Editing
Now that you have completed your paper, even though you are a great writer, you must edit your work.
The is the biggest mistake I make. I edit my paper immediately after I complete it. Editing works best if you wait to edit your paper until the day after you complete it. It is easier to see the errors that way.
Another tip is to have someone else, your teacher, a friend, an enemy, a family member, edit your paper for you.
I am sure you have written an amazing work, and now you are a writing expert!
Writing the paper
Now that you have your outline, writing the actual paper should be easy as cake!
What may be difficult though is citing your sources. There are several different methods to citing sources, but you must cite your quotes or paraphrases. A general guideline to information you must cite can be found on this website. Read over this webpage. If you do not cite a source it is considered STEALING.
Since different subjects have different methods to citing information, I am going to list a few websites that I have found useful.
Turabian/Chicago Manual style – check with your instructor when using this Turbian style, because some might require endnotes as well as a bibliography.
MLA – MLA is a form of citation used commonly in liberal arts and humanities for research papers. With MLA you must quote from a source, the immediately after the quote you must write the author’s last name and page number you found the quote or idea on.
APA– common for Social Sciences.
When using information quoted from a source, you must also introduce who the author of the source is in the body of your paper, to help the reader understand better. In my new podcast I have created, I read a research paper, which I wrote. In this paper I was careful to introduce every author I quoted.
Outlining your paper
Now that you have a thesis, you must organize your paper in order to prove your thesis. Writing an outline is a key way to organize a paper. Your outline should include topics, subtopics, and where you want to include your research findings.
You may become stuck for topic ideas, and in this case you should refer to your sources to see what historians have to say about your thesis. This could give you potential ideas for topics.
The first step to creating the outline is to brainstorm. Write down all of the information you want to write about, then organize it.
An easy way to organize an outline is to follow a chronological order of events relevant to your thesis. For example, if you are writing about the Civil War, start with causes, follow the chronological order of battles, then end with effects of the war.
Here is an example of my outline so you know how to bullet each line. Pay special attention to the hierarchical order of Roman Numerals, numbers and letters. outline.doc The Roman Numerals must be of equal importance throughout the outline, the arabic numbers must be of equal importance as are the English alphabet letters. This is so your outline is organized.
Thesis development
Now that you have all of the research completed for your topic, it is time to write your thesis statement.
A thesis is a statement indicating what you intend to prove with your research paper. Here is a good website to assist you in writing your thesis statement.
I had a lot of struggles when figuring how to word my thesis statement, and this website really helped!
Here is an example of my opening paragraph, with my thesis concluding it, in bold. Thesis statement.
Research Organization
Just imagine, you are done researching. You have found all of the sources to answer the question you have proposed in your topic. Now its time to organize your sources. When I started researching for my paper, I lost all of the information I found and had to start of from scratch. I wouldn’t want that to happen to any of you!
One way to prevent this is by using index cards. It is very useful if you label an index card with the source, then write what quotes or information you want to use form this source into your paper.
A second way is to write an annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is an evaluation of a source and an explanation of how you can use the source in your paper.
Click on the link to see an example of my annotated bibiliography: project-22.doc
Secondary Sources
A secondary source is an anlysis or an interpretation of a primary source or of an event. For example, if a primary is a photography, a secondary source would be a critique of that photo. Or if a primary source is a diary of the Civil War, a book about the Civil War written in the 20th century would be a secondary source.
Here is a podcast I have recorded from a book about World War II written in 1958*, which can act as a secondary source to the podcast I recorded from Newsweek. Listen for analysis and interpretation of the war, which indicates that it is a secondary source.
Secondary sources are important to your paper because you can either agree or disagree with the author, which adds to your analysis of your topic.
Examples of secondary sources that are easily obtained are encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, books and journal articles.
*Snyder, Loius L. The First Book of World War II. Ambassador Books: Toronto, 1958.
Primary Sources
There are two main types of sources that can be incorporated into a research paper. In this blog I will discuss PRIMARY RESOURCES.
Primary sources are materials on a topic upon which subsequent interpretations or studies are based, anything from firsthand documents such as poems, diaries, court records, and interviews to research results generated by experiments, surveys, ethnographies, and so on.”*
Basically, primary resources are unaltered documents, occurring around the same time as an event which the document focuses on.
You may find it suprising that a drawing or a photograph can be used as a source for your paper. It is true though! For example, you can describe this Gettysburg battle scene to let the readers know how deadly of a battle it was.
A second example of a primary source that you can use in a paper about the Civil War is a diary of a soldier, like this one. You can quote the soldier to inform the readers of how it felt to be a part of the Civil War. Diary
A third example of a primary source for a Civil War paper are statistics taken at the time of the war about battles. You can write about the statistics in your paper to prove a point you are trying to make. Here is an example of a website with statistics
You can find these sources in libraries or even online!
I made a brand new podcast with an example of a primary resource that I found, so you can hear what a text primary source sounds like, so you can identify one when you need to. It is a magazine article from the February 9, 1942 Newsweek.** What is tricky about using magazines is that if they are written at the time of the event, as this World War II article is, then they are primary resources. However, if they are written a few years after the event, as a reflection or analysis, then they are labelled as secondary resources. This was a hard learned mistake for me.
*From Hairston, Maxine and John J. Ruszkiewicz. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. 4th ed. New York : HarperCollins College Publishers, 1996, pg. 547.
**Pratt, WIlliam, V. “Jap Threat in Pacific Grows Despite New Punch of Allies.” Newsweek, 9 February 1942.
How to tell if a website is credible
As you all know, anyone can desgin their own website. If you are using a website in your research paper, you want one the is a reliable source. You don’t want to be writing a research paper on Abraham Lincoln and quote a website in your paper which labels him at the first president of Mexico. I find the task of determing the credibility of a website daunting at times. A mistake I made in my research paper this semester was that I got information from a website claiming that the Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1935. MY professor, who has his phD in U.S. History was outraged that I was two years off. I showed him where I got the information from, and he told me that I have to be careful when I use websites. I don’t want you to make the same mistake as me, so here is a very helpful website that tells you how to determine credibility of a website:
Tackling Research
Today my entry is going to be about a scary topic: RESEARCHing your topic. I hope that I can help you to calm your nerves.
There are countless sources to choose from when researching a topic. You can look in books, at credible online sources, at journal articles, magazines, government documents or any resource you can lay or hands on (or have displayed on a computer).
Here are some credible website links I find useful when researching:
Step #1: Choosing a Topic
I indicated on the “Research Paper Steps” the first step is to choose a topic for your paper. Depending on how much choice your teacher allows you to have, you should choose a topic that interests you, because being interested in a topic will help motivate you to research it more, without becoming bored and giving up. A topic proposal should be a short paragraph that gives background to the topic and a question that you intend to answer in your paper.
In my History 221 class we had to choose a topic that dealt with the environmental history of the United States. I chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his efforts in deforestation versus reforesation as my topic, because I am fascinated by the Great Depression Era.
A mistake I made in this topic proposal was that I chose a topic without researching other options first. You should always come up with at least three topics to choose from, do a little research on each topic, then choose. I chose too prematurely, and there has been hardly any previous research done on this topic.
Here is a copy of my topic proposal: topic-proposal.doc
Educ- Bethany Kleinbach (History) 