Students in college composition courses often have great difficulty learning to write research papers. They can learn to write better research papers through a series of steps: learning to read for the main point, writing opinion papers on topics that are personally meaningful to them, preparing lists of questions implicit in the opinion papers in order to provide a focus for their research, researching their topics, and transforming their opinion papers into research papers that draw on available source materials. Although the system has a few disadvantages, it minimizes or eliminates the problems involved in traditional approaches, helps students avoid common flaws in research papers, and reduces or eliminates plagiarism. (GW)