Writing A Perfectly Researched Article
“Do I have something to tell my target audience?” – that is the question from which starts a deeply researched article that every site wants to publish. If you’re writing articles for a long time, you probably know your target audience and what they are interested in. If you don’t then our first recommendation is to start analyzing it.
“Do I have fresh original/innovative research?” – another one, because editors and reviewers are looking for new information, a fresh look at the issue/problem that their audience has. If you are an expert that has original data, but you don’t know how to get the message across to the audience, you can hire professional article writers.
What is a perfectly researched article?
Professional article writers adhere to the following criteria:
- A good article should contain the right topic, clear structure, and detailed data;
- The article writer should write for a target audience, so, at first, he should know it;
- The article should contain cites from credible research sources only;
- Writers should add fresh research or original data to the article;
- And for further success, the author should choose the right journal to publish.
Now suggest we move on to the proven 4-step process for writing a well-developed article. This process has been verified by a successful team of article writers with good expertise.
What 4-steps should you follow?
Step 1 – Choose your topic, do research, make notes
The first step for a successful in-demand article is to choose the right topic, do research and make some records and notes that will be the basics of a future article. We are estimating this step as 50% of success.
How to choose the right topic? Follow your interests in the field and consider the target audience’s interests. If you choose the topic you are interested in, the process of writing will be easier and more inspiring. And the opposite – if you concentrate only on what you need to write for someone, you will stretch out the process, and sabotage the task.
On the other hand, you should choose a topic that you can find information for. The topic should not be too narrow or too broad because it makes the search process difficult.
Making notes means that in the process of searching it is good to fix your thoughts and ideas to use them in the article. While choosing the topic you can already come up with the article’s structure, what data you need to find to sustain your arguments, and many other useful tips for yourself.
Step 2 – Know your audience and prepare carefully
Who are you trying to help with your research?
Some crucial mistakes with identifying your audience:
– to think that everyone wants to know about the subject of your article and your target audience potentially is all people that can read;
– to think that everyone knows everything about your topic;
– to think that you do not need to analyze the audience you write for at all.
Here are the main questions that you should think about:
- Who your text should reach and why?
- Do they have expertise in what you will write about? If they are not, what level of awareness do the readers have?
What problems about the subject of your article do they have?
List of recommendations that you should consider:
- Shortlist a few target platforms. It helps you to speak with the audience in the language that they get used to. Moreover, it helps you write clearly and use a certain writing style that your audience will estimate.
- View your article from the reader’s perspective: what do they want to know more exactly? What have they already known? And what is worth their attention?
- Do you need to use jargon or reduce its number? Target audience analysis helps to use the correct terminology to make your content more relatable for readers.
- Make your article engaging: write it with one goal – to help readers to solve their problems and don’t make text uninteresting with dry facts.
- Do you follow the article’s topic and goal during the article? Сome back to this question regularly while working on it. Be specific.
- Are you citing credible research sources? You should check all of the sources you use before sending the article to get published. The introduction and discussion parts of the article, which take a massive part of it, rely on external sources of information that have already been published. It is necessary to extract and cite this information from appropriate, credible, recent, and relevant literature to support your arguments.
Step 3 – Select the right platform to get published
You haven’t written an article yet but you are choosing the journal or site where to publish. Yes, that’s correct.
How could you write an article following all of the recommendations if you have no idea what site/journal you will publish your article to? Why redo your article now when you can write it according to the requirements a little bit later?
We understand that it can be difficult to decide what journal you want to publish in before you start writing your article, that’s why we suppose that the other option to make this decision is when you’ve already been working on article writing.
Thinking about a specific platform to get published while you are working on an article have a huge benefits, such as:
- The basic advantage is that you can know in advance whether your research fits the needs, goals, and topics of the chosen journal. This knowledge can save you and your editor time.
- When you are preparing an article you can keep in mind all of the requirements of your source: word limit, presence or absence of certain elements in the text of the article, the maximum number of pictures or tables that are allowed, or the maximum number of references you can include.
- Another important advantage is that the goals and scope of the journal will give you an accurate portrait of your target audience and help you write an appropriate article.
It is easier to know that the platform you choose to publish requires that the text should be no more than 3,500 words than to spend weeks writing a 5,000-word article and then waste your time cutting it down. But not all the platforms have specific requirements, it’s always a good idea to make a short list of platforms if you don’t want to choose the particular one to publish your article.
Step 4 – Start writing your article
And now we finally can start writing our article. It seems that step 4 is the most important and time grabbing but it is not the whole truth. You can write an article quickly if you make quality preparation for it by making steps 1-3.
A perfect article is always well-structured, sequential, and clear. Most platforms accept original research articles in the following structure:
Abstract.
This element of the article’s structure is usually used in closed-access platforms where readers have the access to a summary to decide if they want to purchase the whole article. As you could understand, this part of the article is extremely important.
All information presented in the abstract should be taken from the article and spelled out in a very concise form: topic and subject of the study, arguments, results of the study, conclusions, and abbreviations. This section should be clear, decluttered, and concise.
Introduction
This part of the article starts with the introductory information on the topic: what is already known, what problems we have about this topic, research relevance, how are we planning to solve problems through our research and this article, and our theories or hypotheses.
Methods
This part of the article describes the ways and procedures that helped to do research. These methods are revealed in great detail.
This section should be clear and detailed for other researchers who want to repeat the research and confirm the results of the research. The section should contain ethical information and it must be written in the past tense.
Results
This section usually presents the results of the research without explanations or interpretations. Here the conclusions are simply stated next to the figures or tables mentioned in the text in the correct sequential order. The section describes what you have already found and it is also written in the past tense.
Discussion sections and conclusion
This section begins with a summary of your research and it is designed for you to interpret your results, compare them to previously published work, and detail whether your results are comparable to or contradict previous literature.
This section also contains the strengths and limitations of your research, the latter of which can be used to suggest future research.
Finish this section and the whole article with a perfect conclusion paragraph, briefly summarizing and emphasizing the main findings and novelty of your research.
The described structure is also known as the IMRaD. Most serious sites and journals want you to follow their precise recommendations. It means you should follow the sections that were outlined by the journal and how they prefer for it to be formatted.
If you already have a topic and some notes and records, if you have already done the research and you have chosen the site or journal by this moment, you can easily structure your materials and implement recommendations.
As soon as you complete all 4 steps, you are ready to get published with a perfectly researched article! Congratulations! But if you want to simplify the process of writing an article for your business, you can always turn to expert article writers.
