How to Write a Research Paper

I   RECENTLY HELPED a college student work her way through her first college-level research paper. She found the process confusing and difficult, and I'm not really surprised.

This series of posts is designed to help two groups—students who are struggling with research papers and teachers who are dissatisfied with their student's progress.

What makes writing a research paper so hard? Two things:

1. The methods used for teaching haven't kept pace with the technology, and
2. The basic approach adopted by most teachers is self-defeating.

So, if you're a student, I'm going to show you how to write a research paper that satisfies a teacher who uses the traditional methods, while at the same time making the process much easier, and the paper itself much better.

If you're a teacher, I'm going to suggest a different way of teaching research papers: one that will be easier to explain, less frustrating both to you and your students, and which will improve both the quality of their papers and their research skills.

There are as many different approaches, even among teachers who use the traditional method, as there are teachers. So when I describe the "traditional" approach, I'm going to use a worst possible scenario: a combination of all of the biggest mistakes that can occur in a class that uses the traditional approach.

Your teacher probably doesn't make all of these mistakes. But they provide a helpful reference point for explaining the difference between a bottom-up and a top-down approach to research writing.

So lets begin at the beginning:

1. After picking a topic, the next step in many classes is to settle on a thesis.
   
   This is the biggest mistake in the process, and the source of most of the problems students have with research, for three reasons:
2. 1. It discourages, rather than encourages, research.
      
      From the student's viewpoint, the result of the research has already been determined. Anything that comes up during the research process which might change the direction of the inquiry, or, worse, contradict the pre-defined thesis, will have to be ignored unless the whole process is started over.
   2. It's exactly backwards.
      
      The time for forming a point of view on research is at the end of the research process, not at the beginning. The idea that one should begin with a thesis teaches students bad research habits and makes the whole process unnecessarily difficult.
   3. It creates writer's block. The student has to come to a conclusion about a topic that he or she has only begun to read about. Obviously, this is not easy, and so the whole project becomes overwhelming from the beginning.

The appropriate approach, which I'll explain later in detail, is to begin with a question:

1. A question, instead of limiting research the way a thesis does, drives research. The actual work of the research process becomes a search for the answer to the question.
2. At the same time, a question provides a more useful focus than a thesis does.
   
   If the student runs into an unexpected twist that could change the direction of his or her research, the question provides guidance: will this new direction answer the question?
   
   It won't stop the student from pursuing relevant information, as a thesis might, since it's far less likely that new information will contradict a question.

   To be continued...