INTRODUCTION

Through the college years student are made to develop there own way of thinking, perspectives ideas to promote innovation and creativity. Writing research papers is one of the ways to build up the thought process of the student. Research paper writing is in which you present you perspectives and ideas on the work done by the experts of that particular field or writing on something which you start from scratch.

As mentioned above writing a research papers involves a lot of thought process where you have to investigate about the topic and present your point of view which in turn seems like a huge task to the student. But this all can be made very simple if a certain procedure is followed while writing the paper. It's not necessary to follow one same procedure all the time but you can yourself develop a course of action which is most suitable for you while writing the paper. This write up is going to provide you with the general steps which should be taken while writing the papers; these steps will assist you and make the job much easier.

CHOOSING TOPIC

The first step it to select the topic. Choose the topic of your interest because your approach towards the topic would determine the effort you would put in to writing that report. The topic you select, depending upon the pages of your research paper, narrow down the topic to something much more manageable. Teacher authorization is necessary before beginning the full scale research on the subject. Make sure the topic you selected does not have a constricted range source material.

COLLECTING INFORMATION

Once the topic is selected look for the information on it. Library is the first place you should be search at. Bibliography of that book can provide you with other books and articles on that topic. Other then the books use internet, magazines, encyclopedias any source of information to help you out with. Don't limit your self in the search and get information from any source possible because the more you know is only going to help you. In some cases interviews are also a good source of information. When gathering the information you should note down the source of all the material you get for writing the bibliography.

PROPER CITATION

After identifying the sources from where you can get the information on the topic, go through them thoroughly and make notes of the important points stated in them. If copying direct from the source put quotation marks on it to evade plagiarism. Keep track of all sources from where you gather information. Give numbers or headings to the notes you make so that organizing them would not be a headache.

MAKING OUTLINES

With all the gathered information its time to organize them and make an outline which in turn will take the shape of the report. It's more of a table of content which shows the headings and sub headings and in which order they will be written. Organizing ideas is when you analyze and sort out the wanted material from the unwanted material; make sure the information provided in the research paper is accurate and up to date

The outline made by organizing the ideas will serve as the foundation for the report. Now you have to build on the foundation by writing the first draft of the report. It's the point when you give your ideas coherence, and give them the shape of a report. Any report or research papers have three basic divisions. Introduction, body and the conclusion. Introduction should be such which captures the imagination of the reader and generates interest in the topic. Body is where you provide a detailed description of the topic and present you ideas at the same time using quotations and examples to prove you point of view. Following the outline you made each idea should have a separate paragraph so that the paper does not look stagnant. Use transition words in between the paragraph so keep a smooth flow of the ideas. In conclusion you sum up all the ideas and restate the main idea of the papers.

AVOIDING PLAGIARISM

To avoid plagiarism documenting the source of information is very important. This is done by using footnotes, end notes and bibliography which is an other step all together. Footnotes are written in the end of the same page as the quotation or any other information which is copied and end notes are written together in the end page before bibliography. Format you chose for writing the footnotes and the end notes entirely depends on you writing style.

WRITING BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliography provides the source of all the information from where it was taken and buries all the doubts of plagiarism. It is provided at the end of the report; it can be either on one page of several pages. As mentioned above it is very important to keep track all sources of information to make it easier to write the bibliography. General format of a bibliography is to provide the title of the book, article or the internet source, author, publisher and the date of publication. Assembling of the bibliography can either be done alphabetically or any other format which is preferred by you or your teacher.

REVISION AND PROOF READING

The draft you first wrote is in very rough and raw form. You would want to polish it before submitting it. Therefore revision and proofreading is a must. Note that revision and proofreading are two different things all together. Revision is where you analyze your work as you did when researching on the topic. Delete what is unnecessary and add where you think the argument presented by you is weak. It's all about thinking over your ideas once again and editing out all the mistakes made in the first draft. Make other people read it and note out the points which require editing.

CONCLUSION

After all the hard work students tend to get lazy and that is where they lose marks when they do not check careless mistakes such as grammar, miss spelled words, punctuation and capitalization etc. Although the material provided by the student is very good but this careless mistake end up dropping your grade therefore do a double check on them and proofread each and very word carefully, because you would not want such hard work go down the drain just to save a few minutes of work after putting that much effort into the report.