Once you have some working answers to these basic questions, it’s time to start thinking about actually writing the research essay itself. For most research essay projects, you will have to consider at least most of these components in the process:

• The Introduction
• Background Information
• Evidence to Support Your Points
• Counterarguments and Answers
• The Conclusion
• Works Cited or Reference Information

The Introduction

Research essays have to begin somewhere, and this somewhere is called the “introduction.” However, by “introduction,” we don’t necessarily mean only the first paragraph. Introductions in longer research essays are frequently several paragraphs long.

Introductions have two basic jobs to perform:

• To get the reader’s attention; and
• To briefly explain what the rest of the essay will be about.

What is appropriate or what works to get the reader’s attention depends on the audience you have in mind for your research essay and the sort of voice or authority you want to have with your essay. Frequently, it is a good idea to include some background material on the issue being discussed or a brief summary of the different sides of an argument. If you have an anecdote from either your own experience or your research that you think is relevant to the rest of your project or will be interesting to your readers, you might want to consider beginning with that story. Generally speaking, you should avoid mundane or clichéd beginnings like “This research essay is about…” or “In society today…”

The second job of an introduction in a traditional research essay is to explain to the reader what the rest of the essay is going to be about. This is frequently done by stating your “thesis statement,” which is more or less where your working thesis has ended up after its inevitable changes and revisions.

A thesis statement can work in a lot of different places in the introduction, not only as the last sentence at the end of the first paragraph. It is also possible to let your readers know what your thesis is without ever directly stating it in a single sentence. This approach is common in a variety of different types of writing that use research, though traditionally, most academic research essays have a specific and identifiable thesis statement.

While the introduction is of course the first thing your readers will see, make sure it is one of the last things you decide to revise in the process of writing your research essay. You will probably start writing your essay by writing an introduction—after all, you’ve got to start somewhere—but it is nearly impossible to write a very effective introduction if the rest of the essay hasn’t been written yet. This is why you will certainly want to return to the introduction to do some revision work after you’ve written your essay.

Background Information (or Helping Your Reader Find a Context)

It is always important to explain, contextualize, and orientate your readers within any piece of writing. Your research essay is no different in that you need to include background information on your topic in order to create the right context for the project.

In one sense, you’re giving your reader important background information every time you fully introduce and explain a piece of evidence or an argument you are making. But often times, research essays include some background information about the overall topic near the beginning of the essay. Sometimes, this is done briefly as part of the introduction section of the essay; at other times, this is best accomplished with a more detailed section after the introduction and near the beginning of the essay.

How much background information you need to provide and how much context you need to establish depends a great deal on how you answer the “Getting Ready” questions you saw earlier in this chapter, particularly the questions in which you are asked to consider you purpose and your audience. If one of the purposes of your essay is to convince a primary audience of readers who know little about your topic or your argument, you will have to provide more background information than you would if the main purpose of your essay was to convince a primary audience that knows a lot about your topic. But even if you can assume your audience is as familiar with the topic of your essay as you, it’s still important to provide at least some background on your specific approach to the issue in your essay.

It’s almost always better to give your readers “too much” background information than “too little.” In our experience, students too often assume too much about what their readers (the teacher included!) knows about their research essay. There are several reasons why this is the case; perhaps it is because students so involved in their research forget that their readers haven’t been doing the same kind of research. The result is that sometimes students “cut corners” in terms of helping their audience through their essay. We think that the best way to avoid these kinds of misunderstandings is for you to always remember that your readers don’t know as much about your specific essay as you do, and part of your job as a writer is to guide your reader through the text.

Weaving in Evidence to Support Your Point

Throughout your research essay, you need to include evidence that supports your points. There is no firm rule as to “how much” research you will want or need to include in your research essay. Like so many other things with research writing, it depends on your purpose, the audience, the assignment, and so forth. But generally speaking, you need to have a piece of evidence in the form of a direct quote or paraphrase every time you make a claim that you cannot assume your audience “just knows.”

Stringing together a series of quotes and paraphrases from different sources might show that you have done a lot of research on a particular topic, but your audience wants to know your interpretation of these quotes and paraphrases, and your reader wants and needs to be guided through your research. To do this, you need to work at explaining the significance of your evidence throughout your essay.

For example, this passage does a bad job of introducing and weaving in evidence to support a point.

In America today, the desire to have a winning team drives universities to admit academically unqualified students. “At many universities, the tradition of athletic success requires coaches to produce not only competitive but championship-winning teams” (Duderstadt 191).

The connection between the sentence and the evidence is not as clear as it could be. Further, the quotation is simply “dropped in” with no explanation. Now, compare it with this revised and better example:

The desire to always have a winning team has driven many universities to admit academically unqualified student athletes to their school just to improve their sports teams. According to James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, the corruption of university athletics usually begins with the process of recruiting and admitting student athletes. He states that, “At many universities, the tradition of athletic success requires coaches to produce not only competitive but championship-winning teams” (Duderstadt 191).

Remember: the point of using research in writing (be it a traditional research essay or any other form of research writing) is not merely to offer your audience a bunch of evidence on a topic. Rather, the point of research writing is to interpret your research in order to persuade an audience.

Counterarguments and Answers

Most research essays anticipate and answer counterarguments, the ways in which a reader might disagree with your point. Besides demonstrating your knowledge of the different sides of the issue, acknowledging and answering the counterarguments in your research essay will go a long way toward convincing some of your readers that the point you are making is correct.

Counterarguments can be placed almost anywhere within a research essay, including the introduction or the conclusion. However, you want to be sure that the counterarguments are accompanied by “answering” evidence and arguments. After all, the point of presenting counterarguments is to explain why the point you are supporting with research is the correct one.

The Conclusion

As research essays have a beginning, so do they have an ending, generally called a conclusion. While the main purpose of an introduction is to get the reader’s attention and to explain what the essay will be about, the goal of a conclusion is to bring the reader to a satisfying point of closure. In other words, a good conclusion does not merely “end” an essay; it wraps things up.

It is usually a good idea to make a connection in the conclusion of your essay with the introduction, particularly if you began your essay with something like a relevant anecdote or a rhetorical question. You may want to restate your thesis, though you don’t necessarily have to restate your thesis in exactly the same words you used in your introduction. It is also usually not a good idea to end your essay with obvious concluding cues or clichéd phrases like “in conclusion.”

Conclusions are similar to introductions on a number of different levels. First, like introductions, they are important since they leave definite “impressions” on the reader—in this case, the important “last” impression. Second, conclusions are almost as difficult to write and revise as introductions. Because of this, be sure to take extra time and care to revise your conclusion.

“Works Cited” or “Reference” Information

If we were to give you one and only one “firm and definite” rule about research essay writing, it would be that you must have a section following the conclusion of your essay that explains to the reader where the evidence you cite comes from. This information is especially important in academic essays since academic readers are keenly interested in the evidence that supports your point.

If you’re following the Modern Language Association (MLA) rules for citing evidence, this last section is called “Works Cited.” If you’re following the American Psychological Association (APA) rules, it’s called “References.” In either case, this is the place where you list the full citation of all the evidence you quote or paraphrase in your research essay. Note that for both MLA and APA style, research you read but didn’t actually use in your research essay is not included.  Your teacher might want you to provide a “bibliography” with your research essay that does include this information, but this is not the same thing.

Frankly, one of the most difficult aspects of this part of the research essay is the formatting—alphabetizing, getting the spacing right, italicizing titles or putting them in quotes, periods here, commas there, and so forth. But if you have been keeping and adding to an annotated bibliography as you have progressed through the process of research, this part of the essay can actually be merely a matter of checking your sources and “copying” the citation information from the word processing file where you have saved your annotated bibliography and “pasting” it into the word processing file where you are saving your research essay.

Whether you’re writing in MLA, APA, or another style, it is important to pay close attention to standard conventions for citing sources when you cite your research in order to avoid plagiarism, or the practice of using someone else’s words without acknowledging the source. See chapter “Chapter 21: Writing with Sources,” for more information on incorporating sources in your paper and avoiding some of the most common pitfalls of attributing information. You can also visit the Bass Library’s LibGuides for MLA Style and APA Style.

Revising and Editing

Before you submit your paper, you should revise and polish it. You might reorganize your paper’s structure or revise for unity and cohesion, ensuring that each element in your paper flows into the next logically and naturally. You will also make sure that your paper uses an appropriate and consistent tone.

These final steps in the academic research writing process are not necessarily the linear final steps. You might find that reorganizing your paper’s structure reveals new ways of thinking about your topic, for example, and these new ways of thinking might open up further avenues of research, or even additional research needs. In this case, you might return to the research phase of this process, find additional sources, and engage them as you did your other sources. As described earlier in this chapter, the academic writing process is not linear, so don’t reject returning to previous steps in the process in order to refine and develop a more effective paper that you can feel confident in.

Once you feel confident in the strength of your writing, edit your paper for proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and formatting.

Works Cited

 “Time Management Map.” 10 Really Cool Mind Mapping Examples,

https://mindmapsunleashed.com/10-really-cool-mind-mapping-

examples-you-will-learn-from, Accessed 20 Feb. 2022.