This library guide explains practices that can help you avoid plagiarism. 

Start your research for any writing assignment very early and chip away at it a bit every day. Let it form gradually over time.

To avoid losing the forest for the trees,and to have a high level guidepost or point of reference for where your writing stands, here are a few ideas:

• Keep reviewing and revising your outline as your writing evolves.
• As a way of reminding yourself about the direction of your paper, consider writing a brief abstract (summary) of your paper early on in your writing and then revise it as your writing proceeds. You can then revise it appropriately to become your paper's opening paragraph.
• Another approach is to take a piece of paper and draw a flowchart of your ideas and how they interrelate in support your thesis statement.

See the box below for ideas about how to use Word to structure your paper using headers, which you can then move around within a navigation pane  in Word. See the video to see how to do this.

This video tutorial explains how to use headers in Microsoft Word when writing. Use this link if you have trouble accessing from below: tutorial video.  Ignore the part of the video about a writing template--you can create your own headers, suited to the paper assignment. See in the video how to add your own headers.