Drafting & Integrating
You have done a lot of work so far, and, now, it’s time to put all of that work together and begin drafting your research paper. Using your outline as a guide, you’ll begin to develop your ideas and integrate your source information.
When you develop your essay, you’ll be using your source materials to offer specific support for the points you’re making. You’re able to develop support using three different integration strategies:
- Summarizing main ideas.
- Paraphrasing supporting materials.
- Quoting specific text.
Your authority as a scholar will be enhanced when you demonstrate your ability to use and integrate outside sources in a fair and attentive manner. By doing so, you help to demonstrate that you have carefully read and considered the material on your topic. Your reader sees not only your ideas alone, but also your points contextualized by the conversations of others. In this way, you establish yourself as one of the members of the community of scholars engaged with the same idea.
And, as you draft, remember that your writing doesn’t have to be perfect. It is important to work to get your ideas down and your source material integrated, which will be discussed in this step of the research writing process. However, you still have other steps of the process, revision and editing , which you’ll use to polish your work.
LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS
Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). Located at: https://owl.excelsior.edu/ . This site is licensed under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .