EPT
In college I had to write a research paper on average, approximately once or twice per year. Now that I'm in graduate school, it seems like each of my classes requires exactly one research paper in addition to other requirements (I'm not convinced the instructor actually reads them though... a formality?). Anyway, due to my physics/education majors as an undergrad, and placing out of freshman composition (Verbal SAT 10 points above minimum for placing out thank god XD), I haven't had to write that many papers.
For the few papers I actually wrote in college, I felt reasonably well prepared because I did fine in SUPA English in 12th grade. However, I've always felt like I don't really get how you are supposed to do a proper research paper.
Of course, research papers come in many different varieties; each one requires a different approach. But whenever I'm writing a research paper, I get this inescapable feeling that most of what I'm doing is nothing more than BS. I feel like, of all the skills I gained in (or for) college, writing research papers is one of the ones I understand the least. Still, I've had reasonable success with my papers (when you look at achievement... but I suspect in most cases it's not that hard to get an instructor to say a research paper is 'ok' even if it really isn't... due to the nature of the beast).
My Paper
As a mentioned to a few people in IRC, I had to write a research paper for my Fall class this semester which had a very vague prompt: Write a seven page research paper on an emerging technology in education. I was frustrated by the lack of direction (not even a specification about formatting etc), but I eventually decided I would take advantage of it. I decided to do something I've never done before: specifically plan out all the steps I was going to do in creating this paper from start to finish. I don't know how successful it was considering I probably won't get so much as feedback from the professor on it, but my sister who graduated Summa Cum Laude with an English degree didn't have any major complaints (aside from a few grammatical considerations) so I take that as a ringing endorsement. She did note however that the purpose of the paper seemed much different than virtually all of the ones that she had to write as a college student, so I suppose she wasn't the best judge (if you want her pics pm me).
My Steps in Completing the Research Paper
1) Download my classmates' papers which were uploaded to blackboard and read them to get a feel of the types of topics they chose (mainly to avoid a duplicate) and formatting they used (I wanted to see if they were using internal citations, and they were).
2) Log on to the university's research portal, and skip immediately to ERIC because I've had the most luck with it in the past. Search for "Emerging Technology" and skim the abstracts until I get an idea of what emerging technologies are actually easy to find research on.
3) Print approximately five journal articles that are useful for the topic I choose. Read through each of them in depth and highlight each term, sentence, or paragraph that will be useful for me.
4) Label each article A, B, C, D, and E. Number each quote 1, 2, 3, etc. Now every quote or piece of information I want to use has a unique name.
5) Construct a basic outline of the paper. This helps me determine what sections the paper will include, and in what order.
6) Make a big table which has columns for each of the sections of my paper. Go back through each article, and for each quote (by quote I just mean any piece of information I highlighted because I plan on using it), place it in the table, within the column corresponding to the section where I will use it.
7) Write the paper, section by section, using the table to keep track of which quotes to use when.
Conclusions
Although it seems like I did a lot of work prior to writing the actual paper, it felt worth it to me. After all, I included about 75 pieces of information that I took directly from the articles (about half a dozen actual quotes with quotation marks though). If I hadn't been anal about keeping organized, I would have had a lot of trouble incorporating all that information in the correct sequence.
So, I'm just curious if other people with a decent (or large) amount of experience in writing research papers can give me their take on this issue. Some questions to consider (feel free to ignore them if you already have something to say):
1) In what ways are students adequately prepared for writing research papers in high school or college?
2) What do you think of this method of numbering quotes and using a table to organize them? Alternatives that work?
3) What percent of your time working on a research paper should be physically writing it, and what percent should be gathering/reading research, and preparing to write it? (I think for this paper it was like 50/50 for me respectively)
