Drafting, Revising, and Formatting a Research Project

Writing Quick Start: Drafting, Revising, and Formatting a Research Project

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IN THIS CHAPTER YOU WILL LEARN TO

organize and draft your research project,
avoid plagiarism by understanding what to document and giving credit to all your sources,
integrate sources into your research paper effectively with signal phrases (attributions) and in-text citations,
follow the proper guidelines for integrating quotations into your research project,
revise and prepare a final draft of your research project, and
document your sources in MLA or APA format.

WRITING QUICK START

uppose you have been assigned to write a research project for a mass communication course on a topic related to human communication involving two or more people. You decide to write about issue-oriented art, examining how artists make political or social statements through their art. After reviewing numerous sources, you decided to focus on one artist — Banksy. You drafted a working thesis, examined Bansky’s works, and synthesized commentaries on and evaluations of Banksy’s art. Now you are ready to revise your thesis, organize your ideas, and begin drafting your essay.

Based on what you have learned about drafting and revising from earlier chapters and from your instructor, write a paragraph describing how you will follow through on the process of drafting and revising your research project. Also consider how writing and revising a research project might differ from writing a paper that does not rely on outside sources.

In Chapter 22 you learned how to plan a paper with sources and how to choose and evaluate useful information. Chapter 23 gave you advice on finding sources, taking notes, making sense of information from sources, and synthesizing sources as you prepare to write your paper. This chapter continues the research process by showing you how to organize, draft, revise, and document a paper using sources. Figure 24.1 presents an overview of the process.

FIGURE 24.1 Writing a Paper Using Sources

SCENES FROM COLLEGE AND THE WORKPLACE

For a business management course, you are required to research a Fortune 500 company and write a report on its history and current profitability. At least two of your sources must be from the Internet.
For a social problems course, you are asked to identify a social problem in your area, research the causes of the problem, and report your findings in a research paper.
As human resources director of a publishing company, you are asked to research editorial salaries in the publishing industry and submit a report that your company will use to decide whether to change salary levels for editors.