What is the Body of a Research Paper?

I observed through high school and college that for many students choosing research paper topics, doing research and writing a research paper was the hardest thing in the world to do.

Having students in first and second grade begin to learn how to write a research paper would make it so much easier for them to do later on. They would have a good feel for the basics.

Students in the early grades could be guided through the process in a very simple way. The different parts of writing a research paper could be broken up. Students as a group could choose a general subject like animals, then decide on some aspect of animals like "where they like to live."

Next, each child would choose an animal's habitat and do research on the internet. Figuring out a thesis would require some help. Organizing the material, finding pictures, and making charts etc. would depend on the child's age.

Doing the write up might be a challenge. They could do a little at a time - learning about introduction, conclusion and grammar skills.

To my way of thinking there really doesn't need to be strict formulas to follow when writing a research paper. My approach usually was to write a brief thesis with a couple of variations.

Then before I started writing the body, I would write a simple outline. The outline was very informal, but it served my purposes. Some people may need to do a formal outline, and that's fine.

Then I would organize my information on index cards and mix them around until I found an order that I liked. Then came the "write" and the "rewrite."

Before the first write, I always tried to decide what audience I was writing this to and what I was attempting to tell them. Lastly, I went back to the thesis and wrote it in a clear, concise manner.

@MissDaphne - That's a really good idea about writing the body first! I may start recommending it to students who come into the library looking for research paper help.

I admit, I never want to write an outline. When I was in school, I wold always just dash off the first draft and then go back through later spiffing it up. But then I had a teacher who required that we turn in a very formal outline.

I thought I could outsmart her by writing the rough draft, then going back and writing an outline of what I had already written! But here's the thing - what I had written didn't make a nice outline, because it was disorganized. So I had to make revisions to make it fit the outline.

From then on, I always used that technique - dash off a rough draft, then write an outline while revising the rough draft to be more organized. Who says the outline has to come first?

The article is right-on in suggesting that you make a research paper outline before you get started. This can be as formal as you want; some people like to use Roman numerals, capital letters and so on, all the way down to the lowercase Roman numerals, while other people just like to make some scratches on a piece of paper.

Something a lot of students don't realize is that you can actually write the body of the paper first! As long as you know what your thesis is, there's no need to write the whole introduction. A lot of people sit down to write the introduction and get stuck looking for that perfect hook, when if you just start writing the "meaty" part of the paper, the hook will probably just come to you!

But again, you have to have your thesis and some idea of what you're going to write about, or you'll just start putting junk on the paper.