A Guide for Writing a Technical Research Paper

This document provides you with some tips and some resources to help you write a technical research paper, such as you might write for your required capstone project paper. First, congratulations are in order– you are embarking on an activity that is going to change the way you think and add to the overall body of human knowledge. The skill of gathering information, deciding what is important, and writing about it for someone else is extremely valuable and will stay with you for the rest of your life. Because we humans have been doing this for quite some time, we have some reasonably standard forms for technical research papers, which you should use for your capstone. You should do this because your paper will better understood by readers who are familiar with this form. Before you can begin writing your paper, you need to have a sense for what research entails, so I’ll start there. Then I will give you some tips about writing, including connecting with your readers, defining your topic, the format of your paper, and how to include references from the literature. I am a computer scientist, so be aware that parts of this paper are biased toward my discipline.