"The Curious Researcher": 5 helpful tips

One tip that I thought would be helpful is the "Steps to writing your research essay," on page 6. I think it would be helpful because it breaks up each step by week, for a total of 5 weeks. Even though sometimes people dont have 5 weeks to write an essay, it's not saying that you can't combine some of the weeks, and write the essay in say 2.5 weeks, an amount of time most professors give you to write any essay.

Another tip I think would be useful was on the bottom of page 5. Ballenger says, "But if you're dreading the work ahead of you, then your instict might be to procrastinate, to put it off until the week its due. That would be a mistake, course. If you try to rush through the research and the writing, you're absolutely guaranteed to hate the experience..." I think this is very helpful, especially to me, because I, like many others, am a horrible procrastinator. In high school, I put writing essays off until the last possible minute. And for high school, that was ok. Nothing was really that hard for me, and it definitely didn't count for most of your grade for the entire course. But, unfortunetly, my habits carried over with me to college. I am still a procrastinator, but I'm trying really hard to get better at homework, and especially writing essays for this course. I always think I'm going to get a bad grade, because writing has never been my strong point.

Another thing that I think would be helpful is the "Questions to Ask Your Instructor about the Research Assignment," on page 11. I think this is helpful because a lot of students are confused over the assignment sometimes. A lot of professors wants formal writing, but some don't. Some want you to use the pronoun I and a lot of others don't. It really all depends on the professor, and I think students just need to ask questions about the assignment if they have them, and not worry about looking stupid, which is the case a lot of the time.

On page 15, Ballenger writes, "But factual writing doesn't have to be dull." I think this is helpful because I really think just chugging out facts is boring. I find it irritating to write these kinds of papers, especially in high school. Everyone else in the class was writing on the same topic, with mainly the same availability to resources, and then I end up producing a paper that has the same facts as everyone else. I think its boring to just look up facts and statistics and put them in an essay. I think it would be especially boring for a professor to read. I think Ballenger should expand on how to write a research paper thats not boring.

A final thing that I think would be helpful is Figure 1, on page 13, titled, "Why Write Research Essays?" It explains informal research essays and formal research essays and compares the two. I think this is helpful because some people, myself included, don't think informal and formal writing have anything in common. And its good to know that they do have things in common.