 Why is writing a research paper difficult? What difficulties have you been having and how have you been able to overcome those struggles?
Your initial post should reflect deep critical thinking and reflection on this topic. For this session, you MUST only reply to ONE (1) post.
Kasey Gallagher
3/15/2014 12:04:31 pm
I think the hardest part about writing a research paper for me personally, has been taking all of my ideas and compacting them in to something that makes sense. When I first started doing my outline, I couldn't figure out where I wanted to put which ideas and how I wanted to connect them back to a single topic. I had to do a lot of thinking to decide what needed to go where. I also think all the research that has to go in to a research paper has been hard for me because I knew so much about my topic before even doing research. My topic is something that's interesting to me because it will affect a lot of my future in the health care field. Because of that, I wasn't sure if I needed to find research for things I was able to fully explain from my own knowledge. But when I actually started to do some in depth research, I found there was a lot of different articles that could help me even better explain my ideas. Overcoming my difficulties was easy when I sat down and really thought about which things could connect back to each other. When I went to write the last section of my essay, I realized my third topic had no real connection to the rest of my essay. So then, I looked at what I already had and realized that I had a third topic already in my essay. Another challenge has been writing my conclusion, and I haven't found a way to solve that problem yet.
Devin Blattner
3/15/2014 01:11:32 pm
We had the same problems with writing our outlines. You said that you couldn't figure out where you wanted to put ideas and how you wanted them to connect to a single topic and I feel like I had the same problem with connecting my topics back to my thesis. Eventually, everything started to flow and make sense which made me less stressed about writing the research paper. We also are similar because we both had challenges writing our conclusions.
Devin Blattner
3/15/2014 01:06:10 pm
I believe the most difficult part of writing my research paper was the planning and outlining. The outlining was the hardest part because that is where your initial ideas come out and you have to make them flow and make sense. I know a lot of people didn't write full sentences in their outline, instead just writing little thoughts, but I pretty much wrote the major parts of my essay in my outline. By doing that, it was much easier to write my paper because I already had most of my paragraphs on my outline. A difficulty that I have encountered is writing my conclusion. I always find this the hardest part of my paper because I'm not exactly sure what type of information goes in there and how to format it. I'm going to overcome that struggle by asking Mrs.Erdman for help when I go into my peer editing session.
Kasey Gallagher
3/15/2014 01:18:36 pm
We had the same problem with writing our conclusions. I tried to find different ideas on what to put in to my conclusion, but when I did that I got even more confused. I put some things in that I thought made sense, but I'm also going to ask Mrs. Erdman for help!
Alyssa Saggio
3/18/2014 01:15:16 am
I had slight difficulties outlining as well. It was difficult for me to find good enough resources or examples to back up what I actually wanted to write about. Also, I don't necessarily have a problem with writing my conclusion, I have a problem with writing to much. Because I have so much information included in my paper, I cannot decide exactly what is essential and what can be taken out of my final paragraph. I plan to discuss this in the next writing conference.
Cole
3/18/2014 01:11:39 pm
I didn't think that writing the outline was very difficult. I agree that it wasn't easy getting the ideas, but once you get the base of it, it just starts to flow. I didn't wright out full ideas like you did. I just wrote key words or main ideas in my outline. Maybe thats why it wasn't as difficult for me to write my outline
Alyssa Saggio
3/18/2014 01:25:54 am
Overall, writing a research paper has been a challenging experience. In writing this paper, I found that finding multiple sources to back up one specific topic or example has been very difficult for me to do. In addition, I feel as though it is also hard to pick out what is necessary to write about. It seems as if I can include several things in my paper. For example, I have a subtopic on plagiarism. Therefore, I began to state how plagiarism can lead to copyright infringement. While I want to go into more depth on the severity of copyright infringement, I'm confused on how I should go about starting it, and when it should come to a close. Should that be a subtopic on its own? My biggest problem is that I frequently question myself. I plan on asking my peers and my teacher in our next class discussion on writing a research paper.
Alyson
3/21/2014 09:53:59 am
I also had trouble with putting the research I found into place. I question myself too and end up either adding too much information or not enough. Our peer revisions in class gave me a good idea of what I needed to do in order to improve my paper.
Tori McCaslin
3/21/2014 11:40:18 am
I didn't mention this in my blog post, but I also had trouble with the research portion. I wasn't sure if I should have a lot of facts or just to summarize what I read and then cite it. Like Alyson mentioned, the peer discussions helped me figure out how to improve my paper.
Alyson
3/18/2014 02:26:50 am
For me, the hardest part of writing a research paper has been inserting the research into my opinion. I do not really understand how to do that and I've been struggling to do so. I obviously have to overcome that because I can't write a research paper without research. I have just been writing my thoughts and then finding research to back up my thoughts.
Brian Burke
3/18/2014 05:11:02 am
Writing can sometimes be difficult for me. I often make tons of minor mistakes such as grammar mistakes. Besides that, a difficulty for me writing the research paper is citing all my sources. There are links that help create citations but I often find difficulties putting them together. I sometimes find it to be time consuming as well. But it's a problem that I can easily deal with myself.
Cole
3/18/2014 06:22:46 am
There are a few things that make writing research papers difficult. The first hardest thing is actually finding good research on trustable websites. There are a lot of websites that seem a bit shady, but have, what seems to be, good information. If the website seems shady to you, then to a teacher it would be a definite no. The other thing that made writing a research paper difficult was avoiding plagiarism. You have to take a lot of precautions in order to not plagiarize and the steps that you have to take takes a lot of time to do, but it's necessary to have a good, non-plagiarized research paper. Using websites like purdue owl to make citations makes it a lot easier on students to do so.
Brian Burke
3/21/2014 02:43:50 am
Finding the research from websites was somewhat difficult for me as well. There were tons of sites to chose from, but not all of them seemed to give accurate information. Often I check to see if the website is a "org, net, or edu". Once that was done I also used owl purdue to help site my web sources.
Tori McCaslin
3/18/2014 11:25:01 am
When looking at how I plan and write my essays, I think the part that gives me the most trouble is the planning and outlining. I have so many ideas come to my head and it was hard to compact them into a strong thesis and be able to build from them. Making all of my ideas fit together and make sense was definitely the hardest part. In stead of just writing bullets or fragments in my outline, I tried to write full sentences out so it would make more sense when I started writing. Another difficulty that I had when I was writing was breaking my ideas into paragraphs. For example, I had a really long paragraph with too many ideas so I tried to break it into two paragraphs. Once I did that, they seemed too short. Doing more research and taking more time to outline helped me overcome this. Comments are closed.
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