Virtually every paper that is not a personal letter needs a title.  You should consider carefully the title of what you write as it becomes the face of your work.  The title is what introduces your work to the reader and, consequently, the title often decides whether the reader continues to read the rest of the text.  A title can be factual ("A review of Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age Economics") or it can be referential, hinting about the content of the paper, in which case a subtitle should be added to explain what the text is really about (Frank H. Wu's: "Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White").

A short paper may not need any headlines (aka subheadings), but longer papers are often significantly clearer and easier to read when headlines are included.  Headlines help the reader understand the structure of the paper as the headlines form a roadmap as the author develops and pursues his or her argument.  Similarly, writing from an outline maintains structure and focus, while avoiding the inclusion of a "roadmap" in the actual paper.

Equally as important, using headlines makes it easier for you to detect if and when your argument goes astray.  For example, you are writing a paper on the development of the nation state in the 1800s.  An argument could be developed that the progress of national economies through the establishment of national banks significantly strengthened the state, that the state became materialized in their citizens' everyday life through bank-issued coins with national signifiers (often heads of state).  The national economy was dependent on the citizens' ability to calculate so that they could understand and participate in the economy, which in turn had an effect on the establishment of national school systems that stressed calculus education.  Such an argument, while not very complicated in itself, needs to be broken down into its pieces, and each piece needs to be separately addressed in your paper, before you can summarize and draw a final conclusion.  Including headlines or writing from an outline will make it much easier to organize effectively your thoughts and material.  If you have a headline "National Money," and you suddenly find that you have been writing about the education system, then you will easily see that this piece of writing will have to be relocated elsewhere in the paper or deleted.  Headlines and outlines are tools for organizing the author’s argument, ultimately making it much easier for the reader to understand the paper.

With almost no exceptions, you should always state your research question or topic at the beginning of a paper.  This helps the reader immediately identify and understand the purpose of the text.  The body of your paper should address this opening, and only this opening, in a logical and supportive manner.  If you have designed a good research plan and produced the appropriate data, your paper will essentially write itself.  You need only to follow the design as a type of outline, filling in your information in the appropriate order.  Headlines serve a similar purpose.  (You may find it helpful to arrange your notes by category or topic on separate pages so that they can be shuffled into the appropriate order.  A word of caution: make sure you have all of the necessary citation information for all the data that you collect.)

Make sure your argument follows logically, that you have smooth transitions from one point to the next, and that you remain focused and do not include points not relevant to the discussion at hand.  You will need to include sufficient information to adequately support your contentions.  Beware of using information that "everybody" knows. "Everybody" often turns out to be wrong.  Beware, as well, of using your opinions as evidence to support your argument.  Your opinions are not likely to be shared by everyone.

Each paragraph should address a single point.  In the beginning of the paragraph, you inform the reader about the specific topic of the paragraph.  The rest of the paragraph provides the details necessary to clarify the topic introduced.  If the point requires much clarification, then you are likely dealing with several distinct points and should break the paragraph into several paragraphs, each with topic sentences.  In general, do not write paragraphs shorter than three sentences nor shorter than four lines.  Similarly, avoid paragraphs longer than about half a page.

Each paragraph ought to follow logically from the previous one in the text in order to build your coherent argument.  At times you may need a transition paragraph to build a bridge between the topics of two paragraphs or sections.  At other times the final sentence in a paragraph or the initial sentence in the next may serve this purpose.

A paper always needs a conclusion.  This final section serves to briefly reiterate your main points and describe how they were supported in the text. Hopefully, you have provided a logical, solid, and well-supported argument.  Research papers are seldom, if ever, opinion pieces and should not include your opinions or emotional reactions to the topic.