Infographic: A Quick Workflow Overview to the Research Essay Writing Process
I’ve been slowly turning my course lectures on research methods for essay writing into a series of infographics for the general public. You don’t need to be a student to benefit from following a workflow for researching and writing on a topic of interest, workflows can streamline the amount of time you spend on your writing, and can help you stay on task by keeping you in dialogue with your own goals for your written projects.
Regardless of the subject domain, argumentative research writing generally follows at least four steps, with some steps being iterative (in that you are likely to have to adjust and go back through steps as necessary).
The steps in this workflow are:
- discovery of the problem or topic
- collecting your data to explore your topic
- analyzing the information you retrieved
- writing and citing your research paper
Although some folks use a five-step or even six-step approach to argumentative research writing, I’ve combined the activities of identifying your topic and defining your plan to research it into one step.
This infographic gives you a quick overview of the process involved in researching and writing about a topic. At the bottom of this chart, you’ll find some free online resources to help you get started with your research writing project. I will be releasing more infographics from my lectures, including graphics on essay structure and finding and evaluating information resources. This graphic is free to download and distribute and I hope it helps you in your next research writing project.
For a high-resolution download of this infographic, please visit:
You can also visit my personal site to see more visualizations and graphics that support writing and literacy here:
