I’m not an English teacher, and I haven’t had to do an academic research paper in over 35 years. So take the following for what it’s worth.
1. Intro
You need to state what it is that you intend to show in your paper: “Gutenberg enabled modern civilization by inventing a printing press that led to widespread literacy and an explosion in education” or “Gutenberg single-handedly ruined civilization by destroying monarchies and priesthoods across Europe when his invention enabled the hoi polloi to gain access to educations that would have been previously denied to them”. No, probably neither of those; you make up your own. This is your thesis statement; it’s what you intend to demonstrate / prove with what follows.
2. Life
The facts of his life: birth, parentage, family and education. A recounting of the events and circumstances that shaped his life. This has to be pure fact, backed up by your scrupulously documented research.
3. Major Works / Inventions
This is still primarily factual (has to be fact-based, anyway), but ‘major’ is up to you to define here, and illustrate with examples and documentation. This is where you start to make your case to prove the Intro.
4. Impact on the Renaissance
This is where you have to hypothesize and demonstrate how “what he did” affected “what followed”. For example, how many books and manuscripts were available in Europe at the start of his life? At the end of his life? Twenty and fifty years later? What was education like, before and after? Can you obtain data on numbers of colleges and other institutions of higher learning? Their independence from the Church? (The Church should figure prominently in this analysis, I would think—but it’s your paper!—since they controlled nearly all higher learning prior to the printing press. How can you demonstrate whether the independence of the printing press was good or bad in that regard? What are the data that support your position?
5. Conclusion
How well did you make your case? What you have to do here is cogently summarize what has gone before, comparing the various claims you made in the Intro to the ways in which you have proved that. Your conclusion might also raise questions and suggest areas of possible future research.
Everything you state in sections 2 – 4 has to be backed up by fact, so that whatever you say in 5 can be backed up by… your preceding work in the paper.