The Importance of Research
By: Jessica Lage


Research papers are some of the greatest pieces of writing on the planet. The point of a research paper, no matter the subject, is to explore, support, and share a new perspective that either expands an idea further or to challenge the status quo. Sometimes, people overlook how important it is to have new or different perspectives to challenge traditional ways of thinking. It’s amazing how much society will change to new information that’s been published. Without new ideas, we would think that proteins were genetic information, Freud was the god of psychology, or that dinosaurs never existed, and for many young children, that idea’s devastating. Unfortunately, research papers get a bad reputation for being distant, boring, and tasteless. It is heartbreaking; the most passionate young researcher, left without an audience because of a generic paper. People argue that it’s the job of news sources to spread information about significant breakthroughs in the realm of academia, many sources often skew newly released information in order to draw in readers and subscribers and in turn can spread false information. They can’t translate research and rarely comment on the significance of new information. It’s important to know how to captivate an audience without using a middle man. Therefore, it is important that an author know how to gain readers through grammar, organization, and an appropriate tone of voice.

The one of the most important parts of any good piece of writing is clarity, which can be maintained through standard use of the English language and coherent organization. Standard grammar is constant across writing and should not vary in a nonfiction piece of writing, especially a research paper. By practising proper grammar, an author allows readers to be able to understand their work. People don't have the patience to sit and read through a paper riddled with grammatical errors. The more difficult part to keep in mind is organization. In analytical writing there is a general formula for this, however, many writers struggle with the order of those arguments. The best way to do this is to put the second strongest arguments in the beginning, the weakest in the middle and the strongest last. In scientific papers, there is also a standard order to a research paper. According to an article by Thomas Perneger and Patricia Hudelson, “The basic structure of a typical research paper is the sequence of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (sometimes abbreviated as IMRAD).

Each section addresses a different objective. The authors state: (i) the problem they intend to address—in other terms, the research question—in the Introduction; (ii) what they did to answer the question in the Methods section; (iii) what they observed in the Results section; and (iv) what they think the results mean in the Discussion.” (Oxford Academic) The really tricky part, in my experience, is making sure to include all the tiny and almost insignificant details of your research in your paper. This is just in case a future researcher wants to continue or validate your work. Bouncing off of that, in order for someone to base their ideas or work off of your writing, they need to be interested in it first.

The next most important thing to keep in mind is your audience. Writing for a scientific journal versus the general population are two very different things. When writing for a scientific journal, the language is extremely formal: you can’t use singular personal pronouns, contractions, and numbers that value less than 100 are exclusively written out. In a graded journal article I wrote in my own biology class, “Flower preservatives help prolong the visual appeal of flowers”, the audience was for a hypothetical science journal. After reviewing where points were lost the most, I found that I had lost points for using the pronoun “I” instead of “we”. “I chose to graph the average water level for each day of observations because it would be an indication of how much water was absorbed on average for each of the two groups of stems.” The sentence is completely fine on its own, but scientific journals will take the error into account when their choosing whether or not to let the paper be published.

The general population tends to be more lenient when it comes to grammar and style, but they’ll want reading material to be more personal and generally more entertaining. Susan Williams, Robins Williams widow, published an article in the journal of theAmerican Academy of Neurology, she writes about her experience of her husband suffering the disease and his subsequent suicide. In the article she uses incredibly personal language to describe the deterioration of her husband's mind and uses personal pronouns and imagery to capture the reader's attention (Neurology) . Which is exactly the point of a journal article.

As stated before papers are published and created to stretch the mind of the population to challenge what we already know. It’s too easy to dismiss these piece as boring, tedious, and repetitive. People tend to relate to things that are familiar to them, like celebrities, popular books, or current events. Academic papers tend to not grasp at the general population. However, when allowed, papers that become popular through being published or spread between social circles, they become popular topics, for research and conservation alike, and soon enough, they become common knowledge. From there, they can change the way society works. Whether you’re allowed to write for academia or the media, successful writing can have monumental effects on the world around you, for better or worse.