Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Sonia Dogra, J Lenni Dorner, Pat Garcia, Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen, and Meka James.  To learn more about this amazingly supportive group and to see a list of participating blogs, click here.

I write a blog about outer space, which means I sometimes attract the ire of Flat Earthers, Moon Landing deniers, and other “free thinking” people.  One especially self-righteous commenter once admonished me for believing all of NASA’s lies and then said the classic line: “Do your own research!”  If I had been drinking tea at that moment, I would have spit my tea out laughing.  Do my own research?  That’s my whole shtick!  That’s basically my mission statement on this blog.  I’m a Sci-Fi writer, and I blog about my research.

So for today’s IWSG post, I’d like to share some tips and tricks to help any other writers who want to do their own research.  Some of this may seem to be specific to researching science, but there are general principles that I think you can adapt to any kind of research you might need to do.

First of all, start by learning the vocabulary.  Every field of study (scientific or otherwise) has its own unique jargon.  When I first started doing my science research, someone told me (rather sternly) that just knowing a bunch of science jargon is not the same as actually understanding science.  That’s certainly true; however, if you learn the jargon first, the rest of your research will be considerably easier.  You’ll know what terms to search for on Google (or better yet, Google Scholar).  You won’t have to stop so often during your research to look up words.  And if the opportunity comes up, you’ll be able to ask more intelligent questions and have more productive conversations with people who actually work in whatever field you’re researching.

Next, if you end up reading more technical (i.e., more confusing) books, articles, research papers, etc., then I recommend reading the end first.  Don’t worry about spoilers.  Not when you’re doing research.  So for example, whenever I read a scientific research paper, I’ll skip to the end and read the section titled “Conclusions” first (or sometimes that section is titled “Discussion”); then I’ll go back to the beginning and read the whole paper.  I find it’s a lot easier to follow along, step by step, how a new discovery was made if I already understand, in some detail, what the discovery is.

And lastly, after you learn a new thing, I recommend trying to explain whatever you’ve learned in your own words.  The act of putting something into your own words is a clever brain hack that will increase the odds of you retaining that new knowledge long term.  This process can also help you identify gaps in your knowledge where you still need to do more research.  One option: you could simply talk to a friend about whatever you’re researching.  Or you can write a research diary.  Or you could do what I do and blog about your research (although I recently started keeping a research diary as well, because if I don’t feel confident that I understand something, then I don’t want to spread my own misconceptions to others on the Internet).

All of that may sound like a lot of work.  That’s because it is a lot of work.  Doing your own research is a lot of work.  I wish more people on the Internet understood that.  However, if you’re willing and able to commit the time and energy to doing it right, doing your own research can do you a lot of good—especially if you’re a writer.

So if you’re a writer looking to dive into your own research, I hope something I’ve said here was helpful to you.  And if you’re someone who’s been doing your own research for a while now, I’d love to hear about how your research process works in the comments below.