For an essay and certainly for a dissertation the time spent on research will probably exceed that spent in the actual writing. If it does not, then maybe you have so many relevant facts and so much material within immediate access that you can still conjure a splendid piece of work; or maybe (and I suggest, humbly, that this is more likely) the end result maybe a little glib or superficial and perhaps unimpressive.

Having said this, research should be an ongoing occupation that is worked into your daily (or weekly?) study. In other words you are researching all the time and it helps to organise your notes and papers accordingly.

Even for essays in the normal run of your course you will probably have a choice. Unless you are inescapably drawn to a topic of immense attraction or there is one in which you can excel regardless of background knowledge (or the lack of it) it’s normally best to choose one where you already have some basic understanding.

Each person has an individual system of note taking and organisation. Rather like a natural way of playing a particular sport, this should not be fundamentally changed, unless it’s completely wrong and debilitating.

Signs of this may be:

1. After hours of reading, or other research, you have little relevant and useable material, or
2. Maybe you have, but are nowhere near understanding the core of the question.
3. You have to continually re-read books or notes or go back to original research to understand the material you have collected. This is not the same as checking details (names, titles, technical terms, dates etc.) as you actually write the essay. This is normal and in fact advisable.

You will need to keep an eye on the clock, or, in this case, the calendar. It is likely that submission dates will become even less flexible. No matter how fascinating you should not allow yourself to be pulled deeply into a line of research that is a side issue or a minor part of the answer.

When I referred earlier to individuality of technique I meant how you collect and classify notes and copies and collate them for reference when writing. There are many ways of doing this but you should probably have an intermediate stage between material and essay. Please see Cath’s article on planning and structuring an essay. If at least some of this function is carried out as you go along, you should get an indication as to how focussed your research is.

Research for a dissertation presents rather different problems. Firstly, by its nature the requirements for a dissertation will vary more from subject to subject than essays do. It will also have a much greater element of choice, although your definition of a question will normally have to be approved before you set off. In most cases the quality of your research will have a much more direct bearing on your result and mark. For these and reasons of space I will not develop this particular topic fully here. We may well attack it again elsewhere but it may be that this is best dealt with in direct one to one assistance.

Just a couple of tips: (well, one, actually)

Spread widely at the beginning with a view to becoming more and more sharply focussed as you form a clear shape of the work. By this I mean even dabble. For mine, I proposed a particular question relating to apparently irreconcilable attitudes to suicide in Elizabethan drama and in religious and secular society. I browsed. I found a bibliography maintained by the University of Mississippi entitled “Suicide in Early Modern Europe”. This covered a significantly wider area in all respects than my subject matter, but I found it invaluable. I show this as an appendix/separate set of pages on this web site. The point is, in those early, comparatively carefree days, let leads take you to leads and even apparent cul-de-sacs to wherever.