Finding the Right Focus in Paper Writing

I think quite a lot of you have this problem as it’s a major trend with my students; lack of focus in paper writing.  I’m not talking about procrastination; I’m talking about writing a paper and not having the focus to see the paper in your minds eye from beginning to end.

For anyone who has been able to accomplish this clear foresight, you’ll agree it’s incredibly useful to produce both a high quality and efficiently written paper. Once I get into a focused paper writing mode I can usually write 10 pages an hour without much difficulty and revisions.  There are 5 important keys that I teach to my students in my online tutoring program and I’d like to pass on a simple overview of those 5 keys for you now.

Research foresight

If you’ve read some of my articles you’d know that I am a true believer in the ‘paper pre-launch check list.’  Not only will this give you the proper focus for your paper but it will also allow you to lay everything out in a single place and enable you to take a snapshot of your paper in its entirety.  Instead of going through the entire launch process here, you can sign up for my newsletter on academic study skills and get the full course component automatically emailed to you.

Review your paper pre-launch check list with others

This is a crucial and usually overlooked key of the paper writing process.  You MUST have somebody else look over what you are about to write before you write it.  This is crucially important because if your research is bad, you’ll have wasted time producing a paper that you won’t have a chance in hell of actually doing well on.  You can hire a tutor or get a study buddy to look it over for you.  Ask for a straight up critical analysis and constructive criticism and be ready to make revisions.

Prepare your writing environment

Where do you write the best?  I personally love writing at 24 hour coffee shops as they have nice background noise and I usually do some of my best writing after midnight.  Find a writing environment and make sure not to poison the space with socializing.  This can be disastrous to your paper focus.

Have a concrete outline

Once you’ve put together an adequate paper pre-launch sequence you should have a good paper outline ready to use.  Go through each step and make sure you don’t get distracted by what I’ll call ’secondary thoughts.’  In essence, don’t make revisions, that’s for later, right now you should just be getting your initial vision on to the page.  Revisions can always be done later.

Revise and optimize

Review what you have written and think critically about your paper.  Where are the holes?  What assumptions am I making?  Have I covered all the relevant points?  If you take the time to run through your paper with the same focus you had in writing it you should only have to go through it once before it’s A worthy.

If you’d like to know more about paper writing or are interested in picking up a tutor that can do all the research for you, go check out my tutoring program.