How to Write a Research Paper without Making Common Mistakes

How to Write a Research Paper without Common Mistakes

When it comes to writing research papers, many researchers get worked up. In addition to designing and conducting many experiments and interviews, there are also many literature references to read, and more importantly, to go through multiple rounds of revision tasks and overcome the writing and thinking barriers. Therefore, this long process often has many links that may go wrong. Nonetheless, this article will review how to write a research paper without making some common mistakes.

Why Errors Must Be Avoided in a Research Paper

Errors due to not knowing or not realizing it usually occur because the writer is not thorough, especially regarding writing techniques, language errors in the form of spelling mistakes and illogical, ungrammatical sentence structures, and incomplete sentences. This last type of error can seriously compromise the quality of the thesis. A thesis with fairly good content, interesting topics discussed, the correct methodology, and the correct theory can be damaged due to language errors. Because of that, language errors are not to be taken lightly and should not have happened. Indeed, a writer should not have language problems. Unfortunately, many writers oversimplify and consider language issues to be trivial.

In general, the errors in writing the thesis cover a few things, some of which are substance, theory, methodologies, and language. Substance errors include two things, namely the theme that is written not within the area of ​​the body of knowledge and the questions asked are very technical, so they do not give birth to a concept. The concept is nothing but an abstract idea to describe social phenomena expressed in terms or words. The study area needs serious attention from every thesis writer.

• Reduce errors in referencing

To achieve a significant reduction in reference errors, first, you must know the importance of references to a research paper. Specifically, researchers need to develop a good habit of citing references. We must carefully check each reference according to the original text when writing and before submitting, which is also a manifestation of the serious and rigorous academic attitude. Only cite the references that have been read, and avoid re-citing as much as possible, avoid possible omissions or errors, and use professional software to manage references.

• How to reduce grammar errors

The most common writing problems in papers include grammatical errors, colloquialization, and formatting problems, article writing errors, too long sentences leading to unclear meaning, paragraph arrangement problems, ambiguity in primary and secondary, and various singular and plural forms. In most cases, the improper organization of the format even hinders the clear expression of the author’s meaning, hence, the need to be abreast with basic syntax rules.

To effectively write a paper or thesis without making common mistakes, full attention and time must be dedicated to proofreading exercises. The following are some guides as to the workings of proofreading.

The biggest obstacle of proofreading is autopilot. Your consciousness is always trying to save attention. Meanwhile, you need maximum attention when proofreading, even if you know the text almost by heart. Therefore, the crux of this write-up is aimed that increasing awareness.

Before proofreading

• Know your common mistakes

Every writer makes certain mistakes repeatedly. The spell checker finds most of these errors, but often time, the keyboard errors create real words that you must track down. For some people, the favourite mistakes are “she/you” or particularly tricky comma rules. Once you know your common mistakes, it is best to make a list. Then you can systematically search for these errors.

• Don’t start too early

If on a cursory reading, you find “this is a coherent text”, you can start proofreading. If you are still rearranging paragraphs, inserting new thoughts, or throwing unimportant things out of the text, you can ignore spelling and grammar. However, if you notice a mistake in passing, correct it as you go while keeping in mind that the big raid comes later.

• Let the text sit

If you don’t have much time, let it lie there for at least half an hour and do something else during that time. Gladly something strenuous. A short jog, a phone call with a difficult customer or walking up and down the stairwell ten times. You want to gain as much distance as possible from your text so that you can forget it and read it with fresh eyes.

During proofreading

• Print out the text

It is much less strenuous to read a text on paper. Your text also looks different on paper than it does on screen. This makes it a little strange to you but reads more carefully. Your subconscious wants to help you by just skimming over the known. Most of the time it is only a matter of capturing the content of a text. But when looking for mistakes, you must look carefully at every word and phrase. This works more easily with printed texts. Some writers intentionally change the layout or fonts before proofreading to see the text again.

• Read the text aloud

The same principle works here in that, you have to read the text out loud and take a closer look at the words so that you can pronounce them, which in turn helps catch mistakes.

• Cover the text

Reading the text line by line makes it easier to pay attention to each word. And if you cover the text below the current line, your impatient subconscious can’t just rush ahead until you’ve been done with the current line.

Make Use the “Find Function” of your text application

If you make certain types of mistakes frequently, read through the text several times, looking for one of your regular mistakes each time. To check the spelling word for word, it helps to read the text word by word from back to front. Because the content does not “disturb” you, it is easier for you to take a close look at every single word.

Watch Out for Titles and Numbers

Pay particular attention to title lines/title pages, especially to the very capitalized ones, and to numbers. Here it is too easy to assume that this is correct anyway. Also, it is beneficial to arrange for a neutral party to proofread for you. A fresh set of eyes see flaws that escape your eagle eye. You can never look at your text as impartially as another reader who reads it for the first time.

Use the spell checker. Always run the spell checker when you write, it helps to correct the popular keyboard errors immediately. Otherwise, the error margin would be too high. Spell checkers work very well for finding words that are not in the dictionary. They also often provide good information when it comes to upper- and lower-case letters and some grammatical errors. But they are overwhelmed with subtle mistakes and sometimes they make suggestions that you shouldn’t just accept.

Reduce the structural errors

In essay writing or research methods, you will learn that the most important thing is the structure of the paper. In research writing, the beginning of the thesis can roughly follow the following three parts: What is the overall problem structure of the thesis and why this is a problem that needs to be studied; How people in the past viewed this issue, that is, a review of the literature; How you will deal with this issue and what your thesis theme is, will determine the structure of your thesis. The focus of the arrangement of chapters is not what you will do in each chapter, but why you must do this is because of the structure of the problem. If you can write according to this structure, your paper will have a clear structure with a clear outline. Of course, ideals often mean impossible, but try to get close to this ideal structure.