The Final Product

It was a long semester of taking notes and researching my topic but it is finally over and done with. In my first blog post I had a process that I believed would be helpful to the research paper constuction. While writing my research paper I followed my guidelines but also added a few new steps. Steps 1-3 are the same as before. in step four I said:

4. Organize your thoughts

Within that step I should have added:

Anticipate question your readers may have.

• Anticipating what questions your reader might have helps to organize your own thoughts. It helps because although you know what your paper is about, your reader may not. So by anticipating what questions they may have, you can organize your paper to answer their question before they have them.

The last two steps of my research paper I definately followed. I tried to sit down and type out two to three pages at a time and sometimes even that was too much. I found that doing the paper a few paragraphs at a time worked out better. Although by just typing the paper a few paragraphs at a time made me feel like I was procrasinating, I found that I was finished with the paper in no time (even though I was still working on it right up to its due date.

One step I should have added was:

6. read, Read, READ!

• After you think you have finished you paper, read it over for mistakes that might have been made. After you have read it yourself as least twice, ask a friend to read it; not just for spelling and grammar, but also for information gaps and citiations. After you have had a friend read it, correct the mistakes and repeat the process. **to avoid frustration only repeat this process twice**

If I would have had that last step, I feel that I would not have struggled so much at the end with missing information and errors in citation.

In third blog post, I mentioned how sometimes reading sentences that are not making sense in my head out oud helps; that definately helped me throughout my writing process there were many instances in my paper where I got twisted in my words and couldn't understand what I had just written so I said it out loud and I know instantly whether or not I should keep or re-word my sentence.

All in all, writing this research was everything I expected to be. When I got frustrated I referred to my steps and got back on track. So when I got done writing my paper, I felt confident that I did good work.

The Second Proposal

I have found that writing a second proposal to my paper is a little more difficult. The most difficult part for me is getting started; since this second proposal is essentially a part of the paper I am having most trouble organizing my thoughts. I know what I need to put into the proposal however, every time I sit down to work on it, I never know where to start.

What I did before was, sit down and try to free write, but that seems too unorganized for me at this point. So far I have found it most useful to type the introduction, then make an outline of what would come next. My outline consists of questions that my readers would most likely ask after reading the introduction and after every question I have which source or sources I will need to consult to provide the needed information. This helps me because instead of just trying to type the information into the paper as it comes to me, I can put it in an order that is least confusing to the reader and myself. This method also helps me because now I have an idea of what comes next rather than working one paragraph at a time and having to remember facts and information that comes next.

Another method I find useful when I am stuck on how to phrase a sentence, I say it out loud to a friend or myself. For me, if I can hear what I am trying to write I can make better sense of it to make sure that s makes sense to the reader as well.

If you are having trouble with this second proposal, hopefully some of the things I have mentioned will help you like they did me. Good Luck!

The Proposal +

The proposal was not a surprise but definitely not what I was expecting. Who knew that making a proposal would  take so many tries? For those of you who are not in my CWRR class I am not talking about a marriage proposal but a topic proposal for my research project.

The proposal is where we formally propose our topics to our teacher. The requirements were as follows: "The text should focus on the general environmental issue, along with a research question and/or hypothesis on local issues." After reading it you are probably thinking pshh that's easy. That's what I thought until I had to sit down and write.

 I am planning on doing my research paper on how solar panels will lower the amount of energy and money a college campus spends each year. So when I sat down to write my proposal that is what I started with. Then I had to think, am I talking about putting solar panels on all the buildings on campus or just on certain buildings. I was thinking more so for just the dorms so I had to include that. After that, I had to think about how adding solar panels to the dorms are going to help the environment. By using solar panels the dorms will be using solar energy instead of burning coal to supply power to the building which reduces the amount of fossil fuels being burned and released into the environment. I also noted that because switching to solar panels would save the more money the school could charge less for tuition or put the extra money toward other improvements that the school may need.

Gathering all my main points for the proposal was hard enough then I actually had to type it out. It took me three tries to get it to sound like what I wanted it to and I still did not like the end result. However making the bibliography was not as difficult. Even though we had to have quite a few sources, it was easier because we didn't necessarily have to read them before we listed them as a source we may need for our paper. At first I struggled because I was not exactly sure where to start looking. I started out by typing out my topic in the google browser and seeing what articles popped up. There were quite a few but not as many as what was required. During the next class period I asked my professor how to use the school database to look up different articles. So he took us through how to use the schools library database to look up articles and journals that would be helpful to our topic. After learning how to use the database it did not take me long to figure out which sources I thought would be relevant to my research topic.

The Thursday before our proposal was due, our research librarian came in and gave us a lesson on how to use the database as well. Although our professor showed us it was good to have refresher for the weekend and future research that needed to be done.

5 Steps to an "A" on Your Research Paper

In high school, when most of my classmates heard the words "research" and "project" come out of our english teacher's mouth, they would cringe. However, I was quite the opposite; I was excited. I had been waiting all year to write a paper that was not about my thoughts about a political topic or about how I learned a valuble lesson from doing something I was not supposed to do when I was little. The reasearch paper was my chance to inform my fellow class mates about something that I was  interested in without causing an argument because of difference in opinion. Of course in all other papers that I had to write I had to do a little research on the topic, but the research paper was my chance to go into an in depth search of a topic that I desperately wanted to know more about. My research topic was deforestation. I wanted to know why it was such a big deal, and the actual affects it had on the earth. Out of all the papers I had done my senior in compostition, I recieved my highest grade on the research paper which was a 92%.

What helped me to get that good grade on my research paper are theses five steps, that I still use for just about every paper I have to write:

1. Know What Research Is
In order to do a research paper, you have to know what research is. Research is

when you investigate or look for infromation on a certain topic or topics to learn about them.

 

2. Find a Topic

Once you have figured out what exactly research is and how to go about getting your information, you can choose a topic. If your teacher or professor does not assign you a topic, then it is safe to assume that you can pick just about anything you want. Do not just start out looking for one topic, find two or three that you are interested in and pick one from those. In my opinion, it is best to choose from topics that you already have some information on or that you are already itching to know more about. Trying to do a research paper about something you have no idea about can be difficult because if you have no interest in it, I find it is harder to be motivated to look for information.

**Ask your teacher or professor if there are any topics that they recommend not doing because they have seen it about a million times before or they feel it will be to difficult to sift through the mountains of research that is already out there. Some examples my teacher gave me were abortion and global warming.**

 

3. Do Research On Your Topic

You can find information about just about anything nowadays; in books, magazines, published professional journals and of course the internet. It is good to use more than one source to get information because no two sources will have the exact same infromation. If you have trouble finding a good place to start looking for information, a good place to start, if you are still in school, is your school library's website. Most school library websites will have links to different search engines that will help guide you to information about what you are researching.

**If you choose to use the internet as one of your sources, make sure the website has valid and recent information about your topic**

 

4. Organize Your Thoughts

After you have done all your research organize all of your thoughts out on a piece of paper or on the computer. Get all your major points down and put them in the order that they are going to be in in your paper. This can help you so that when you are writing or typing your paper you don't start mixing up your information.

**Make sure you site your sources on a works cited or reference page to avoid plagiarising**

 

5. Write or Type Your Paper

Now that you have found your topic, done your research and organized your thoughts, it is time to write or type your paper. If you know that your paper is going to be lengthy, do not try to do it all at once. Do a couple pages or paragraphs at a time and come back to it later. Otherwse you will start to dread it and start to just put anything in it to get it done.

**When using the computer to type your paper or organize your thoughts, make sure you hit save often so if your computer crashes you will have at least some of your work already saved.**

 

Absolutely DO NOT wait until the last minute to work on this paper. It may seem like it is just like any other paper but it isn't. It takes a lot more time and effort to do this paper. Unless you are a virtuoso on every subject in the universe you need to start working on this paper as soon as it is assigned unless told otherwise by your teacher or professor.