Although most of the people who have ever tried writing a research paper, prefer to speak of the way that has driven them to the certain results than of the results themselves, such is a man’s psychology that it is easier to enumerate the data than to follow one’s course of thoughts. Still this is what I am going to do. Despite the memory process is hard to restore, I will try to explain my course o thoughts as I picked the particular research and was writing the document.
As Clare (2004, p. 3) outlines, “A research report is written to fulfill the researcher’s contractual or moral obligations to those who put up the resources that enabled the study to be undertaken”. With the burden of the moral obligation I was bearing from that day on, I started out with the purpose of my future research. What needs does it have to meet? What problems does it have to touch upon? What topic does it have to deal with?
As these hard questions were finally answered, I went on to draw a brief plan of what my research would look like.
It seemed to me that a good research is much like a well-cooked pie. That is why I started with the basis for my project, that is, with the dough. It had to be thick and stable, and that made me search for the most reliable and well-established facts that were the axioms for my research to ground on.
Most of them have been taken form the encyclopedias and the trusted sources, such as research papers and other scientific sources. It was a matter of the credibility of my future research, because once a false idea has crept into the paper, it is ruined for good.
Then I had to arrange somehow the material that I had gathered. There were three basic types of them that I subdivided them into. These were the facts that I found well-known and that could be presented as an introduction to my research paper; they helped me to explain better the subject I was dealing with. These were a kind of common place, yet they helped to concentrate on the subject and frame it. The next were the facts that I was actually operating with as I continued the research.
Those facts helped me to get the necessary information for my research to operate with as I was coming up to the part where my individual research began. Those facts were like the flowers that I had to make a bouquet of. I had to work carefully to arrange them in the very best way, so that the audience could trace my train of thoughts and understand the course of the research well.
Those facts provided a food for my thoughts as well, since there was a lot of contradicting information in them, and at times it was hard for me to understand the way the facts were driving to.
Finally, as I had dealt with the hardest part of the research, the time came to decorate the “dish” of mine. That was the right time to use the information that I defined first as the additional one. The peculiarity of the information of that kind was that it actually did not influence the results of the research in the least, but it was funny to listen to and it made the research sound a bit more vivid, not that dry as it could have been if I had presented only the results themselves. It made the audience feel much more relaxed, and because of teat their attention was focused on the research all the time.
And, finally, as the plan was drawn and all the facts were arranged in the right order, it was the very time to get down to writing the research itself.
The process of writing might seem far not that interesting to you, but I should say that I was trying to make it sound both scientific and exciting. That took all the boredom of the writing process.
The results of my research speak fort themselves. Now I am glad that the work I have done was just as exciting for my audience as for me.
Reference
Clare, J., & Hamilton, H. (2004) Writing a Research: Transforming Data into Text. Churchhill, London: Elsevier Science Ltd.