Planning Your Research Essay
→ Activity: Planning Your Research Assignment
Formulating your research topic is one of the most important steps in the research process. When you begin an academic assignment you may have only a very general notion of what you would like to write about. Library resources are key to formulating questions and focusing your topic.
The library resources at Columbia are extraordinarily rich and diverse. When you start writing a research paper you need to be selective. What should you be looking for? By analyzing the general principles of the research essay, how to read different kinds of essays, and how to read your course materials for insight into the requirements of your assignment, you will learn how to focus your search for appropriate library resources.
While all your assignments will require you to perform common tasks of analysis and description, different types of assignments may require different types of tasks.
What Is the Goal of Your Assignment?
To find your way you first need to get your bearings. This Compass Point will help you understand exactly what you are being asked to do in your assignment by examining the language used - by your professor, in your course readings, and in other kinds of books and journals.
Understand the Language
Take a close look at your starting point, the wording of your assignment. Your assignment fits into pre-defined patterns that your instructor recognizes; so should you.
By noting the kind of language your professor has used in your assignment, you can often detect what tone and rhetorical devices your professor may expect you to use in your essay. If the language is passionate and inflammatory, you can assume that your instructor is looking for a persuasive essay. By giving you this type of assignment, your instructor is asking you to make strong arguments. If a term in your assignment is discipline-specific, something you were taught in this particular class, you are probably being asked to apply this new concept in a fresh context. This helps you internalize the meaning of the new concept and broadens your understanding of it.
Terms and Phrases
The type of language you find in your assignment is not the only place to find clues to the nature of your assignment. Your course materials and a variety of library resources also will provide you with insight into your assignment and help you formulate your topic.
Course resources
Notice the language in the syllabus and the language your instructor uses in his or her lectures. Then examine the terms and phrases you find in your required and recommended readings. If you don't recognize them, define them by looking at subject dictionaries. Through this kind of investigation you can gather information and understanding of your topic.
Library resources
By searching library databases and reading articles and books about a topic you can familiarize yourself with the problems and debates that surround that topic. These debates can direct you toward interesting and fruitful questions. You have been asked to write a research paper in the context of the language and methodology of your subject discipline. Take a look at the footnotes and bibliographies in your required course readings and note in particular what is referred to as a seminal or core text in your discipline. If you are not sure which are the core books and journals, ask your professor or consult a librarian. See Compass Point 2 - Finding Resources, for information on how to find these core texts and other supporting texts in the library. See Compass Point 3 - Evaluating Resources, for a greater understanding of how to know which texts to look for.
Research Questions
You can use the investigation and analysis of the language of your assignment and other resources in your field to lead you to questions that interest you in your research. You can also use this critical investigation to understand the tasks that your instructor is asking you to perform in your paper. Both your questions and the tasks of your assignment will direct your research in the library.
Asking the Right Questions
If you frame your topic too narrowly or too broadly you may not be able to find enough or the right kind of research materials to construct your argument, or you may be overwhelmed by resources and ideas within your given scope. The best way to find your own perspective on a topic is through questions. Yet, there are so many kinds of questions you could ask, you may wonder where to begin. What is a relevant question and what question will lead you to a dead end? Questions arise out of your interests and intellectual curiosity, as well as from your responses to readings in the subject area.
General kinds of questions are also implied by different kinds of assignments. You may be asked to compare and contrast two theoretical positions, events, places, milieus or any other object of study. Implicitly, this task asks you to answer an important set of questions:
- What is [your object of study]? - You must know it, and characterize it, in order to compare it.
- Which [object of study] has more value?
- Why does this [object of study] have more value?
- Why do neither of these [objects of study] have lasting value but a third way has value instead?
Take the following example:
Martin Luther King said: "The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility." Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper & Row [1968, c1967]
An assignment that quotes someone making a claim and asks you to discuss the quote is implicitly a compare and contrast question. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a certain claim, and your course material and library research should have given you the context to know that Malcolm X said something else that is often set in contrast to this claim. You are being asked to compare the claims, back one or the other, or find a third way. A claim quotation task is a compare and contrast question in another guise.
If you are being asked to do a close reading of a text you are being asked two what is this [object of study]? questions:
- What is the meaning of this [object of study]?
- What is the form and content of this [object of study]?
You are also being asked two How does [this object of study] work? questions:
- How does the form and content of this [object of study] work within the conventions of its genre (type of thing being read)?
- How effectively does the form and content of this [object of study] convey meaning?
There are many questions implied by your assignments. Here we have looked at only two types of generic assignments to analyze the questions held within them. You can use this strategy to look at your own assignments to find the implied questions within them. More complex, less generic questions relevant to your specific assignment can be found in both course and library resources.
Your professor may ask questions in class and then answer them him- or herself, or may encourage the class to answer them. These questions can lead to further questions, and in the course of these lectures or seminars you may be left with unanswered questions of your own, which have arisen from your instructor's or fellow classmates' questions in class. Try to record your questions as part of your lecture notes. If you are now beginning to take notes with your own questions in them, label them in some way (perhaps with your initials) as questions that you might like to come back to later.
By searching catalogs and databases on LibraryWeb you can find encyclopedias, articles and books in the library on a particular topic. Reading about your topic in different kinds of media --books, journal articles, newspapers -- can spark your enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity and provoke questions you will address in your research paper.
Types of Assignments
Once you begin to recognize the tasks you are being asked to perform in a particular type of research assignment, you can then begin to understand the corresponding structure implied by those tasks. Some of the tasks you might be asked to perform in your research papers are the following:
- To create a riveting narrative of events (find the cause)
- To compare and contrast forms/perspectives/characteristics (compare and contrast)
- To make generalizations from, and see patterns in, cases, samples, or examples (from cases create a theory)
- To investigate an object or objects by breaking them down into smaller, significant parts, analyzing them and weaving together the meaning of the whole work, or collective works (do a close reading)
- To discover the meaning of an object (or objects) by placing it (or them) within larger external contexts (find meaning in context)
- To apply theory to the interpretation and/or creation of artifacts; and to the conduct of policy, action, or law (apply a theory to practice)
Evidence
The research essay is a particular kind of essay genre, which means that other essays have been written that share some of the stylistic and formal qualities that characterize the genre. Your research essay will be written in the context of this other work in the genre. You might want to read exemplary research papers with the goal of recognizing identifiable forms and style. Then, you can attempt to practice these forms and styles in your own writing. Consult a librarian or your professor to find examples of writing in this genre.
Kinds of Evidence
Evidence in a research paper has two parts to it, description (or quotation) and interpretation. By learning how the two parts work together, you can find out what to look for in model resources and how to use this structure to its full advantage in your own writing.
The role of description
In many of your assignments your professor will ask you to do both analytical and descriptive work. But the term "description" can be deceptive. Writing a description in context requires analytical savvy: only when you understand your purpose for describing your object of study can you determine which of its characteristics your reader will find interesting.
You will never be able to describe something like a work of art, a poem, an event, or a ritual in its entirety. That shouldn't even be a goal. Why should your reader not (if possible) go and experience the real thing? Since your target reader is your professor, you can assume that he or she is not reading your paper to gain more factual information about the subject it covers. Instead, your descriptions should work to increase the depth of your reader's understanding of a subject he or she already knows on the surface. Descriptions help you give your reader a new sense of the subject's meaning. In essay writing, descriptions don't do this alone. They need help.
The role of interpretation
Because they need help, your descriptions should form coherent bonds with other types of writing: reflective analysis. This reflective analysis is the exciting part. In it, you get to show what happens when your own unique mind, with your specific interests and curiosity, meets your object of study and creates meaning.
You will have to describe (or quote/include directly) any evidence you have selected to support such activities as analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and narrative construction. You'll need to reflect on and critically interpret that evidence so that your audience (in this case your professor) can see how it supports the smallest claims in your essay. The claims and the evidence together form the structure of your paper. Read more about quoting sources in your arguments in Compass Point 4 - Documenting Your Research.
Finding Evidence
Normally, we think of consulting library resources when writing a research paper in order to find content. The library is an excellent source for evidence we will use in our research papers. It's a great place to find cases, narratives, primary and secondary sources, and other media. Print and online sources can provide you with evidence you can use to build and support your own opinion, which you will develop into the thesis of your paper.
But we can also use the library to find models of research paper essay writing techniques, including the way that evidence is used to support an argument. Which resources should we rely on as models, outside of those resources required by our instructors? We can look to journal articles and books in the subject discipline that are available through LibraryWeb. We can also find model articles and books in those cited by the authors of our required and recommended readings. Read more about using this technique to evaluate sources in Compass Point 3 - Evaluating Resources. For search strategies to use to find these resources see Compass Point 2 - Finding Resources.
Conclusion
In this Compass Point you have learned about the basic features of research papers and how that understanding can help you formulate your topic. Your own curiosity, enthusiasm and interests lead you to questions that will be further refined when you conduct preliminary library research from references in your required and recommended readings. These questions can point you in the direction of the subjects you will focus on in your research paper. Through analyzing the language and form of your specific assignment you can limit the scope of your research and focus your search for evidence. Course readings and library resources will provoke specific questions and will help you shape your thesis. You will find, in Compass Point 2 - Finding Resources, that you can use these same skills to develop search strategies and guidelines for library research that will help you refine your library searches and enable you to create the basis of your paper, its evidence and arguments.
continue to... Finding Resources
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