It would not be uncommon to sit in front of a blank screen, clueless when you start to write a research paper. It is quite natural that it may not occur to you what you intended to write in your paper or something you had read somewhere that you wanted to incorporate. In addition, you may have sometimes got stuck with finding a reference you have lost somewhere or perhaps all the content that you desired or thought to incorporate in your research is scattered around in a way you don’t know how to compile or put together.
I am sure you have faced these kind of problems often and hence learning to create a research document is important for you and it can be of great help. Now what is the way to create a research document and what are the ways in which you can organise your research?
Firstly you must write an essay plan before you actually initiate writing an academic essay. This is what we call as a research document. It becomes your guide and fundamental base upon which you rest the organisation of your research. Your essay plan has the bullet points or dot points which you plan to incorporate in your essay as different sub heads. As you keep reading content, it is a good idea to jot down the information along the way. It really isn’t necessary that you have to type everything. All that is required is relevant and important information in the essay. Once you have done that, at a later stage you can add your own notes or elaborate on the content as per your requirement. This approach is a very beneficial approach and this research document that you create would be very helpful for you in the following ways:
- You don’t have to rely on or strain your memory to retain every small little detail
- At the time of writing, all information will be there with you without anything important getting left out
- Facts distortion would not happen
- When you elaborate each fact with your own extension, you would clearly know which part is your content and which has been taken from sources
- It helps to organise ideas better
- While you are doing this, you can work around creating your own reference list too simultaneously so you are not piled up with work at the later stage for creating the entire reference chapter from a scratch