Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper

“Writing is hard. It requires us to use multiple parts of the brain in an improbable symphony of high-strain effort. Our hippocampus summons relevant facts; the prefrontal cortex tries to organize them. A brain region known as Broca’s area helps us to narrate in a familiar inner voice; our verbal working memory stores and manipulates the narration as we transfer it to the page. Meanwhile, our brain recruits our spatial working memory, which evolved to track our location in physical space, to orient our words within a whole.” [Newport, Cal. “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?” Annals of Inquiry. The New Yorker, October 3, 2024]

This quote reveals why the simple act of writing can be a struggle for any of us. It is actually a complex endeavor that requires multiple areas of our brain to manage specific tasks simultaneously. This guide is intended to help college students successfully navigate the process of writing a quality research paper in the social and behavioral sciences. The goal is to help you overcome any struggles with writing you may have by describing, in plain language, how each section of a college-level research paper should be prepared and structured, along with offering practical strategies for thinking about how to write effectively and with confidence.

See also: Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments