The pain of writing research papers...

It's the job of graduate schools to make you read, review and eventually write research papers. I am currently doing that too. Writing a research paper that is. Its called a thesis.

There's no easy way that helps one write a research paper, or at least I haven't found one. Please do correct me if you have found one; I'd love to know about it and make my life easier.

You read so much literature, try to put them into your work and voila, something you read just yesterday and wanted to articulately add to your brilliantly written work goes poof from your mind when you momentarily shift your attention to something else. I don't know about you, but that happens way too much for my comfort.

There was one class I took in the first year of my undergraduate that had me write a research paper and gave me guidelines on how to do good research. I'm still hitting myself for not remembering much of them or retaining the guidelines in print. But one thing I do remember is the use of 3x5 note cards in the research.

So here's my guidelines on how to write research paper (of course incorporating what I do remember of the use of note cards)

1. Organize your paper before you start writing it.
2. Formulate questions that you are trying to address in your research (curtsy of my adviser)
3. Find and read relevant research material.
4. Play special attention to this point - while reading, if you find something that strikes you or you think might help you answer one of those questions, or even if it just comes at you like "Oh hey, I can write it like such and such", just pick a note card, write what you thought on one side, and then write which subject or class in your organization it belongs to on the other side. Make sure you note where the information came from and what page it came from (specially if you are writing quotations). Recently, I'm starting to think that its a good idea to carry a few note cards with you where ever you go, because if you are like me then you don't stop thinking about the project even if you have closed the books for a while.
   
5. Later you can go through and sort the cards by the classes/subjects in your organization.
   
6. When you are writing about the topic, you can use the cards to formulate your argument and provide very good references to support it using the cards.

Well, right now I'm at the part where I'm writing the cards while I'm reading the references. Cards and notes. But I think I have enough information for some sections that can help me quickly write them when I do get to them. A similar method helped me when I was writing that research paper till 11 p.m. in a library as an undergrad before they threw me out while they closed. Let's see how it fares against graduate school.