The Art of Writing Research
Language Arts
All of us will write a technical paper in our lifetime. Whether it is for a project for school or a research paper about your next revolutionary idea, knowing how to write a technical paper is an important skill to develop. Personally, I have written a few abstracts and research plans for science fair. Coming into 8th grade, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how to write a technical paper because of my past knowledge. Soon I was going to realize that writing research isn’t just a couple of facts thrown into a paragraph, rather it is a story that you tell others about the research that you have spent so much time doing. In Language Arts class this year, I believe that I have grown in my ability to write a successful technical paper.
After going through this unit, I realized that in order to write a proper research paper, you have to have a good understanding of proper terms and vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, etc. to make the writing’s message get across. I am interested in pursuing Biomedical Engineering in the future. I know that I will have to publish many papers about the research that I have done in order to share with society the advancements that are occurring in this field of study. I am hoping that if I grasp the skills necessary to be able to write a proper technical paper now, I will be better prepared when expected to write them in the future. Technical writing doesn’t just have to be a list of facts. It can be a story of the journey that you took to attain this understanding.
clauses. Complex sentences are a sentence-structure with an independent and dependent clause combined. Compound-complex sentences are the structure that includes two or more independent clauses and one dependent clause. We then had to complete activities about using these sentence types. These activities helped me grow in understanding how these sentence types were used in writing; using different sentence types helped me refine my skills when writing because it made the piece more interesting, as you can see in my plate tectonics research paper. Another activity that we completed was identifying important components in a
Himalayas Research Paper
technical piece. We had to annotate our assignment and write down our thoughts about how they used these elements.You can see that in my annotation I was able to identify the claim, evidence, and reasoning of the piece, keeping in mind that I had to include it into my plate tectonics paper. The annotation that I wrote for identifying the claim was that “There was a claim made that Balto was a hero.” The evidence that I picked up was “Balto had to run through frigid temperatures to bring back serum. – piece of evidence.” Lastly, I commented on the concluding paragraph, “All of this shows how people felt about Balto. They saw him as a hero and they wanted to bring pride to their state by having him in their museum. This shows how much they respected Balto’s strength and how they saw him as their hero.” As I read through the whole piece I made notice of how the writer had spun a story while giving us plain facts to make the reading more interesting. By analyzing this document, I felt like I had a better understanding of how to write a technical piece.
group created a model of how the plates formed at the Himalayan Mountains. The outline that we had created for this essay was to start out with some interesting facts about the Himalayan Mountains and then transition into the science of how the Himalayan Mountains were formed. As we developed drafts, we added more detail about the science behind Himalayan Mountains. You can see this occur with a statement about uplift in the paper. “The Indian Plate is moving at a faster rate than the Eurasian Plate causing the Indian Plate to eventually “catch up” to the Eurasian Plate. When this happens, there is immense pressure between these two plates. This pressure turns into uplift, creating the Himalayan Mountains.” In our final document, we stated that “The Indian Plate is moving at a faster rate than the Eurasian Plate causing the Indian Plate to eventually “catch up” to the Eurasian Plate. When this happens, there is immense pressure between these two plates. This pressure results in uplift and bending, creating the Himalayan Mountains. Uplift is when the pressure under the ground builds up to extreme levels. This causes the land to be pushed up or lifted up, causing it to be called uplift.” You can see that in the second version we were more detailed in explaining what uplift was and how that caused the Himalayan Mountains to form.
The test to see how we had developed our technical writing skills was the final plate tectonics research paper. They say that the best way to check your understanding of a concept is by being able to teach someone else the topic. This was what we had to do with the plate tectonics project. The goal of the project was to create a working model of how the plates move to create a specific case study site. After creating all of the models we were going to send these models to other middle schools for a range of middle and elementary school students to learn from. My
Balto Reading Annotations
When we first started learning about writing in the technical sense, we learned about different sentence structures. Simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences were the four sentence structures that we learned about. Simple sentences are sentences that have one independent clause. Compound sentences have two independent