Write Research Papers Faster — 7 Things I Wish I Knew My 1st Year
Look, when it comes down to it, nobody really likes writing papers. At least not in a school setting. More time spent doing homework means there’s less time available to do the things we actually enjoy. After five years of university, I’ve learned some useful tips on how to increase efficiency, reduce stress, and decrease the time spent working on research papers.
The key is to be organized.
How organized you are during your preparation and writing will dictate how often you’ll have to go back and revise your work's content and structure.
The goal is to minimize this scrambling.
Here are 7 tips I discovered along the way I wish I knew in my first year.
- Start researching at least a week before the due date. I know it seems ironic to argue that you need to allow yourself time to complete a paper in an article about tips on how to be faster at doing so. The fact is that researching takes time, and you need to allow yourself the time to gather your information. Starting to research at least a week before it's due will give you a clear idea of how much time you will need to put into your project. It will unlikely take this amount of time to gather the information, but it’ll save you from scrambling and doing a poor job if you leave it until a few days before. Sure, you can write the entirety of the paper the night before it's due, but give yourself no less than a week to become organized and allow for a smooth, scramble-free process when you begin writing. After the research is complete and you are completely organized, the rest will go quickly.
2. When you find a source you want to use, email it to yourself. After about my second time searching for what seemed like forever for an awesome article I came across the day or two before that I failed to save, I realized I needed to be sending my sources to myself. Once anything is in the database of an email platform, it will always be there. Relying on your memory or even writing the title of the article down isn’t enough. Don’t waste time searching for the same article again and put it in your inbox the first time.
3. When taking information from a source, ALWAYS note the page number you found it on. Marking down exactly where you found useful information will save you from having to go back and search for it again. Research papers require many in-text citations, so doing this avoids scrambling and, therefore, time-wasting. When you come across information you think may be relevant for your paper, write it down and the page you found it on. Even if you don’t use it in your paper, it’s better to have it than having to go back and find it.
4. If you think of an idea for your paper when you’re not working on it, make note of it. My least favourite thing while writing a paper is staring at the screen for ten minutes trying to figure out how to phrase something. One night while I was working out at the gym I thought of a way to say something for a paper I was writing. I stopped midway through my set and put it in the notes on my phone. Even if you think it’s simple and you won’t forget it, mark it down somewhere. Time spent staring at your laptop will only add stress to the process, so don’t rely on your memory and take advantage of those lightbulb moments when they come.
5. Cite as you write. After you’ve gathered notes from your sources and start writing, do your in-text citations as you type your paper out. Again, this is a time-saver. It will eliminate the need to go back later and scan the sections requiring references. A method that worked well for me included writing out the information I gathered from a single source, with the page number included, on one piece of paper. I did this for all of my references so that when I needed information while typing, it was there in front of me with the page number if needed.
6. Write your intro last. In one of my very first university classes, my professor had us submit our introduction paragraphs two weeks before our paper was due to discourage procrastination. As my schooling progressed, I realized this was illogical. An introduction paragraph is a broad summary of what you will discuss in your paper. Since you won’t know your paper's exact content until it’s finished, then writing the intro first is not only a waste of time but pointless. If you write your intro first, you may have to keep going back and revising it to relate it to your paper's structure. Even if you only revise it once, this is time wasted. You cannot tell someone about your day before it has happened, so don’t summarize your paper before it’s been written.
7. Always email your paper to yourself after each work session. It never happened to me, but hearing stories of people’s laptops being stolen or their hard drives crashing in the middle of a school project has scared me into someone who believes in emailing your work to yourself regularly. Putting it into your email’s database makes it impossible for the nightmares of theft or technological failures to become a reality. Even though these are extremely rare circumstances, you do not want to risk starting a research paper from scratch with even less time to finish than when you first began. Sure, you may have a reasonable professor that grants you a later due date, but no one wants to start a second time after already sacrificing hours on a project you now have nothing to show for. Allow the chance of this happening to you to go from slim to none and email your work to yourself after every session.
During the end of my Undergrad, I came to realize that these methods extremely increased my efficiency while writing research papers. The last thing you want to do while working on a paper is to keep having to go back, add things, and modify your work. Next time you have to write a research paper, approach it this way and see if the writing portion of the process goes smoother. The better organized you are with your research, notetaking, and writing, the quicker and less stressful the entire process will be.