How to Draft an Academic Paper
This Resource Page will help you:
- Learn the steps in drafting an academic paper or standalone literature review.
Introduction
Note: the instructions on this page focus on the following types of academic papers: research papers and standalone literature reviews.
Drafting an academic paper involves three main steps:
- Understanding the general structure of the text genre (e.g., research paper, literature review, etc.)
- Creating an outline
- Drafting/writing the paper
We will look at each of these stages in detail.
Step 1: Understand the Structure of Academic Papers
Research Papers
These papers typically focus on the results of original research. This is their structure:
Here you give the background information on your topic, include a problem statement, briefly contextualize your topic in the literature, and outline your objective/thesis statement/research questions.
To learn more, check How to Write Introductions.
This is sometimes included in the Introduction for academic journal articles. Here you review the relevant literature on the topic before eventually identifying a gap that your study aims to fill.
To learn more, check What is a Literature Review? and How to Prepare a Literature Review.
Here you give details on your research design, participants, data collection procedures, data analysis techniques, etc. (i.e. how you conducted your research).
This is where you share the findings of your research, often organized into themes. In more quantitative papers, you will find tables and charts in this section, while qualitative studies will have a lot of participants’ quotes in this section.
In this section, you generally zoom out to discuss the meaning of the findings altogether, their connections to the previous literature, and the ultimate answers to your research questions. This section will take on a more narrative style than the numbers and charts found in the quantitative Results section and more analysis of participants' perspectives in qualitative texts.
Finally, you summarize the key points and then discuss larger implications in the Conclusion. This is where writers often include the study’s limitations, areas for future research, and recommendations for practice.
To learn more, check How to Write Conclusions.
Standalone Literature Reviews
These papers are based on secondary sources. The entire paper is a literature review and the data is the literature itself. This is their structure:
Much like in Academic Papers, give the reader an overview of the topic and the rationale or objective of the Literature Review, ending with the research questions. If you need to give more background information than there is room for in the Intro, you can create separate background sections to follow the Intro.
To learn more, check How to Write Introductions.
Because the entire paper is a Literature Review, we don’t need a separate Literature Review section here. Thus, jump straight to the Methods, including information on the retrieval of relevant studies (databases, key words), inclusion and exclusion criteria (limits on date of publication, topic, text type, etc.), and then briefly introduce the studies that you did include and the categories that you will use to organize them in your Literature Review.
This section looks like the Literature Review section of the Academic Paper, except here the literature IS your data. You can, again, organize this section by theme and outline the focus, methods, and results of each study before comparing, contrasting, integrating, and critiquing them.
Zoom out and look at your ‘findings’ all together. How have they answered your research questions? What are the similarities that you found in the literature? Any unresolved debates? Any remaining gaps and areas for future research? You will continue to do comparison, contrast, synthesis and critique here, but now across all your themes instead of one-by-one.
Quickly highlight the key takeaways from your Literature Review before focusing on larger implications, recommendations, predictions, etc. You can also discuss the limitations of your own Literature Review here (as opposed to the limitations of the literature in general, which fits into the Discussion above).
To learn more, check How to Write Conclusions.
To learn more about Literature Reviews, check What is a Literature Review? and How to Prepare a Literature Review.
Other Types of Academic Papers
Here are some Resource Pages of other text types that you will probably find in your courses at СƵ, so take a look for their specific organizational patterns:
- What is Reflective Writing?
- How to Write Reflectively
- What is an Annotated Bibliography?
- How to Write an Annotated Bibliography
- How to Write a Research Proposal
Step 2: Create an Outline
Always start with an outline before drafting your paper – it will make your drafting and revising phases much easier.
Beyond just creating an outline for the main sections of your paper (described in the section above), try to develop a more detailed outline that shows different sub-headings, points, and supporting arguments within each section.
Consult your outline continually during the writing process and check it again at the completion of a rough draft to make sure you included all relevant and important points. At the same time, keep in mind that your outline will evolve during the writing process as you read more, come up with new ideas, and drop old ones, so some flexibility with your outline is also advised.
Here is an example of a .
Step 3: Draft / Write
In the drafting/writing process, the order that you write in depends on you.
Some people like to start at the beginning (Intro) and then write in the same order as the outline until the Conclusion. Others prefer starting with the main findings and then writing out from there, jumping around to write different sections and sometimes even ending with the Introduction once all the details are filled in. Try experimenting with different approaches to see which writing sequence works best for you.
The following Resource Pages give some guidance on the writing process, starting with the most basic level of the paragraph:
Next, these Resource Pages can help you draft different sections of your paper, from Introductions to Literature Reviews to Conclusions.
When zooming in on specific sections or paragraphs of your paper, these Resource Pages describe more mechanical aspects such as communicating directly to your readers, using transitions, attending to flow, and bringing out your own voice in the writing:
Beyond your own voice, these last Resource Pages give instruction on how to integrate other articles and texts into your writing as well as how to use APA style:
Example of a Standalone Literature Review
This is a full literature review paper written by an СƵ student on the topic of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) and Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) in Writing Centers (WC). Throughout the paper, you will find several annotations. Yellow annotations refer to the structure of the paper, its content and how ideas are developed. Purple annotations refer to writing elements and language elements (e.g., paragraphs, paraphrases, summaries, quotes, stance and voice, cohesion, etc.).