Research writing can be roughly defined as the type of writing that is based on certain research, which it aims to interpret and explain.

If you do good research writing, you can improve your academic performance. In a school or college, this can help you get better grades and make a good impression on your teachers and peers. In a professional setting, better research writing can mean good news for your career.

In this post, we are going to be looking at some tips and pointers that you can follow to do better research writing.

1. Be sure to use a formal and professional tone

The first thing that you need to keep in mind about research writing is that you have to maintain a professional and formal tone throughout. Research writing is a type of academic writing – and as such, it has to follow the same types of rules.

You should never use a casual or formal tone in your research write-ups. They ruin the look of the paper and also make it look ineffective and unauthoritative.

Here are some tips that you can follow in this regard:

• Avoid using slang words in the content.

• Avoid using colloquial terms and phrases in the content.

• Avoid any type of funny or crude examples or references (this is something that you can get away with when writing other types of casual content like blogs).

• Avoid using first-person and second-person language

2. Ensure that all your arguments and explanations are segregated

When you are writing a research paper, you have to follow a certain progression. You have to separate and segregate your arguments and explanations so that they don’t appear weak or confusing to the reader.

When you are elaborating on research, there are many different facets and aspects to said research that you have to talk about. Should those different points become merged or coalesced, the integrity of the paper as a whole can be compromised.

The best way to ensure that this problem never occurs is to organize your paper using headings and subheadings. You should create headings for the main parts of the paper and then divide those headings further into subheadings.

Another benefit of this – apart from the segregation and easy understandability of the paper – is that your reader will be able to go to the part of the paper that they want to without having to scan through it all.

3. Use evidence to substantiate all your points and arguments

One thing to remember about research writing is that all the content you write has to be backed up by evidence. Unlike other types of content, there is no scope for adding thoughts and opinions in a research paper.

Since the purpose of research writing is to explain and elaborate research material, all the content in there has to be data-driven. Whenever you make a point or address an argument, base it on evidence and data from your findings.

All the points have to be decisive and to the point. Your language shouldn’t be tentative – something that tends to happen if you present baseless or unsubstantiated points in your writing.

Here is an example of a passage containing baseless and tentative information:

There have been many studies conducted on the world population. There are probably more than 5 billion people on the planet. This is something that we can obviously guess by adding up the populations of all the countries. India, China, and the USA alone add up to around 3 billion.

This looks horrible. It’s a bunch of guesswork aggravated by a poor tone of writing. The same information, when backed by evidence and written with a proper tone, looks something like this:

Numerous studies have been conducted on the world population. According to the renowned online source “Worldometer,” there are 8 billion people on the planet as of 2022. According to the same source, the population of India in 2023 is 1,428,627,663, the population of China is 1,425,671,352, and the population of the USA is 339,996,563. These three countries alone add up to 3,194,295,578, which is approximately 39.93% of the entire world population.

4. Make sure that your writing is grammatically perfect

Maintaining grammatical perfection is important for the quality and integrity of all types of content. It is even more important when it comes to academic content and even more so in research papers.

Grammar errors and spelling mistakes go right against the very grain of academic writing. These types of imperfections mar the formal and professional tone that the write-up has to necessarily contain. Here are some things that you can do to ensure that your writing is grammatically perfect:

• When writing the paper, you should be actively careful about not making any errors. In other words, you should deliberate what you’re writing and watch every word as you pen it down.

• When you’re done writing, you should proofread and check your content a few times. By proofreading it, you will be able to find any errors that you’ve made unknowingly. A good tip that we usually proffer in this regard is to not proofread the content as soon as you are done writing it. Rather, you should wait for some time and forget what you’ve written a little. The errors will stand out more clearly that way.

• Once you are done with all that, you should run a grammar check on the paper using an online tool.

5. Make sure your content is unique and plagiarism-free

There is perhaps nothing more harmful to a piece of research writing than plagiarism. Once again, it is bad in all types of content, but when it comes to academic write-ups like research papers, it becomes worse.

Since the topic of this post is how you can improve your academic performance with better research writing, we won’t exactly delve into the consequences of plagiarism and everything. Rather, we’re just going to give you some pointers on how you can avoid it and eliminate it should it occur inadvertently.

• Plagiarism can become an issue right from the research phase. In other words, if you don’t perform research properly and take your information from a single source, then you could copy the tone and style of that one source without realizing it. To avoid doing that, you have to spread your research out on multiple authoritative sources rather than just a few.

• When you want to take some information directly from a source, you should take care to use your own words rather than copying the existing material verbatim. This will help you avoid direct plagiarism.

• Last but not least, when you’re done with everything, you should scan the entire content for plagiarism using an online plagiarism check. These are basically online tools that are made to check the provided content against existing content on the Internet. If there is any sentence or passage in the paper that exactly matches existing material, it is pointed out.

Conclusion

And that brings our article to an end.

You can improve your academic performance by honing your research writing skills. We’ve talked about some of the important things that you should keep in mind during the process.

To quickly recap, you should be careful about maintaining a formal and professional tone in the paper. Along with that, you should also make sure that the arguments you address in the paper are all segregated and backed up by proper evidence.

Ensuring grammatical perfection is also necessary in a research paper. There are different steps that you can take to do that – which we’ve discussed in detail in the post above.

Lastly, you should keep an eye out for plagiarism in the paper. If there is any, and you can find that out using an online plagiarism checker tool, you should eliminate it before finalizing the write-up.