Much of the writing advice for writing a proposal abstract also applies to writing your paper. The writing process is iterative, meaning you'll likely have to go back to earlier "steps" to do your project well. The following aren't rigid sequential steps, but in general, you'll need to:
- Understand the assignment
- Gather your information sources and read them
- One of the most useful reading strategies is to write a number from 0 to 3 next to each paragraph of a difficult text you're reading. Zero means you don't understand it at all, while three means you understand it perfectly. You can look back at the paragraphs you gave a 0 or 1 to and ask if you need to understand it better than that to complete your project. If you do, try re-reading slowly or out loud, or apply some other remediation strategy. Otherwise, move on to another source! You may come across a text that is all 0s and 1s, and you may simply want to look for another source as you don't have the background knowledge the author assumes you have because they are writing that source for other people who have been studying the topic for years.
- Consider using a citation manager such as Zotero to keep track of your resources, full text, and notes. See Mary Broussard if you'd like to learn how to use Zotero.
- Use in-depth information synthesis strategies - Mind mapping is one, but the Information Synthesis tutorial provides several others
- Draft your paper (embrace those really bad first drafts!)
- Citations - be sure to put something in the place where in-text citations should go, but don't worry too much about format yet. You want to remember where that information came from, but you don't want to lose the flow of what you're trying to say. If you don't add something as a place holder, you'll likely be scrambling at the last second to figure out what information came from which source, and you're basically doing twice as much work under four times as much stress.
- Revise your paper for organization and clarity
- Edit your paper for grammar
- Clean up your citations
- Perdue OWL is a great resource
- Review your assignment requirements to make sure you have met all of them
The Bucknell Writing Center has created a list of Resources for Writers where you may find more useful information about the writing process.