help with psychology research paper

My advice would be to set up your structure ahead of time - it's easier to write when you have a target to shoot for than when you're staring at a blank page. It helps here to have a key set of references or data that you can use as anchor points to hang your report on.

At least for me, the biggest obstacle in writing is inertia. I can do a lot of writing when I have the momentum, but I need to maintain it to get anything done. So I set aside some time and just keep writing. When I get stuck, or need a reference, I make a note and carry on or jump to a different section. After a while, I go back over what you've written and fill in what I missed. Writing a report for me isn't linear like reciting a speech - I prefer to chip away at it from many different angles.

Once I can see the report it takes a lot of the pressure off and I can go back and fix things like grammar, flow and references. When I do this the essay always changes quite a lot, because I'm using my points to guide further research and having to change both them and my conclusions to fit the new facts.

This is important because the editing phase is where a terrible, incorrect report can become a good one. Your first draft will be terrible, so don't cut corners during the editing phase and don't be afraid to basically rewrite it to make it better. It is much easier and feels like much less work if you have already written it once.

The best way to get good at something is to make mistakes and learn from them. You will make mistakes, so make them early when there are no consequences rather than later when there are.

And yeah, don't start from someone else's work. Even if you edit it you're still boxing yourself into their approach which was not designed for your project. Identify the parts that are good, and use them to inform your own writing. If they said it perfectly, reference them and make it clear that's what you're doing. If you're not comfortable citing them then you shouldn't be using them as a resource anyway.