I begin to write my research paper as a letter to a friend explaining the topic. This won't necessarily give you a fully-structured paper, or even sentences that will make it into the final draft, but it will give you material with which you can start writing, and an idea of the difficulties of navigating the topic in prose. You may end up with a single informal draft, followed by a rigorous formal one that goes in a completely different direction, and this is entirely natural for the style of papers that are usually assigned in comparison to the way we talk about or explain philosophy.
I begin to write my research
I begin to write my research paper as a letter to a friend explaining the topic. This won't necessarily give you a fully-structured paper, or even sentences that will make it into the final draft, but it will give you material with which you can start writing, and an idea of the difficulties of navigating the topic in prose. You may end up with a single informal draft, followed by a rigorous formal one that goes in a completely different direction, and this is entirely natural for the style of papers that are usually assigned in comparison to the way we talk about or explain philosophy.