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If you are like most students you have too many classes, too much work, and not enough time in which to do it. Unfortunately, schools do not teach students many tips and tricks for writing research papers or term papers quickly.

Because of a large course-load or tight time constraints, students sometimes feel pressured to produce a research paper quickly, and without the tools to do it themselves, many times they turn to plagiarism, or buy plagiarized papers, and submitting them as their own. This obviously has a detrimental affect on their education. These three secrets will help you feel prepared in the event you face a looming research paper or term paper deadline.

Secret #1) Topic selection is vitally important to the overall speed at which you ultimately compose your entire paper. Unknown to most students, topic selection has a huge impact on the total time it takes to write any college paper. The best topic (all else being equal) is the one that is easiest and fastest to write a paper about.

The right topic must provide plenty of research materials. If you can't find sufficient quality resources, you may have to start all over again, or change your thesis statement so you have more to write about. You'll finish faster overall, if you spend extra time at the beginning of the process researching, planning, and validating your topic.

Secret #2) Perform extremely efficient library research. It is called a research paper, after all. Researching your subject efficiently and effectively is the single most important factor in your overall writing time. The more efficiently you perform research, the more solid resources you'll find. The more resources to draw from, the easier your paper is to write. The paper quality (and grade) will improve in proportion to the amount and quality of material upon which to draw in support of your thesis statement.

It is also very important to organize your resources efficiently. All of us have had the experience of getting to the paper compiling or writing stage, only to find that we didn't capture information that we were looking at earlier in the day. Either we didn't bring the book home from the library, didn't take proper notes on it, and / or failed to photocopy the materials. It is important to develop an efficient system to:

* capture your findings
* sort through them for relevance
* extract the key data
* save them for later reference

Secret #3) Know when to write an outline, or skip it. Outlines can help you immensely, or be a complete waste of your time, depending on the circumstances. The trick is to identify and understand which situation you are in. This is another area where 'traditional' wisdom is dead wrong. High schools and universities always teach that you should write an outline. It is considered (by them) to be a critical step in planning a research paper or term paper.

Outlines are like roadmaps, they show you where you are going. At first glance, this makes sense. On the other hand, how many times do you get into your vehicle without first consulting a map? Did you need it? Probably not; it depends on the length of the trip, and the complexity of the route.

We've all had the experience of taking a map on a road trip, using it, and finding ourselves completely confused. It happens all the time, with road trips, and with writing research papers for school. Sometime highly detailed outlines look great! But then you find yourself having a very difficult time making your paper resemble the outline. The harder you try, the more stymied you get. So understanding when to create an outline, and when to skip it, is a real source of confusion.

Conclusion

Secrets - they help! The more secrets, the better, and the faster you complete your writing assignments. Put these three secrets to work, and you will write research papers faster than you ever thought possible!