Free Essay Help: Composing A Good Paper Without Effort

Composing an essay can be easy if you know a few tricks, especially a research-based paper. What I think is the best method for writing any type of essay is to compose what I call a "research outline."

A research outline, is an outline wherein you have transposed all the quotes and paraphrases you want to use with citations. With citations is important, because you don't want to try to find a quote later that came from a book or article and have to sift back through all of that stuff to find that one great quote your entire paper hinges upon, do you?

First, collect all your research. Make a stack of all the books you want to use quotes from and keep a file folder full of all the articles you want to use as well, with citations stapled to the front of them so that you can easily access your citation material to use in your end notes and in your works cited page. Every time you type a quote into the research outline, you need to cite the quote - with the page number, author, a snippet of the article title and any other information that you might need should you vary the introductions to your sentences - your signal phrases. For example, you might say, "As Smith notes," in one citation but in another citation you might only say, "In his wonderful article titled "New Discoveries in UFOs in the Year 2015," one author noted that "quote," - see, then you would heed the author's name and the page number It came from.

Second Step

Type every single quote into your research outline that you want to use. They do not have to be in order for now - we will do that later.

Now, print out these pages, once you finish and look at what you have compiled. Read it closely one time through.

Last Step

Now, as you skim back over the material, take out a good colored pen and write beside every paragraph a one, two, or three or write "beg," "Mid," or "end," to signal to yourself whether the quote should come early or later in the paper.

Now, rearrange all your quotes until is sounds as if it reads like a paper would read if it had your authorial voice to hold it together. Now, all you need is to add your voice, and introduce your quotes and cite them in proper format.