When asked ‘Why do Baobabs grow only in Africa and never in Europe?’ or ‘How the western world power influenced the Nigerian civil war’, you will find answers to questions like this by carrying out experiments, visiting libraries, searching the internet, reviewing literatures and so on. This process of locating and analyzing relevant information is termed RESEARCH.
Research is aimed at solving existing problems, discovering novelty or creating a better understanding about or within a topic or idea. The research process is not limited to these or complete without sharing data, information, inference and the novel ideas gathered from a concluded research in public domain where other people can assess them and cite its content as reference base.
These results can be presented in various forms with the most popular and effective in the 21st century being the RESEARCH PAPER which can be published in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, stored in libraries and can be presented in conferences, workshops or seminars.
The importance of research writing cannot be overemphasized, apart from providing the end product of the performed research, they serve as a reference point for amateur researchers to understand what has been studied about a subject, methodologies employed and bottle necks encountered during the research. This will create room for improved and precise approach in future trials about and within the subject matter.
In my years in research, I have observed this common occurrence among young researchers, churning out writings unbefitting of a high impact journal. The Implications of this? Insufficiency of data in public domain and consequently dearth of knowledge which will create bias, misinterpretation, uninformed decisions made on assumption about or within a subject matter.
Research writing demands technique and style different from other types of writing otherwise the purpose research is defeated.
In our subsequent letters we will discuss these techniques, styles and their pros and cons.
Together we will explore the science and art of writing right.
See you next time.