Tips for your Research Assignment

How to success in your research assignments

We won’t lie to you: writing a research assignment is not an easy task. It takes a lot of work and analysis. But you can success! Consider that if your teacher has asked you to hand in research assignments or a research essay, it must be because you have all the skills you need. All you have to do is follow these tips.

Choose the right topic

Since all your research assignment will be based on the topic of choice, a bad topic translates into a bad work. While some teachers may be willing to provide students a list and ask you to choose one, others are reluctant to topic suggestions, since they believe it is part of the student’s work to find a suitable topic. In that case, you as a student may end up with nothing but general guidelines. For example, “Write a research assignment about German philosophy in the XIX Century”. If that is your case, assume that the topic is just too broad, since it will require you to deal with too much information for just one essay. You can say many things about this topic, but everything you write will be at a very basic level.
The answer is narrowing your topic: that is, choosing to deal with only a part of it. For example, instead of writing about every single XIX Century German philosopher you know, you may want to choose one or two. This way your analysis will get deeper into it.

Organize your work

Once you get to write, remember you should always start your research assignment with an introduction, in where you delimit your topic, establish your hypothesis and write about your research methodology. Once you have it ready, you may start the plan by writing subtitles. Another good idea at this stage of the task is planning is the bibliography. Search through every article and find appropriate quotations you may want to include in your assignment.

Referencing your research assignment

When writing research assignments, you should always quote the main bibliography you consulted. Try to include as many texts, documents and testimonies as possible, to show the examiner your commitment to your investigation. Do not constraint yourself to one or two authors.
Of course, you must always quote the used bibliography. It is basic for you, as a student, to learn how to reference an essay, a paper or any written assignment in a suitable way. For every single quote you must always mention the author, their work, the publisher and the year, as well as the page where you extracted the quote from. And don’t forget about quotation marks, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism.

One last tip: no matter how desperate you are, don’t hand in a free assignment, because it is not safe. Every teacher nowadays is aware of the different ways students can cheat. And every single one of those essay samples, assignments and papers you can just download for free, can be easily spotted with very common anti-plagiarism software.

Tags: assignment tips, assignment writing, research assignment