Advice for Students: How to Write Research Papers that Rock!

July 18 by | 119 comments | Communication, Featured | Tags: , , , , , ,
Research papers that rock!

No assignment save the comprehensive final exam seems to engender such fear in students as the research paper, especially the open topic research paper. Faced with the prospect of writing 5, 8, 12, or more pages on a topic of their choosing, a lot of students panic, unsure what to write about and how to research it. Far too often, students endanger their grades and even their academic futures by turning to online essay sites or other sources and copying what they assume is decent work (it rarely is, of course). I’ve even had students hand in my work as their own!

One of the reasons students balk at research paper is that writing them is a skill that most college professors assume their students have, while few high school teachers teach it — leaving students to work out for themseves how exactly to proceed. Add to that the fact that students often take a range of courses they have little or no interest in to satisfy their general requirements, and it’s no wonder that students often feel hung out to dry when it comes to writing research papers.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Looked at properly, research papers can be a great way to deepen your understanding of your chosen field, and may be the first step towards developing a specialization that will serve you well as you move into your career or advanced education.

There are a lot of things you can do to help make research papers work for you — and get a decent grade in the process:

  • Write about something you’re passionate about. Figure out the link between the class you’re taking and your educational and career goals. If you hope to earn an MBA and find yourself stuck in a required Women’s Studies class, write about workplace harassment, or the impact of equal opportunity laws. If you are pre-med and have to take anthropology or sociology, write about cultural differences in notions of healing, or about access to health care for members of different classes. If you”re an accounting major… change your major. No, just kidding — if your major is accounting and you have to take literature, write about Franz Kafka (an insurance company clerk by day) or Wallace Stevens (also in insurance — there’s a lesson in here somewhere…).
  • Write a strong thesis. Your thesis is your statement of intent: what do you intend to demonstrate or prove in your paper. Here’s some types of theses that will grab your (and your professor’s) attention:
    1. Challenge a misconception: Use your paper to challenge the received wisdom, the stuff “everybody knows”. E.g. “Lots of people think [A] but really [not-A]“
    2. Find an unlikely connection: Use an idea from science to illuminate a concept in literature, or vice versa. For example: “Neils Bohr’s theory of the structure of the atom provides one way of looking at the relationship between Hamlet and the play’s secondary characters.” The idea here is to find a surprising new way of looking at or thinking about a concept.
    3. Rehabilitate a villain. Defend a historical personage or literary character widely assumed to have been “a bad guy”. The biologist Steven Jay Gould was a master of this, writing about people generally portrayed as the enemies of scientific progress — Lamarck, Bishop Usher, Pope Urban VIII — as exemplars of the cutting-edge science of their day. Make your reader take an unfairly (or even fairly) maligned character or person seriously. (Note: I’d avoid using this approach for Hitler; no matter how well you write, it’s unlikely anyone will appreeciate your efforts to make Hitler seem like a good chap.)
    4. Reframe a classic work in light of today’s technology, social structure, or culture. What kind of woman would Cinderella or Jane Austen’s Emma be in today’s corporate world? What could Newton or Julius Caesar have done with a MacBook Pro?
    5. Reframe today’s world in light of the technological, social, or cultural context of a classic. What would Julius Caesar think of Jack Welch or Bill Gates? What would Johannes Kepler make of string theory? What would Jane Austen think of today’s career woman?
  • Use yourself as a source. Use your own life experiences to illustrate the points you’re making. If you are writing about witchcraft and your grandmother was a Oaxacan healer, talk about that; if you are taking accounting 101 and your father ran a successful dry cleaning business, talk about that; if you are taking Poli Sci and you successfully ran for class president, talk about that. Use your own experiences to make your writing immediate and lively — and to keep yourself engaged in the act of writing. (Who doesn’t like to talk about themselves?)
  • Consult the experts. The Internet makes it possible to directly reach people we’d have never thought possible even a decade ago. Google the leading voice in the field you’re writing about: a professor of chemistry at MIT, a leadership guru, a corporate anthropologist at Intel, and so on — chances are you’ll come across an email address, or at least a mailing address. Write to them, explain your project, and ask a few questions. The worst that can happen is they’ll ignore your request (so write a few people for backup). An easy trade-off, though, for being able to back up your argument with a nobel laureate’s support.
  • Choose your audience. Never, ever, write only for your professor. Write as if you were explaining your topic to a friend or family member, or to the President of the United States. Write as if your work was going to be a feature article in Time magazine, or as if you were submitting it to the leading academic journal in your field. Always choose an audience to write for, which will give you both a standard to evaluate your writing against (“would mom get this?”) and the incentive to write clearly and at the appropriate level. Writing as if your professor was the only one likely to read your paper (even if s/he is) is the shortest path to stuffy, boring writing that will engage neither your professor or, most likely, you.

Writing a research paper is work, there’s no getting around that. But it doesn’t have to be a chore — it can be, with a little thought, work you enjoy pouring yourself into. The trick is to give yourself something to write about that reflects your interests and truly fascinates you, something that you would want to know more about even if you hadn’t been assigned a paper.

The ideas above are a start — what tips do you have to share to help make writing less of a task to get through and more of an experience to enjoy?

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also a freelance writer and university instructor in Las Vegas, NV, where he lives with his partner and three children. His personal site can be found at dustinwax.com.

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  • Kathe

    As a college professor, I think it is important to add a few more comments. They sound obvious, but I often see students overlook them:

    1. Follow the directions. If they say to use academic research, then using yourself as a source is a lousy strategy and will cost the student points.

    2. The internet has lots of claims — learn how to evaluate websites so that only credible (i.e., “academic”) sources are used.

    And I take offense at the “email the expert” advice. On a website about how to be productive yet professional, I think it is horrible to tell students not to go out and do some research themselves rather than emailing experts. It is insulting to get emails (as I do about three times a week) that say “Hi, I am a student in high school or college and have been assigned X topic. You are an expert about X, so please tell me everything that I should know to write the paper.” That is lazy and unprofessional (yes, even students should act professionally). Don’t do it!

  • Jeremy

    I’m a college student, and while I generally appreciate most of the advice on the site, this post is shoddy.

    Using oneself as a source is at worst petty and non-sequitor, and at best completely insubstantial. If you’re researching anything of significance, it’s unlikely that a college student’s personal experiences would lend any great insight.

    As the poster above said, emailing experts for help is the opposite of research.

    My biggest trick: find a recent book posted on the subject, look in the footnotes/endnotes for all relevant material, and go find those sources. Repeat, and your argument is basically written already. This does require you to spend a few hours in a large library, however.

  • http://www.dwax.org Dustin Wax

    Thank you both for your comments. With all due respect, I disagree about consulting the experts, though I do see the point. I think you’re both making a false distinction between reading what an expert has to say in an email and reading what the same expert has to say in a book or journal article. I should maybe have expanded on that point, though, and maybe I will expand it in another post down the line.

    If I got an email asking for “everything I should know to write the paper”, I would fast-track it to the trash bin. As noted, that isn’t research. However, if I got an email asking about my latest research project, that would *certainly* qualify as research; likewise, if I got one asking for clarification of a point I’d made in a published work, that too would be pretty good research. It is, after all, what we actual researchers do — we consult experts in our or their fields.

    As to using yourself as a source, perhaps it matters that I’m an anthropologist and so value the self as a research tool more than, say, a chemist. That said, I know from teaching that the idea that students have no personal experience that might lend insight into their topics is dead wrong. For one thing, not all students are 18 — I’ve taught folks up to their ’80s. But even among those in their early ’20s, there are students who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, students who have experienced first-hand racial, religious, ethnic, or sexual discrimination, students who have worked in third-world sweatshops and plantations, and so on. Maybe their life experience shouldn’t be the *core* of their research, but it can certainly provide illustration and depth.

    This post steers away from advice on writing and research mechanics, but Kathe’s advice about directions and evaluating sources is dead-on, though what she says about the Internet applies to sources in general. The mining of bibliographies is, too, great advice, though doesn’t really lead to arguments that write themselves. I’ve got another in the works that will cover the mechanics of writing a bit more in-depth, and should probably do one on the mechanics of research.

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  • http://www.keithmurphy.info Sophist

    As a college professor, there are three MAJOR issues you have omitted here and one minor pet peeve of mine.

    Major issues:
    1. A clear solid argument which answers the research question is critical to doing well on the paper. This is true for both qualitative and quantitative papers. If your work is not clearly organized and I have to struggle to follow your argument, the odds are slim that I will do so; especially if there is a stack of 75 other papers waiting to be graded by tomorrow.
    2. Do real research and cite your freakin’ sources. A quick Google search is not research. That big building with the books is on your campus for a reason (Other than to give the freshmen a place to procreate). Use it. Then accurately cite your sources. Some of us still check citations to see if they really exist and you’ve cited them accurately.
    Just using the first 5 hits you get on Google tells me you don’t give a sh*t about the assignment or the class.
    3. Don’t plagiarize. I may look dumb; but if you are dumb enough to try this, I am smarter than you and will catch you.
    Pet Peeve: When you write a paper, or write an answer to an essay question, try to at least sound like you give half a crap. This subject-matter is our life. It is why many of us get out of bed in the morning. We’re sorry that you are only interested in Paris Hilton or Barry Bonds. If you want me to reward you come grade time try feigning interest in the one subject that I have devoted my life to. Remember, that’s what you’d do if you were trying to get me interested in you as a romantic partner…since all you want is a grade, I hope, at least feign some interest when you write about the subject matter which consumes our soul.

  • http://www.bloggrrl.com Bloggrrl

    Most professors do not accept papers written at a second grade level, therefore I do not recommend writing one with the president in mind. Sorry…I just couldn’t resist! Excellent points. I particularly like your thesis ideas, which can be applied to many different kinds of writing.

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  • tom

    “Use yourself as a source.”

    College students, disregard!

  • Librarian

    1. Once you’ve picked a topic that interests you, learn how to focus that topic. One student told me her research topic was “everything about Martin Luther King Jr.” Uh, no it’s not. The library has hundreds of books on MLK. Will you read each and every one of them in the 3 weeks before the paper is due? And include everything in a 10 page paper?

    2. The library provides free access to many credible sources, like books from academic presses and articles from scholarly journals that have gone through a rigorous fact checking and editing process to ensure the information presented is accurate. Can you say that about the majority of web pages you find through Google? Students that ignore these resources are depriving themselves of an incredible wealth of knowledge that they have already paid for!

    3. This is where the “experts” will publish the research they have done–so you won’t have to bother them with emails. It’s just a matter of reading.

    4. Many of these sources will be available online–but not all. Don’t skip over great information just because you have to walk across campus and check out a book or photocopy an article.

    5. Your instructors will appreciate that you have used these more credible sources when they see them listed in your bibliography–as opposed to some random web page.

  • Ollie

    This advice about choosing a thesis is wonderful! So is the advice about having an audience in mind.

    One suggestion: If you have a clear idea about your career path, you might be wise to choose your thesis and write your paper so that your future co-workers could get something out of reading it.

    Another suggestion: Plan on putting a footnote like this right at the beginning of your paper. “I am grateful to *librarian’s name* of the *Library’s name” for his help locating certain interesting source materials.”

    If you actually work with a librarian sufficiently to justify a footnote like that in your paper, you’ll reap many benefits:
    (1) you’ll have to start doing your research in plenty of time to do a good job.
    (2) you’ll learn a lot about your topic.
    (3) you’ll probably find some obscure and really interesting material to write about.
    (4) you’ll delight your local librarian by asking interesting questions.
    (5) you’ll get a sense of scholarly work as a group effort.

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  • Chris

    Never use yourself as a source. Thats the point of a research paper. Opinions don’t belong in a research paper. Its all about analyzing and interpreting information one or others have acquired with experiments or logical relations.

  • http://fredericerk.com Frederic W. Erk

    It is amusing to witness the wealth of literature focusing on creative writing and research. Research is based on substance and substance is the fruit of labour. There is no magic formula. You should practice research and study as a way to personal perfection and excellence. The more you will advance on this difficult path, the more you will have the feeling of stagnation and failure. There is no denying that creativity and research are difficult and even painful. Is there a better method than another? Is the question even relevant? Exercise your mind and refuse false challenges and rewards like examinations. Passing examinations is often mistaken as a measure of success, but it is not. To the true student the examination is a joy, because it is a game of the intelligence. Feel alive. Enjoy what you do. And above all never forget that one day as a professional or a teacher, even as a simple citizen, you will face much more difficult events, and that true knowledge will help you in those moments. That is the life of an educated and intelligent man. Culture is at the heart of mankind.

  • http://www.horizonplastics.ca 10668844

    All your points are valid, but there is one problem still – if you can’t write, how do you do that? I have tried to teach a number of individuals how it is that I write, how I come up with the ideas, and that is difficult. Even if I show someone the structural way, the process, if they can’t ignite that spark in them, it’s more or less pointless.

    So, how do we find a way to teach that spark?

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  • http://pensador.org Pensador

    I really enjoy reading, but I can’t write as well.

  • Rhoul

    @Sophist:

    You’re so bitter that your students might not be as passionate about a required course that you are, having “dedicated your life to this one subject”. How about grading based on the student’s ability to construct and present a good argument, instead how much they entertain you? You sound exactly like the kind of quack I’d report to the administration in an effort to get you fired.

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  • MadMonkYHZ

    There is a time and place for using yourself as a source. It depends on what the requirements of the paper are. It depends on the research methods. It depends on the style of the paper. But you should take a research methods course as well as a research ethics course to find out when and where instead of reading off-hand blog posts.

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  • COBOL

    Do not use yourself as a source. Seriously.

    If this article were on a scale of to I’d give it a rating

  • COBOL

    my bad, lifehack doesn’t like angle brackets.

    If this article were on a scale of (single spark) to (roaring volcano), I’d give it a rating of (Bunsen burner)

  • pro

    I strongly recommend to use a lot of sources; interlinked and based on their strength.
    1- journal articles, research papers
    2- publications, conferences,
    3- books, universities
    4- experts, researchers, people that might know
    5- web etc….
    Remember, be referencing you use the knowledge and effort of someone else and you built upon it..
    … Keep track of your route and patient,,, That’s it!

  • OU prof

    Another college professor here.

    I will say that using “yourself as a source” is an exceptionally bad idea, and a red flag for highlighting bad science! That’s not research, that a personal narrative. It is extremely important that research papers do not come off as simply story telling. Research papers should be grounded in research!

  • http://www.lifehack.org/ Craig Childs

    This is all good advice for writing in general too. Consulting an expert can be as simple as citing another article, especially if we’re talking about writing about blogging [or blogging about writing].

  • http://www.dwax.org Dustin Wax

    Thanks Craig — I did try to keep this broad enough that people not writing research papers per se would still find some value in it.

    As to the rest, I can’t believe that “ue yourself as a source” is the sticking point for so many. I the best you can think of to ask yourself is “How do I feel about this? What’s my opinion?” then yeah, you need to write yourself off as a decent source (and a decent researcher); however if, like one of my students, you ran for state assembly, and if you are writing about the political process, I think you have a few things to say that might well not be in the library. If, like one of my students, you grew up on a Ugandan cotton plantation, I think you have a few things to say about third-world work relations that aren’t in the development literature. Using yourself as source means forcing yourself to reconcile these nebulous experiences with the perspectives of your discipline.

  • Luke Dicken

    This post has so little to do with writing a “Research Paper” that its ridiculous. This is all great advice for someone in high school, its maybe even relevant for your first year or so of university. But lets face it, you’re really talking about term papers, not research papers. There’s a world of difference.

    The most important thing in research is citing relevant, respected sources. If you aren’t an accredited expert in the field, your opinion doesn’t count for jack (with the possible exception of analysis of existing work e.g. Paper X overlooks aspect Y of method Z which skews the results stated) so by and large keep it to yourself. If you are an accredited expert in the field, then have something to support your opinions or save it for your book.

  • smur

    About the much discussed advise “Use yourself as a source”. At first I too found this advise to be ridiculous, but after reading the description, it was clear that the advise is to relating and narrating your own experience. It is not talking about “citing yourself”. Excessively citing oneself, or citing no one else, is bad for a research paper.

    My $0.02.

  • JG

    @Sophist

    That’s just terrible advice for students that may come across this page. Feigning interest in anything is the worst thing you can do. Feigned interest is more than obvious in writings and is far more offensive than being honest and doing your best to answer the question. You are clearly extremely bitter and I pity your students. I’m only thankful that in my years of undergrad and graduate work that I never ran into a professor like you.

  • http://www.oneyeargoal.com OneYearGoal.com – Make Money Online

    Wow. Great article. I wish I’d read it back when I was in undergrad.

    Still, there’s something better than writing research papers.

    One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. More fun than research papers.
    http://www.oneyeargoal.com

  • bloodmist

    wow… thats a lot of closed minded professors(don’t get offended but academic knowledge is not bound to only one area like science or history). I am not very good at writing so I apologize for mistakes..
    What many of college professors in here seem to miss is that research papers written for different subjects are going to have very different general guidelines. Using common sense you should see that scientific papers have to be in a scientific format, meaning that there is no room for personal opinion unless you have repeated the experiments. As for subjects like philosophy or sociology, of course you most likely can tie it to yourself because most of us have dealt with the issues that can be tied to the general subject of the paper by 20 years of age.
    so use your common sense and try not to get offended by what other people say, they are not necessarily wrong. as for points made by the article.. some cool information although it is mostly for the liberal arts/social sciences fields.
    thank you.

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  • Patrick

    The citing yourself as a resource is definitely a sticking point, as you say. If, on the other hand, I had written X number of research articles that had been published in science journals, that would be a different story.

    Saying “I think it’s like this to be an assemblyman,” simply from experience (not research) is just personal narrative.

  • http://www.dwax.org Dustin Wax

    “Saying ‘I think it’s like this to be an assemblyman,’ simply from experience (not research) is just personal narrative.”

    Maybe, but narrative is important. It gives the paper a “hook” and can tie the research or others together in interesting ways. “In Fall of 2004, I ran for state assembly and had these experiences…. According to author x, the influence of out-of-state interests in local elections has grown over the last two decades. In my case, I was against an opponent who was backed by a national union, a situation which author y comments on in source y1: [quote]…” And so on. This, of course, depends on students making good distinctions between the particular and the general — it would be great, as mentioned above, if students all took research methods courses, but since that’s not likely, it’s a skill professor’s have to inculcate in their students, not something we can assume.

    I haven’t discussed how to do research or the mechanics of paper-writing here; I’ve discussed how to add life to a research paper project (or term paper, or really any writing project) so that the chance of writing a great paper is higher than the odds when you just plod through something you expect the professor wants to see. Perhaps it was wrong to use the term “research paper”, since this really applies to any kind of paper; also, as someone noted, this is really more slanted to the social sciences and humanities, though I’m not sure much actual paper-writing goes on in the undergrad sciences (I certainly didn’t write any as a sciences major; all my writing was in my lit minor and, after I changed to anthropology, in my upper division anthro classes).

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  • JD

    Apart from the first and last pieces of advice, these are all almost uniformly bad. Like others here, I write as a college-level teacher of writing, in my case in the humanities and social sciences.

    -Writing email to random authorities you find on the web: a waste of your time and theirs (go read their articles and books, and cite those).

    -Use yourself as a source: always a good way to turn a paper that’s supposed to make an argument into a meandering anecdote about your dead grandmother. Stay within the world of evidence that everyone can access — anecdotes never prove anything, and are very hard to incorporate into a logical argument.

    -Write a strong thesis: good idea, but the specifics here are terrible. “Lots of people think X” is a silly way to begin (if you want to argue with a widely believed but wrong argument, just start in on *why* people would believe X, even if they are wrong). Applying random pop-science to literature: a disaster every time, unless it happens that the author knew quantum mechanics. Rehabilitate a character — will almost always be done poorly, because students tend to employ vague generalities here, and it’s very hard not to. Furthermore, in literature or history, it removes all the nuance and kills interesting arguments to talk about whether some person was overall a bad or a good guy. Reframe X in today’s world: ugh. Maybe in a science fiction class (which I’ve taught too), but otherwise, you’re not doing research or making an argument, just making up stuff. Again, fine for creative writing, but not much else.

    I’m not talking from personal standards here, by the way. Everyone I know who teaches college freshmen how to write demands these high standards; you can ask students to do less, just putting pen to paper, but they will rise to something better if you try. I’m sorry to think of all of our future students who may come here and take these lessons to heart.

  • http://www.accessmylibrary.com EH

    And, while we’re discussing sources, there are thousands of respected, peer-reviewed academic journals freely available in full-text at AccessMyLibrary.com. All you need is a library card.

  • http://www.dwax.org Dustin Wax

    Unfortunately, I get the students that have already been taught “high standards” by composition professors and they can’t really, you know, write.

    But I do hope nobody takes “Lots of people believe x…” as their opening line; that was an explanation, not an example!

    What I see in a lot of these comments are a set of guidelines to write the same dreary papers that students don’t write well already. If you can’t write a paper to begin with, by all means, learn how. Certainly learn how to use the library and how to evaluate your sources. But there’s something beyond all that — finding topics you want to write about and, because of that, will write about well and will learn from writing. If you’re shallow and dreary, *please* don’t use yourself as a source; but if you have something valuable to add to your paper, by all means break the rule you’ve seen spelled out in 20 comments above.

  • Watchful eye

    It’s ironic that there are adds on this page to buy premade papers on any topic. It’s not worth it people. Just write the paper yourself, and if it’s bad at least you will have learned something from it, hopefully what made it bad. Plenty of time and plenty of sleep helps with papers too.

  • http://www.accessmylibrary.com EH

    I’m not sure why, but the link to AccessMyLibrary didn’t come through in my comment:

    http://www.accessmylibrary.com

    (Ed.: Not link spamming – just think it’s a good site and relevant to this topic)

  • http://www.adampieniazek.com/ Adam Pieniazek

    As someone who has attended four well-respected colleges (U of Southern California, UNC-Chapel Hill, Northeastern U, Umass-Amherst) and a high school that loves research papers (Boston Latin School), I have a lot of experience writing research papers for a variety of schools. Though understanding the unique culture of your school helps you find your audience and develop an appropriate tone, there are several principles that hold constant no matter where you are.

    Citing yourself is usually a bad idea. The only valid exceptions are when you’ve published papers on the topic or your experience on the topic is very overwhelming and very unique. Are you an expert on the topic? Though you may have experienced the topic, do you understand its history and intricacies? Are you aware of the big picture of the topic, or only your personal perspective? Is your perspective and experience verifiable? For instance, a research paper about digital social networks should not include your experience poking people on facebook but if were or are a developer for a social network, then you may BRIEFLY use your personal experience to back up a cited source, or provide an alternative perspective on a cited source. Using purely your personal experience is weak evidence.

    Know the distinction between an essay and a research paper. An essay is art, a research paper is science. One relies on personal thoughts while the latter relies on proof.

    If your paper is littered with “I”, you’re most likely on the wrong track. During one of your edits, search for “I” (e.g. I think this, I saw that, I found this quote) and everywhere it is logical, get rid of I by rewording the sentence.

    Cite multiple, authoritative sources (pro made a good list above).

    Think about what you’re writing first, and I mean seriously think about it. Sketch out a few outlines, jot down notes, discuss it with friends, and study the material provided. Then, seriously research the topic, use your outlines and notes as a starting point, it’s called a research paper for a reason. I usually have too many sources and find my rough drafts are filled with quotes and citations, during editing I carefully remove sources that don’t add substance or provide evidence.

    Don’t focus completely on one side of the argument; somewhere in your paper, discuss the opposing viewpoint and make a few statements why you or your sources disagree. Realizing that there is a duality to your argument shows you did research before writing your paper, rather than writing it and then attempting to justify your claims. Make sure you reference to the counter-argument is brief, otherwise you risk diluting your claim.

    If you’re experiencing writer’s block, use quotes to start off your argument and build on or challenge the quotes. Then, you can go back in your later revisions and fine-tune the placement of the quotes. Edit, revise, review and have peers edit your paper. A rough draft is easily spotted, be prepared to go over your paper multiple times before turning it in. Use a thesaurus to give your paper diversity.

    Flow is crucial. Does your paper build on your argument in each paragraph? If it doesn’t (except for the counter-argument section), remove, reword or reorder the paragraph. Your conclusion should be apparent before your final sentence. Don’t worry about your exact thesis too much, a few notes on what you’re trying to prove will do at the beginning while you research and write your paper; the thesis will become easier to form once you become a semi-expert (through research) on the topic.

    A lot of this advice is obvious (or perhaps BLS taught me so well it just seems obvious), but just because something is obvious does not mean it is not important. A large part of a successful research paper is the effort you put into it. By starting early, researching heavily, and editing multiple times, you will have plenty of time to brainstorm and integrate new ideas into your paper. Though I’ve written my fair share of good research papers at the last minute, my best results usually correlate to my best efforts.

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  • Alexander

    As a graduate with one of those “useless” Liberal Arts degrees (double major in History and Philosophy), I can attest to what some of the Professors have said.

    Using yourself as a source is not valid in a reasearch paper unless you’re published or the leader of a nation. For students in undergrad work, that’s mostly all of you (except for that weird guy who already has his Lit-trans article published in a journal…what the heck). No subject that I ever took, from Personal Identity Theory to Economics to Bowling (yay 1 credit courses!), had any room whatsoever for personal insights or reflections.

    Sure, I’m not the most interesting chap, but I can bet if I put something to the effect of “As a police officer, I can attest to the difficulties of administering justice fairly and evenly in society – like contends” in a Criminal Justice research paper, the Professor reading it would groan and write “SO WHAT” in big red letters.

    So what. That’s how I look at every paper, and everything I write. So what, you say? Well, asking that question of your thesis, your arguments, your supporting research is crucial to scoring an “A” on your papers. Trust me, it works every time. It’s a way of validating what you’re saying, checking your arguments with a critical eye. That’s the best advice *I* can give.

    Your personal experience is the biggest “So what?” any reader will come across. Unless you’re Ghandi, or maybe Jesus Himself, have “Dr.” in front of your name, or are published in respectable literature – you are a nobody, and your experience means nothing to the reader.

    Soulless you say? Yes. But when I’m reading research, I don’t want anecdotes about your children, your car, a day at the office, your career – I want facts, arguments, meat! So, I just assume that that’s what Professors want as well. And dagnabit, that’s what they indeed want.

    To be honest, your Professor or Teacher’s Assistant have to go through dozens – if not hundreds – of papers. If they’re anything longer than 10 pages in length (most papers), all they are doing is looking for a few things:

    1) Do they have a cohesive argument?
    1a) …and does it satisfy the assignment?

    2) Do they have adequate supporting evidence?

    3) Does the conclusion follow from 1 and 2?

    4) How is the grammar/spelling?

    5) Did they put any of those stupid, stupid personal anecdotes in this- sonovab*tch they did! RARRRGH. FAIL.

    Long story short:

    Save personal anecdotes and life experience for your first published book. Cite solid, respectable resources for your undergrad/grad papers.

    I commend the author for taking a minority position on paper writing, but following that one crucial point “use yourself as a source” will invariably doom 98% of your papers.

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  • RandomPerson

    I like all the people uniformly bashing “use yourself as a source” without the slightest understanding of what the author meant by this. Many, if not most, research papers across *various* fields do this. However, as the author has pointed out several times (to no avail, and likely, his chagrin), he is not talking about “citing” oneself as the source of fact or an argument. Instead, he’s pointing out the use in illustrating a point by first explaining an experience, then using factual sources to compare/contrast against said experience. Which can easily include *invalidating* your own described experience with actual data (a useful method). This is a very common practice. Perhaps all the self-professed research-paper-writer-extraordinaires should actually try *reading* some research papers?

    That said, I don’t think these guidelines are terribly effective for all but the very inexperienced. Even then, many papers likely suffer from basic composure issues. Actually reading research papers is a good way to learn to write them.

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  • Phaedre

    Mr. Wax, your advice to email experts is excellent *if* the student can write a short, polite, grammatically-correct email.

    One of my students asked three separate experts questions and all three answered her. She did not say “Help me write my paper.” Using only two short sentences, she explained who she was and why she was writing to him (instead of someone else). Then she asked specific questions that could be answered in a few sentences, questions that she was unable to find the answers to in library books or online.

    All three experts answered her quickly and completely. This student now knows how to contact experts and respectfully ask for information. And she knows that the expert is doing a favor by answering her, so her email must be short and sweet if she wants it to be answered.

  • Hungry

    I just find it extremely ironic that so many commenters above start off describing thier own personal credentials – then continue on to bash the idea of injecting personal experience, which they just did.

    perfect example, from Adam:

    “As someone who has attended four well-respected colleges (U of Southern California, UNC-Chapel Hill, Northeastern U, Umass-Amherst) and a high school that loves research papers (Boston Latin School), I have a lot of experience writing research papers for a variety of schools. Though understanding the unique culture of your school helps you find your audience and develop an appropriate tone, there are several principles that hold constant no matter where you are.

    Citing yourself is usually a bad idea.”

    Adam just tried to lend credence to his argument by injecting his own experiences into his comment. There are many comments above that are formatted in a similar manner.

    I just thought that was funny.

    The original post (coupled with the author’s clarifying comments that follow) all lean toward an idea I fully agree with. That said, I feel that many students may misinterpret the point the author is trying to convey, mostly because they tend to lack the passion required to put these tips to good use.

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  • An interested party

    I can completely understand the frustration of professors who are e-mailed by a rude student trying to finish a paper at the 11th hour. Such behavior is unacceptable.

    I also know that many undergraduates are poor writers and look stupid citing themselves or handing in citations from Wikipedia. But that’s not where the story ends.

    Are the lot of you really so opposed to an undergraduate reading your work and asking intelligent, probing questions about it in an e-mail? Believe it or not, many undergraduates are capable of just that.

    I went to a university that VALUED and DEVELOPED undergraduate research, so maybe that’s why so many professors’ comments above strike me as snobby and standoffish. No wonder the “real world” is increasingly turned off by the sophistry of the academics…

    It’s also ironic that precisely what some of you professors claim to hate about undergraduate research papers (i.e. injecting personal experience) is exactly the type of writing that gets wide exposure to your complicated ideas in the trade press (like a Time magazine on the effects of breast cancer research on U.S. women’s lives).

    I think the advice of this post is excellent, in the right hands (i.e. those of a undergraduate researcher knowledgable of the basics).

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  • rp

    It sounds to me like the author of this post is putting too high a premium on professors being entertained by the papers they receive:

    “What I see in a lot of these comments are a set of guidelines to write the same dreary papers that students don’t write well already.”

    “. . . narrative is important. It gives the paper a “hook” and can tie the research or others together in interesting ways.”

    If your assignment is a “reflection piece” then your own observations and experience are relevant. If you are supposed to write in the style of a “newspaper article” then screaming for attention in your writing is par for the course. (Note to students: if your professor is assigning such a piece, you are likely in what is known as a “bird course.” Don’t worry too much about following anyone’s essay writing advice – good grades will be automatically issued so as not to create any unpleasantness and/or hurt your self-esteem.)

    Random Person would like us to believe that there is a “use in illustrating a point by first explaining an experience, then using factual sources to compare/contrast against said experience.” Sorry, not for college (or often high school) level work. A paper written in this way smacks of an author who took grade 8 writing as the end all be all of writing technique.

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  • upfire

    Thanks. Idea Rover 2.0 http://www.idearover.com can help. It automates structuring information stored in htm, html, pdf, and txt files. This program prepares outline-structured notes and saves your time by eliminating tedious work.

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  • http://www.researchpaperauthority.com Ryan

    I think this post is pretty good overall, and the comments are excellent. One gripe is the typical advice to write about something you like. Yes this can make the assignment more enjoyable, but what you like doesn’t necessarily lend itself to finding great resources to draw from. I believe topics should be chosen based on a number of factors, one of the most important of which is the number and quality of great reference materials to use as source material.

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  • Kaustav

    Whatever benefits the internet search engines might have, they can never replace books. The best way to get information is to look up the book on a particular subject. That way, it helps to cultivate a reading habit which is absolutely essential for good research, in addition to keeping notes. Research,I believe, is a syncretic activity that helps one to get a better understanding of a subject by looking into and interpreting different sources.

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    This article is really helpful, and the comments, too. LOL

  • dominic_harris

    I turned in a research paper that had both personal experience and secondary research. Much of my secondary research was from academic sources. I used those sources to back up my experience or observation to prove my thesis and argument. My professor failed me. Is that just?

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  • Kim

    Hi Dustin. Thanks for posting this article! It sort of helped me with one of my research essays that I have to write for university. I’m a university student from Sydney, Australia. I’m at a university called, Macquarie University and one of the subjects that I’m taking this semester is called, From The Beats To Big Brother: Popular Culture Since The 1950s.

    For this subject I have to write a 3000 word research essay on how Web 2.0 has changed the way we consume popular culture. I want to put some of my own personal reflection in the essay but I wasn’t really sure of how to intergrate that into my essay. I want to still sound educated but also share my personal reflections. Your article kind of gave me a better idea of how to do that so thanks.

    Any more advice you have for me would be great as well! :)

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