Students often focus on revising the details of their papers, when revising the organization of their papers should be the priority. Once the substance of your paper’s argument has been developed, make sure that readers will find the paper coherent.

When researching, it’s easy to get caught up in the process of research, tracking down as much information that you can find. Scholars, though, don’t document information for its own sake, but to support their research question. By asking the right questions, you can be directed to the information you need to answer them.

When writing a paper, your first task is to find a research question that will lead to a research problem worth solving. First, find a topic specific enough to research it in the time that you have allotted to complete the project. You are looking for a right-sized question worth investigating. A thesis question, for example, should be bigger and more complex than a short undergraduate paper.

No matter what your stage in life, critical thinking skills allow you to think more deeply. When conducting research and writing for an academic audience, critical reasoning is required to interpret your findings.

Critical-thinking skills connect and organize ideas. Three types distinguish them: analysis, inference, and evaluation.

Active learning means understanding the subject matter your studying through different activities. The efforts allow you to evaluate the content rather than just memorizing the theory.

When you’ve identified a source that’s of interest and relevance to your research, you should subject it to critical evaluation. As you review it, ask yourself why the work was needed, what its analysis was, and how the author interpreted the results. Most importantly, what’s your interpretation of the results?