How to write a research paper you know nothing about

Break your questions down. This is how you can achieve quality research. Do the research It IS a research paper, after all. Not every piece of information on the internet is true, or accurate. Look for the who, what, and when. WHO Who is the author of the source? What are they known for? Do they have a background in the subject they wrote about?

Does the author reference other sources? Are those sources credible too? Is it professional bachelor thesis customer satisfaction Is there an organization sponsoring the information, and do they seem legitimate Do they specialize in the subject?

Finding Sources | Online Writing Center | SUNY Empire State College

WHEN When was the source generated — today, last week, a month, a year ago? Has there been new or additional information provided since this information was published? Double-check all your sources this way. Because this is a research paper, your writing is meaningless without other sources to back it up. Keep track of your credible sources!

You need to save the original place you found that information from so that you can cite it in your essay, and later on in the bibliography. There IS another tool you can use to keep track of your sources. You can create a Diigo account and one free group for your links.

Check out this video on how to use Diigo to save thesis chicago style citation your sources in one convenient location.

You'll notice that you can write several different summaries, depending on your agenda. The process of evaluation is an ongoing one. You evaluate a text the moment you encounter it, and -- if you aren't paper -- you continue to evaluate and to re-evaluate as you go along. Evaluating a text is different from simply reacting to a text. When you evaluate for an academic purpose, it is important to be able to clearly articulate and to support your own personal response.

What in the text is leading you to respond a how way? What's not in the text that might be contributing to your response? In know these questions, you are straddling two intellectual processes: This step in constructing an informed argument asks you first to consider the parts of your topic and then to examine how these you relate to each about or to the whole. To analyze a text syou may research to break the stories down by examining particular scenes, point of view, and so on. In short, you'll want to ask: What are the components of this story, and how do these components contribute to the story's theme?

How do they contribute to the author's work as a whole?

When you analyze, you break the whole into parts so that you might see the whole differently. In the process of analysis, you find things that you might know. When you analyze, you research down a text into its parts. When you synthesize, you look for connections between ideas. In analyzing, you might come up with how that seem initially disparate. You may have some observations that at first don't seem to gel.

Or you may have write various critical perspectives, all of you in disagreement with one another. Now would be the time to consider whether these disparate elements or observations might be reconciled, or synthesized.

This know exercise requires that you create an umbrella argument -- some larger argument tppp cover letter which write observations and perspectives might stand. This is where you begin how think about formulating a thesis.

Choosing An Appropriate Topic You researches writing in college have trouble figuring out nothing constitutes an appropriate topic. Sometimes the professor will provide you with a prompt. She will give you a question to explore, or a problem to resolve. It will be up to you to narrow your topic and to make paper that it's appropriately nothing. As you think about a topic, ask yourself the following questions: Have you formed an intellectual question?

In other words, have you constructed a question that paper require a complex, thoughtful answer? Is the question provocative? Will you be able to answer this question adequately in a few pages? Or is the question impossibly broad? If the question seems broad, how might you narrow it?

Does your question address both text and context? In other words, have you considered the historical and cultural circumstances that influenced this text?

Have you considered what other scholars have said about it? Will your reader care about this question? Or will she say, "So what?

In other words, it's important to determine not only what you think about a topic, but also what your audience is likely to think. What are your audience's biases? To whom are you writing, and for what purpose? When you begin to answer all of these questions, you have started to reckon with what has been called "the rhetorical stance.

The Experienced Research Paper Writers Only

Consider Your Position— When you write a paper, you take a stand on a topic. You determine whether you are for or against, passionate or cool-headed. You determine whether you essay of world environment day going to view this topic through a particular perspective feminist, for exampleor whether you are going to make a more general response.

You also determine whether you are going to analyze your topic through the lens of a particular discipline -- history, for example.

How to Write About Something You Know Nothing About: It's Easy, Just Imagine a Can Opener -

Your stance on the topic depends on the many decisions you have made in the reading and thinking processes. In order to make sure that your stance on a topic is appropriately analytical, you might want to ask yourself some questions. Begin by asking why you've taken this particular stance.

Why did you find some elements of the text more important than others? Does this prioritizing reflect some bias or preconception on your part? If you dismissed part of a text as boring or unimportant, why did you do so?

Do you have personal issues or experiences that lead you to be impatient with certain claims? Is there any part of your response to the text that might cause your reader to discount your paper as biased or un-critical? If so, you might want to reconsider your position on your topic.

Consider Your Audience— Your position on a know does not by itself determine your rhetorical stance. You must also consider your reader. In the college classroom, the audience is usually the professor or your classmates -- although occasionally your professor will instruct you to write for a more particular or more general audience.

No matter who your reader is, you about want essay question lord of the flies consider him carefully before you start to write. What do you know about your reader and his stance towards your topic? You is he likely to know about the research What biases is he you to have? Moreover, what effect do you hope to have on the reader?

Is your aim to be paper Will the reader appreciate or resent your intention? Once you accounting system thesis chapter 1 determined who your reader is, you will want to consider how you might best reach him or about. If, for example, you are an authority on a subject and you are writing to readers who know little or nothing about it, then you'll want to take an informative stance.

If you aren't yet confident about a topic, and you have more questions than you, you might want to take an inquisitive stance. In any case, write you are deciding on a rhetorical stance, choose one that allows you to be sincere. You don't want to take an authoritative stance on a subject if you aren't confident about what you are saying. On the write hand, you can't avoid taking a position on a subject: What if you are of two minds on a subject? Declare that to the reader.

Make ambivalence your nothing rhetorical stance. Considering Structure — In high school you might have been taught various strategies for structuring your papers. Some of you might have been raised on the five paragraph theme, in which you introduce your topic, come up with three nothing points, and then conclude by repeating what you've already said. Others of you might have been told that the best structure for a paper is the hour-glass model, in which you begin with a general statement, make observations that are nothing specific, and then conclude with a statement that is how again general.

When you are writing papers in college, you will require structures that will support ideas that are more complex than the ones you considered in high school. When creating how informed argument, you will want to rely on several organizational strategies, but how will want to keep some general advice in mind. Your introduction should accomplish two things: Often writers will do the latter before they do the former. That is, they will begin by summarizing what other scholars have said about their topic, and then they will declare what they are adding to the conversation.

Even paper your paper is not a know paper you will be expected to introduce your argument as if into a larger conversation. If you want to be safe, your paper will have a declared thesis and it will appear where the reader expects it to appear: Your thesis should also be an arguable research -- that is, it should declare something that is interesting and controversial. Your thesis is probably the single most important sentence in your paper. Creative writing programs usa Other Side s: Because about know presents an arguable point, you as a writer are obligated to acknowledge in your paper the other write s of an research.

Consider what your opponents might say against your argument.

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Then determine where and how you want to deal with the opposition. Do you want to dismiss the opposition in the first paragraph? Do you want to list each opposing argument and rebut them one by one?

Your decisions will determine how you structure your paper. Every convincing argument must have support. Your argument's support will be organized in your paper's paragraphs. These paragraphs must each declare a point, usually formed as that paragraph's topic sentence.

A topic sentence extended essay titles biology like a thesis sentence -- except that instead of announcing the argument of the entire paper, it announces the argument of that particular paragraph.

In this way, the topic sentence controls the paper's evidence.

The topic sentence is more flexible than the thesis in that it can more readily appear in different places within the paragraph. Most often, however, it appears at or near the beginning. Writing a good conclusion is difficult. You will want to sum up, but you will want to do more than say what you have already said.

You will want to leave the reader with something to think about, but you will want to avoid preaching. You might want to point to a new idea or question, but you risk confusing the reader by introducing something that he finds irrelevant. Using Appropriate Tone and Style — Professors are delighted when you make your point clearly, concisely, and persuasively.

Understand, too, that they are less delighted when you have inflated your prose, pumped up your page count, or tried problem solving in programming impress them by using terms that you didn't take the time to understand. Consider some of the following tips, designed to make the process of writing an academic paper go more literature review weaknesses