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Research and Documentation

Research Writing Tutorial:
A Self-Guided Tutorial

by Michael Fleming

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Plan the research process.

Effective time management may be the most important factor determining the success of your research project. If you give yourself plenty of time to do each step properly, you'll have the chance to savor your deepening expertise in a particular subject—and you'll avoid the desperation that leads some students to resort to plagiarism.

Above all, be realistic. A research project takes time—you simply cannot put it off until a couple of days before the due date. As soon as you have an assignment, draw up a workable plan with plenty of intermediate goals ("benchmarks") to measure your progress toward the final goal of a completed paper. In general, you should budget about one third of your available time to each of the three phases of the research project: conducting research, writing your rough draft, and revising the draft plus following up on the many "little" things that research entails.

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