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I have had the privilege of being an educator for almost thirty years, and involved in pedagogy for more than 3 dozen years. During that time I have taught grades K-5, high school, college prep and most recently college and university aged students. For me, it was a constant struggle keeping learning fun, interactive and rewarding for each pupil. As my teaching focused on older students, making the gradual change from young to older, I noticed a common concern that each maturity level of kids became overwhelmed by: how to write a research paper.

Initially, I thought nothing of the reaction I received when asking for such assignments to be completed. At first, I simply defined the usual groaning as a student's dislike of my love for take home work. But, what I was dismissing and defining as being disgruntled, actually had much more significance; these students were sometimes downright panic stricken when they heard of an assigned "research paper".

Worry about the something different, being buried in heavy tomes, and not having a clue how to brainstorm research paper ideas was frequent. college-age students envisioning a mountain to climb, because they didn't know how to write a research paper, rarely truly believed me that in the wider scope of things, completing a dissertation, even one that was ten to thirty pages long, was barely a blip on the radar, compared to much more significant, life impacting decisions they'd eventually face as full fledged adults. Those consolations fell on a non-responsive audience usually.

Unable to look towards the bigger picture or the long term, their immediate reality was a looming time limit that could only be met by participating in an enterprise they weren't interested in, that conflicted with their extracurricular activities or that made them uneasy facing the unknown: how to write a research paper, and do it right - not just to pass or fail, but earn the marks that high schools, universities, colleges and graduate schools, both public and private, hold in high regard.

When I first began teaching at the university level I planned to give a semester-long specification to write a research paper on a(n) issue of each student's most passionate pursuit.

The dean of our department warned me that this would cause me many headaches. He said that even at a college level, simply hearing that you have to write a research paper usually sent many students into a counter-productive funk.

Determined, I ignored his best intentions and ventured into research paper neverland. The first day of the semester I handed out the outline for the course. This included the name of the selected text, the dates of the tests and the expectation that everyone would write a research paper.

I explained that the reviews as well as the participation in classroom discussions would be a majority of the final score and the research paper would be the other third. I handed out time lines and deadlines for the essay. I wanted the topic they chose as well as a rough briefing completed in the first 14 days and then various progress reports throughout the semester.

My plan and execution of my set schedule "forced" the paper to be done in small chunks, rather than the typical giant one, when many students, kids or adults, sit down at the last minute and try to accomplish weeks worth of work in one marathon of study. Unnecessary tension and nervousness in my way of thinking. And with the basics of how to effectively write a research paper tackled in small sections throughout the class, semester or year depending on subject and / or institution, initial panic about even the most simple undertaking, research paper ideas, seemed less and less an issue of worry .

Whether narrowing down a long list of passages formatted neat and succinctly summarizing research paper ideas, writing each necessary ingredient, keeping each research paper properly formatted for an educator who was known to be very picky about such details, or pacing themselves to guarantee paper completion by the designated time, when deconstructed into smaller sections, how to write a research paper fears slowly, but surely disappear. Stay tuned for the next article: Research Paper Ideas, the Easy Way.