My Struggles in Writing Research Papers as a Student Free Essay Example

In, “Why are students coming into college poorly prepared to write?” (2015), sources claimed that 61% of high school teachers said their students have never written a paper that was more than five pages. Thus, about 20% of incoming college students are required to take remedial writing classes. Furthermore, teachers also reported they seldom required students to criticize an argument, define a problem and propose a solution, or detect and fix writing errors. A high school teacher of mine once said, “If you can’t think, you can’t write.” Initially, I thought the concept was nonsense.

I have always thought writing comes naturally and should not be practiced nor taught. I survived my first three years of high school with this principle. Until my senior year, my Advanced Placement (AP) teacher required each student to write a ten-page research paper about one prevalent issue in the country. My last two semesters felt like nightmare. It did not matter how much data I had or knowledgeable I was of my topic, I still could not expand my writing to last ten pages, as required.

Only then, I realized the struggles of writing research paper. Through my experiences, writing a research paper was challenging because of my difficulties with approaching a topic with less biases and assumptions, formulating constructive theses, and citing sources.

When my high school teacher introduced her, “golden rule,” I regarded it as a mere implication of how her thoughts and ideas centered around literature. It felt ridiculous and it deemed nothing but absurd to depend my writing skills to it.

Truthfully, all writing assignments I did had a mix of my perspective of the topic. I never had a paper that was completely composed by facts and evidences. Little did I know, practicing such habit would cause trouble and consistent struggle throughout my writing experiences. When I was gathering data for my topic, I found myself having a challenging time using them into my paper. Often, I had to fight the urge to argue and debate what I read and heard. Because of my biases, it was not easy for me to accept research-based evidences that were presented. Instead of writing notes, I challenged every bit of information which caused me to spend most of my time on it.

Moreover, like what students my age experience, I struggled to formulate a concise thesis statement. In effect, I failed to justify my disposition about the issue and convey the main argument to the readers. Writing the thesis statement for my research paper was extremely troublesome. Whenever I wrote my introduction, my writing ceases at some point because I would notice either the introduction does not fit well with the thesis I had in mind, or the thesis does not have any correlation to my prior sentences. Because of that, I had to start all over again and find another way to make my paper efficient. I also found it challenging and strenuous to organize and put all my thought in one simple idea. Subsequently, the arguments and evidences I presented in my paper did not match to my thesis because they were either very broad or too specific. Therefore, my attempt of assertion was not competent enough because my supporting details were not as credible as it should have been.

Lastly, out of all the challenges I had to confront while writing my research paper, citing sources was the major struggle I had to encounter. For the intention of making my paper authentic and plausible, I wanted to include my sources. Since the Guam Education Board adopted the Common Core Standard in 2012, I thought I would graduate from high school with the necessary skills to eschew remedial classes at the University of Guam, however, it was not the case. Throughout my English classes in high school, the core focuses of the teachers were fixated on grammar, vocabulary, reading skills, comprehension of literature pieces, and studying the ancient English language and how it developed into its modern language now. Though some of my teachers gave introductory lessons about the proper way of citing, there were never any exercises nor handouts to give further information and instructions how to do it. There was once a situation when I was berated by my teacher for not citing my sources properly. She said, and I quote, “Just don’t cite anymore since you don’t know. It won’t do you good anyway.” I thought making mistakes would make them realize that students were not learning enough. I guess diverting from their typical lesson plan is such an inconvenience that they would rather have their students not learn an essential skill.

As an ultimate point, writing research paper is not as easy as it appears to be. Even though it is a piece of writing that is based on previous works by others, there are certain elements that many people, students specifically, face. In my case, I struggled a lot with the way I gathered evidences and arguments because I frequently contradicted everything I read and heard. Also, the lack of skills to organize and associate my ideas into a clear statement became a negative impact to my writing. Not to mention, failure to give credits and disclose my sources felt inappropriate. Altogether, the difficulties that made writing a research paper a struggle for me were my biases which intercepted the way I accepted information, the inability to construct a clear thesis statement, and lack of skills to appropriately cite sources.

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