Here’s a useful tip: You can build your own attempts to cope with the difficult aspects of an academic paper, or your own struggle to understand material, into the paper itself, improving your work in the process.
Imagine that you’ve been asked to write a paper on three diseases: Malaria, syphilis, and schistosomiasis. Unfortunately for you, you don’t know anything about these diseases. Fortunately for your research paper, however, you can insert a definitions section or sub-section in order to define each disease. For each disease, you can insert a cited discussion of underlying microbes, etiologies, and treatments.
That’s a valid approach, because even advanced academic papers routinely contain definitions, assumptions, and background discussions of phenomena before progressing into analysis. For students who struggle to write academic papers, inserting definitions not only follows a best practice from genuine academic research but also fills up some space in the paper, thus leaving the student with less to write in the remaining sections. In addition, including definitions in academic papers and theses allows you to synthesize your own knowledge. Setting out several definitions consolidates what you yourself have learned.
To some extent, an academic paper or research project can contain your own attempts to structure, organize, and understand background material. It is a service to the reader to provide such material, which is why you’ll see most scholarly articles written in this way. For you as the student, it’s also an advantage that some of your page count can be occupied by relatively easier material, such as definitions, leaving you with less to write in the way of more complex material.
