate and evaluate materials
- create an outline
- draft a topic proposal
- create an annotated list of works cited (19)
Narrowing Your Topic/Asking the Right Questions
It may seem easy to choose a topic for a research paper, but it can actually be difficult sometimes. In fact, determining a good, solid research question can be one of the hardest parts of writing a strong research paper.
Here are some guidelines to help you:
If you are able to choose your topic, find a subject that interests you. If your topic is assigned, try thinking about an aspect of that topic you find most interesting. You’ll be spending a great deal of time working on this paper. Make sure that it’s about something that you really are interested in learning to understand very well.
Keep in mind that your final topic and research question(s) won’t simply come to you by thinking about it. You need to get out there and start digging—through books, through encyclopedias, and through Internet sites. Pick a general topic that attracts you, and then roll up y