A Manual For Composing A Strong Academic Research Paper


Research papers are one of the most critical assignments students attempt during their academic careers. Of course, they come second to dissertation and thesis writing. For a student, who never attempted such academic assignments, it gets impossible to complete one without looking for help. Even if the student understands the subject and has good command over the language, it gets hard because they do not know the format, structure, writing style, tone, approach and requirements for a research paper. Some teachers need the paper to be in a standard format like APA or MLA while others prefer to have custom formatting. This is the last thing you need to do in your paper.

Let us start with the basics first. If you divide your writing task into three easy steps, you will find it easier to complete an effective paper. Like any writing assignment, you need to plan and organize your ideas in the pre-writing stage, after that you bring your ideas to meaningful words in the writing stage and finally you edit your sentence structures, fix the typos, and look for grammatical and spelling mistakes in the post-writing phase.

To make it simpler we have divided each of these three phases into numbers so that you can understand what you need to do in each phase. Remember that the numerical order is important for you to follow if you want to create a strong paper.

  • Pre writing
    1. 1. Determine the subject area you want to address
    2. 2. Find a potential niche
    3. 3. Brainstorm
    4. 4. Research
    5. 5. Make a list of all the possible topics
    6. 6. Choose the best topic that suits your requirements
    7. 7. Carry out further research
    8. 8. Gather data and analyze it
    9. 9. Organize your ideas in an outline
    10. 10. Plan the time required for each task

  • Writing
    1. 1. Start with a fresh mind
    2. 2. State your thesis statement on top
    3. 3. Understand the outline
    4. 4. Write a first draft
    5. 5. Create chapters like introduction, body, result findings, conclusion, future discussion etc.
    6. 6. Include citations and references by the end of the research paper

  • Post writing
    1. 1. Start with a fresh mind
    2. 2. Edit your paper
    3. 3. Read it aloud
    4. 4. Get a hard copy
    5. 5. Get an audio copy
    6. 6. Proof read your paper
    7. 7. Ask for opinions
    8. 8. Proof read again
    9. 9. Format your paper
    10. 10. Check your research paper for plagiarism with a software