Writing Your Research Paper

Writing Your Research Paper

In the previous two steps, you performed research, first to identify industry trends, and then for information about an issue in one of those trends that you consider to be important to your industry. Now it is time to draft your complete paper.

Writing Your Research Paper

This would be a good time to review information on organization in writing and paragraphs. You might also want to check out the Effective Writing Center’s Online Guide to Writing, a valuable reference for improving your writing.

Your research paper should accomplish two objectives:

• Identify the three top trends in your industry and your rationale for your choices, based on the resources you found.
• Discuss the issue within one of the trends (or from the field of study) that you deem important, based on the current state of the industry. You will present your analysis of facts and a well-reasoned conclusion of how this issue affects the industry.

Your paper will be five to seven pages, not including your cover page and References page(s), double-spaced and set up in APA standard formatting. It does not require an abstract.

Start with an outline and flesh out the main themes with supporting statements. This will become your roadmap to an organized paper. We recommend that you consider the primary components to writing effectively at any level. Draft, sleep on it, and edit. Consider this advice on editing and revising your work. This explanation on how you can move from general to specific writing may also be helpful.  

Refer to References and Citations to ensure that you are using in-text citations to give credit for others’ ideas and to build your credibility as a researcher, neither ignoring sources nor quoting excessively. Your citations, both in-text and on the References page, should follow the APA citing and referencing resources in the UMGC Library Citing and Writing Portal. Use the left navigation menu to find additional information and examples.

After your complete paper is drafted and your citations are correct, read your paper out loud to catch any extra or missing words and to make sure that it makes sense. Better yet, ask a friend to read it; if someone has questions about what you mean, it’s likely that others will as well.