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.