I am disciplined about writing every day for two hours, but I don’t really like the idea of “I write 3,500 words every 1.5 hours”. In fact, I loved a recent blog post by Tseen Khoo entitled “ Your Word Count Means Nothing to Me“.

I am someone who doesn’t react well to word counts. Break down the paper into separate documents. Often times, this will change and I will have to come back and redraft this section, but at least I have a basic structure for the paper.Ģ. I also make sure that I develop the structure of the paper as I write the introduction. Normally what I do is I expand the abstract and write the introduction from the abstract. The one sure way in which I know I am going to make progress on a paper is writing the abstract and the introduction. Write the abstract and introduction first At least you answered the questions and/or filled the sections you needed to and refined your abstract and paper on the basis of these responses.Ģ. What I have found is that often times, my outline doesn’t show the same thing that the paper does at the end of it. So, the outline comes directly from the paper abstract. One way in which I do this is I break down my abstract into the sections that I need to fill out and/or the questions I need to answer to have my paper actually show my full argument. At any rate, you should have a skeleton of what your paper is going to look like. If you’ve already started writing the paper, then Professor Rachael Cayley’s approach is the best – e.g.

This tip would be kind of obvious, but I am far from being the first one to suggest that writing an outline allows you to put complex ideas on paper in a sequential, articulate, cohererent form. So here are 8 tips I use to write a research paper from start to finish. I was hoping to have screenshots of every stage of my paper writing, but obviously doing my own research, fieldwork and travelling to academic conferences to present papers (and writing those papers in haste!) didn’t allow me to do this in a much more planned manner. I promised a few weeks ago that I would blog about how I write a paper from start to finish.

Steps to writing a research paper