Essay Writing

Writing a research paper can be intimidating. Usually, you have to fill five pages or more To put it simply, what your assignment is is to research and explain (to death) some topic. You look up information, and then separate these facts into subtopics, and then put it together in a presentable form.

Here’s some tips on writing a research paper:

• There are three ways to take information from another source and put it in your paper:

1. Summary – this is when you read a lot of material (a big paragraph, a page, a whole book, etc) and you sum it up in a sentence or two. You do not need quotation marks around this, but you do need a parenthetical documentation. For example, “Heart disease is linked to obesity, eating radishes, high stress levels, and taking Calculus (Smith 185-201).”
2. Paraphrase – this is when you say the same thing that is said in the source, but you phrase it differently. Instead of, “75% of junk food eating can be linked to stress,” you would say, “Stress causes three quarters of negative eating choices.” You need to have parenthetical documentation after this, but not quotation marks.
3. Direct Quote – This is when you take word for word what is said in another source. When you do this, you need quotation marks around it all, and then the parenthetical documentation goes outside of them. The reason you would use this instead of a paraphrase is if the original source says something very directly, or if you could not possibly say whatever it is better than the original source.

• Your paper is not just several facts taken from somewhere else and stuck together. You have to fill in the space between. You must expand on each one. Why did you choose that particular fact? What does it illustrate? How does it directly support your thesis? You must say what this info illustrates or what point you’re using it to support, so your readers to know what you meant without telling them. While you know what the importance of the fact is, your readers do not. If you can’t explain what the fact illustrates and why it is important, you don’t need it.
• Your paper should be split into sections. The sections can be paragraphs, each on a different topic, or can be sets of paragraphs, each set being on a topic, and each paragraph being a subtopic. The basic format to a paper is outline on my Setting Up Your Paper page.
• You must frame your quotes. At the beginning of the sentence, introduce the source so your reader knows that this information came from somewhere else. You could say something like, “As stated in The Idiot’s Guide to Iced Tea Making…” or “Marine Biology expert Dr. Elliot Stevens says that….”
• Direct quotes should not make up more than 1/5 of your citations.
• You should aim for about 2-4 citations per page. This means that if you have a ten page paper, you’d want probably 30 or so quotes.
• Every citation you have needs to be parenthetically documented! What you put in parenthesis is the first word that appears in your Works Cited for that entry.