Writing the Research Paper Chinfen Chen

Definition of the Research Paper  Seek out information about a subject  Take a stand on it  Back it up with the opinions, ideas, and views of others

Format of the Research Paper  Every research paper conforms to a specific format, an agreed-upon way of writing papers:  Modern Language Association, MLA  American Psychological Association, (APA)  Governing the placement of the title, the width of the margins and the notation.

Benefits from Writing the Research Papers  Learn a lot about the subject.  Learn the conventions of scholarly writing.  Learn the skills of library searching  Learn the skills of information processing, to organize, to discriminate the useless & useful opinions and to summary, to budget your time, to conceive of the project, manage it, and assemble information into a coherent paper.

Report & Research Papers  Report papers: summarize and report your findings on a particular subject, without evaluation or judgment: listing the opinions of global experts or reporting chronologically  Research papers: take a definite stand on a issue, to argue against or to defense

Report & Research Papers  Writing a research paper need to exercise judgment, to evaluate evidence, and to construct a logical argument.  Generally, producing a good paper takes three drafts, -recursive movement.

Steps and Schedule  Select a topic  Exploratory scanning and reading of sources  Gather and assemble data  Draft a thesis statement  Outline the major parts of the paper  Write a rough draft and acknowledge all borrowed ideas  Prepare a bibliography  Final draft