The Craft Of Research Reading Summary

Summarize and Reaction the readings (1,2,3,4,)

***There are two main parts to the summary: ***

1. Summary of each chapter/article: Includes Title of Article, Author(s), Source, and Date of Article using APA style. In your OWN WORDS describe what the article is about, with major details or points, and should be easy to read (i.e. interesting and flow well!)

2. Reaction: Briefly describe the implications to scholars in academia (so what? in what ways you can utilize the ideas in the readings in your professional development as a scholar).

The Craft of Research
2
Digital Paper
Andrew Abbott
Tricks of the Trade
Howard S. Becker
Writing for Social Scientists
Howard S. Becker
What Editors Want
Philippa J. Benson and Susan C. Silver
The Craft of Translation
John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, editors
The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation
Bryan A. Garner
Legal Writing in Plain English
Bryan A. Garner
From Dissertation to Book
William Germano
Getting It Published
William Germano
From Notes to Narrative
Kristen Ghodsee
Writing Science in Plain English
Anne E. Greene
Cite Right
Charles Lipson
How to Write a BA Thesis
Charles Lipson
The Chicago Guide to Writing about Multivariate Analysis
Jane E. Miller
The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers
Jane E. Miller
The Subversive Copy Editor
Carol Fisher Saller
The Writer’s Diet
Helen Sword
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations
Kate L. Turabian
Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers
Kate L. Turabian
3
The Craft of Research
Fourth Edition
Wayne C. Booth
Gregory G. Colomb
Joseph M. Williams
Joseph Bizup
William T. FitzGerald
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
4
Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005) was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor
Emeritus in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His books included The
Rhetoric of Fiction and For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, both published by the
University of Chicago Press.
Gregory G. Colomb (1951–2011) was professor of English at the University of Virginia and the
author of Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic.
Joseph M. Williams (1933–2008) was professor in the Department of English Language and
Literature at the University of Chicago and the author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.
Joseph Bizup is associate professor in the Department of English at Boston University as well as
assistant dean and director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. He is the author of
Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry.
William T. FitzGerald is associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University.
He is the author of Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1995, 2003, 2008, 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23956-9 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23973-6 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23987-3 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226239873.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Booth, Wayne C., author. | Colomb, Gregory G., author. | Williams, Joseph M., author. |
Bizup, Joseph, 1966– author. | FitzGerald, William T., author.
Title: The craft of research / Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph
Bizup, William T. FitzGerald.
Other titles: Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing.
Description: Fourth edition. | Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Chicago
guides to writing, editing, and publishing | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000143 | ISBN 9780226239569 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226239736
(pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226239873 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Research—Methodology. | Technical writing.
Classification: LCC Q180.55.M4 B66 2016 | DDC 001.4/2—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000143
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
5
Contents
Preface: The Aims of This Edition
Our Debts
I Research, Researchers, and Readers
Prologue: Becoming a Researcher
1 Thinking in Print: The Uses of Research, Public and Private
1.1 What Is Research?
1.2 Why Write It Up?
1.3 Why a Formal Paper?
1.4 Writing Is Thinking
2 Connecting with Your Reader: Creating a Role for Yourself and Your
Readers
2.1 Conversing with Your Readers
2.2 Understanding Your Role
2.3 Imagining Your Readers’ Role
★ Quick Tip: A Checklist for Understanding Your Readers
II Asking Questions, Finding Answers
Prologue: Planning Your Project—An Overview
★ Quick Tip: Creating a Writing Group
3 From Topics to Questions
3.1 From an Interest to a Topic
3.2 From a Broad Topic to a Focused One
3.3 From a Focused Topic to Questions
3.4 The Most Significant Question: So What?
★ Quick Tip: Finding Topics
4 From Questions to a Problem
4.1 Understanding Research Problems
4.2 Understanding the Common Structure of Problems
4.3 Finding a Good Research Problem
4.4 Learning to Work with Problems
★ Quick Tip: Manage the Unavoidable Problem of Inexperience
5 From Problems to Sources
5.1 Three Kinds of Sources and Their Uses
5.2 Navigating the Twenty-First-Century Library
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5.3 Locating Sources on the Internet
5.4 Evaluating Sources for Relevance and Reliability
5.5 Looking Beyond Predictable Sources
5.6 Using People to Further Your Research
★ Quick Tip: The Ethics of Using People as Sources of Data
6 Engaging Sources
6.1 Recording Complete Bibliographical Information
6.2 Engaging Sources Actively
6.3 Reading for a Problem
6.4 Reading for Arguments
6.5 Reading for Data and Support
6.6 Taking Notes
6.7 Annotating Your Sources
★ Quick Tip: Manage Moments of Normal Anxiety
III Making an Argument
Prologue: Assembling a Research Argument
7 Making Good Arguments: An Overview
7.1 Argument as a Conversation with Readers
7.2 Supporting Your Claim
7.3 Acknowledging and Responding to Anticipated Questions and Objections
7.4 Connecting Claims and Reasons with Warrants
7.5 Building a Complex Argument Out of Simple Ones
7.6 Creating an Ethos by Thickening Your Argument
★ Quick Tip: A Common Mistake—Falling Back on What You Know
8 Making Claims
8.1 Determining the Kind of Claim You Should Make
8.2 Evaluating Your Claim
8.3 Qualifying Claims to Enhance Your Credibility
9 Assembling Reasons and Evidence
9.1 Using Reasons to Plan Your Argument
9.2 Distinguishing Evidence from Reasons
9.3 Distinguishing Evidence from Reports of It
9.4 Evaluating Your Evidence
10 Acknowledgments and Responses
10.1 Questioning Your Argument as Your Readers Will
10.2 Imagining Alternatives to Your Argument
10.3 Deciding What to Acknowledge
10.4 Framing Your Responses as Subordinate Arguments
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10.5 The Vocabulary of Acknowledgment and Response
★ Quick Tip: Three Predictable Disagreements
11 Warrants
11.1 Warrants in Everyday Reasoning
11.2 Warrants in Academic Arguments
11.3 Understanding the Logic of Warrants
11.4 Testing Warrants
11.5 Knowing When to State a Warrant
11.6 Using Warrants to Test Your Argument
11.7 Challenging Others’ Warrants
★ Quick Tip: Reasons, Evidence, and Warrants
IV Writing Your Argument
Prologue: Planning Again
12 Planning and Drafting
12.1 Planning Your Paper
12.2 Avoiding Three Common but Flawed Plans
12.3 Turning Your Plan into a Draft
★ Quick Tip: Work Through Procrastination and Writer’s Block
13 Organizing Your Argument
13.1 Thinking Like a Reader
13.2 Revising Your Frame
13.3 Revising Your Argument
13.4 Revising the Organization of Your Paper
13.5 Checking Your Paragraphs
13.6 Letting Your Draft Cool, Then Paraphrasing It
★ Quick Tip: Abstracts
14 Incorporating Sources
14.1 Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing Appropriately
14.2 Integrating Direct Quotations into Your Text
14.3 Showing Readers How Evidence Is Relevant
14.4 The Social Importance of Citing Sources
14.5 Four Common Citation Styles
14.6 Guarding Against Inadvertent Plagiarism
★ Quick Tip: Indicating Citations in Your Paper
15 Communicating Evidence Visually
15.1 Choosing Visual or Verbal Representations
15.2 Choosing the Most Effective Graphic
15.3 Designing Tables, Charts, and Graphs
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15.4 Specific Guidelines for Tables, Bar Charts, and Line Graphs
15.5 Communicating Data Ethically
16 Introductions and Conclusions
16.1 The Common Structure of Introductions
16.2 Step 1: Establishing a Context
16.3 Step 2: Stating Your Problem
16.4 Step 3: Stating Your Response
16.5 Setting the Right Pace
16.6 Organizing the Whole Introduction
16.7 Finding Your First Few Words
16.8 Writing Your Conclusion
★ Quick Tip: Titles
17 Revising Style: Telling Your Story Clearly
17.1 Judging Style
17.2 The First Two Principles of Clear Writing
17.3 A Third Principle: Old Before New
17.4 Choosing between the Active and Passive Voice
17.5 A Final Principle: Complexity Last
17.6 Spit and Polish
★ Quick Tip: The Quickest Revision Strategy
V Some Last Considerations
The Ethics of Research
A Postscript for Teachers
Appendix: Bibliographical Resources
Index
9
Preface
The Aims of This Edition
This fourth edition of The Craft of Research is the first to appear since the
deaths of the book’s three original authors, Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G.
Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. In undertaking this revision, we—
Joseph Bizup and William T. FitzGerald—faced the pleasurable and
challenging task of reworking a book we have both long admired. Our goal
has been to update and refine it without appropriating it from its original
authors.
The fourth edition has the same main aim as the first three: to meet the
needs of all researchers, not just first-year undergraduates and advanced
graduate students, but even those in business and government who do and
report research on any topic, academic, political, or commercial. The book
was written to
• guide you through the complexities of turning a topic or question into a research
problem whose significance matches the effort that you put into solving it;
• help you organize and draft a report that justifies the effort;
• show you how to read your report as your readers will so that you can revise it into one
that they will read with the understanding and respect it deserves.
Other handbooks touch on these matters, but this one is different. Most
current guides acknowledge that researchers rarely move in a straight line
from finding a topic to stating a thesis to filling in note cards to drafting
and revision. Experienced researchers loop back and forth, move forward a
step or two before going back in order to move ahead again, change
directions, all the while anticipating stages not yet begun. But so far as we
know, no other guide tries to explain how each part of the process
influences all the others—how developing a project prepares the
researcher for drafting, how drafting can reveal problems in an argument,
how writing an introduction can prompt you to do more research.
In particular, the book tries to be explicit about matters that other guides
treat as a mysterious creative process beyond analysis and explanation,
including
• how to turn a vague interest into a problem readers think is worth posing and solving;
• how to build an argument that motivates readers to take your claim seriously;
• how to anticipate the reservations of thoughtful but critical readers and then respond
appropriately;
• how to create an introduction and conclusion answering that toughest of questions from
readers, So what?;
• how to read your own writing as readers will, and thereby know when and how to
revise it.
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Central in every chapter is the advice to side with your readers, to imagine
how they will judge what you have written.
The book addresses the formal elements common to most genres of
research-based writing not just because writers need to understand their
superficial shape but also because they help writers think. These genres—
the research paper, the research report, the white paper, and many others—
are not empty patterns or forms: they also embody and enable specific
ways of working and arguing; they help us all to develop and refine our
projects, test our work, and even discover new lines of thought. How we
write thus affects how we argue and research, and vice versa. In this sense,
to learn the genres of one’s field is to learn the field itself.
The book is informed by another conviction as well: that the skills of
research and research-based writing are not just for the elite but can be
learned by everyone. Some aspects of advanced research can be learned
only in the context of a specific community of researchers, but even if you
don’t yet belong to one, you can still create something like it on your own.
Our “Postscript for Teachers” suggests ways you (and your teachers) can
do that.
What This Edition Does Not Address
Like the previous editions of The Craft of Research, this fourth edition
treats research generally. It does not discuss how to incorporate narratives,
“thick descriptions,” or audiovisual forms of evidence into your
arguments. They are important topics, but too large for us to do justice to
them here. Nor does this edition cover research techniques that are specific
to particular fields. Likewise, while it discusses the principles that should
guide online research, it does not attempt to describe the vast array of
specialized search tools and databases now available online and through
the library. Our bibliography suggests a number of sources for guidance in
those areas.
What’s New in This Edition
In preparing this fourth edition, we have kept in mind the positive
reception of earlier editions and the wide audience they attracted, an
audience that ranges from first-year students in composition classes, to
graduate students and other advanced researchers, and even to
professionals working in fields such as business, medicine, and law.
Indeed, this audience is an international one: the book has been translated
into Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.
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What we have been most mindful of is that The Craft of Research is the
result of an extraordinary collaboration among three gifted teachers and
scholars in whose footsteps we are proud to follow. While seeking to help
the book speak to new generations of researchers, we have also striven to
honor and retain the perspective, content, and voice that have made The
Craft of Research a recognized classic. Those who are familiar with earlier
editions will discover that this edition is faithful to the book’s vision and
overall structure. At the same time, each chapter has been thoroughly
updated to reflect the contemporary landscape of research.
Here, concretely, is what we’ve done:
• We revised chapters 5 and 6 to incorporate recent developments in library and Internet
research and in engaging source materials. Especially, we emphasized new research
techniques made possible by online databases and search engines and the value of
online sources, balanced by the need to assess these sources’ reliability.
• We again revised the chapter on warrants (chapter 11), a matter that has been difficult
to explain in previous editions.
• We moved the first two sections of chapter 13 into chapter 12, which is now titled
“Planning and Drafting,” and switched the order of chapters 13 and 14, now titled
“Organizing Your Argument” and “Incorporating Sources,” respectively.
• Throughout, as we thought necessary, we clarified concepts and provided fresh
examples.
• We differentiated the related but distinct activities of research, argument, and writing.
• Wherever possible, we standardized terms (e.g., using “paper” rather than “report”) to
reflect the range of academic and professional genres that are the products of research.
In doing all that, we have tried—as Booth, Colomb, and Williams did in
prior editions—to preserve the amiable voice, the sense of directness, and
the stance of colleagues working together that so many have found crucial
to the book’s success.
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Our Debts
From JB and WF: We wish to thank our editor, David Morrow, and his
colleagues at the University of Chicago Press for their insight and
guidance and, above all, for the trust they placed in us to revise a text that
has no equal in the field. It was a labor of love.
We join Booth, Colomb, and Williams in again thanking the many
without whose help the previous editions could never have been realized,
especially Jane Andrew, Steve Biegel, and Donald Freeman. These many
include Jane Block, Don Brenneis, Sara Bryant, Diane Carothers, Sam
Cha, Tina Chrzastowski, John Cox, James Donato, Kristine Fowler, Joe
Harmon, Clara Lopez, Bill McClellan, Mark Monmonier, Nancy O’Brien,
Kim Steele, David Stern, Ellen Sutton, and Leslie Troutman.
Joe Bizup thanks his wife, Annmarie Caracansi, and daughters, Grace
and Charlotte; and Bill FitzGerald likewise thanks his wife, Emilia
Lievano, and daughter, Magdalena. We are both grateful for our respective
families’ love, patience, and support.
We allow Booth, Colomb, and Williams to once again offer their
personal acknowledgments in their own words.
From WCB (composed for the second edition): I am amazed as I think
back on my more than fifty years of teaching and research by how many
students and colleagues could be cited here as having diminished my
ignorance. Since that list would be too long, I’ll thank mainly my chief
critic, my wife, Phyllis, for her many useful suggestions and careful
editing. She and my daughters, Katherine Stevens and Alison Booth, and
their children, Robin, Emily, and Aaron, along with all those colleagues,
have helped me combat my occasional despair about the future of
responsible inquiry.
From GGC: I, too, have been blessed with students and colleagues who
have taught me much—first among them the hundreds of grad students
who shared with me their learning to be teachers. They, above all, have
shown me the possibilities in collaborative inquiry. What I lean on most,
though, are home and family: Sandra, Robin, Kikki, Karen, and Lauren.
Through turbulent times and calm, they gave point and purpose to it all.
Before them was another loving family, whose center, Mary, still sets an
example to which I can only aspire.
From JMW: The family has tripled in size since the first edition, and I
am ever more grateful for their love and support: Ol, Michele, and
Eleanor; Chris and Ingrid; Dave, Patty, Matilde, and Owen; Megan, Phil,
Lily, and Calvin; Joe, Christine, Nicholas, and Katherine. And at
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beginning and end, Joan, whose patience, love, and good sense flow still
more bountifully than I deserve.
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In Memoriam
Wayne C. Booth
(1921–2005)
Gregory G. Colomb
(1951–2011)
Joseph M. Williams
(1933–2008)
15
Part I
Research, Researchers, and Readers
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Prologue
Becoming a Researcher
WHO NEEDS RESEARCH?
When you think of a researcher, what do you imagine? Someone in a lab
coat peering into a microscope? A solitary figure taking notes in a library?
That’s what most people imagine. But you might have also pictured
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, HBO’s John Oliver, or anyone who prepares
extensively before writing or speaking. Like just about every successful
person, they are not only experts in doing research, but in using the
research of others. In fact, that’s part of what makes them successful. In an
aptly named “age of information,” they have learned not only how to find
information, but how to evaluate it, then how to report it clearly and
accurately. (Often, they challenge misinformation.) More than ever, those
skills are essential for success in any profession.
You may not yet be a professional, but learning to do research now will
help you today and prepare you for what’s to come. First, it will help you
understand what you read as nothing else will. You can accurately judge
the research of others only after you’ve done your own and can understand
the messy reality behind what is so smoothly and confidently presented in
your textbooks or by experts on TV. The Internet and cable TV flood us
with “facts” about the government, the economy, the environment, and the
products we buy. Some of these facts are sound, though many are not.
That’s why, as you learn to do research, you’ll also learn to value reliable
research reported clearly and accurately.
You’ll discover both how new knowledge depends on what questions
you ask and how the way you think about and communicate your research
shapes those questions and your answers. Most important, you’ll come to
understand how the knowledge we all rely on depends on the quality of the
research that supports it and the accuracy of its reporting. Although some
might think it idealistic, another reason for doing research is the sheer
pleasure of solving a puzzle, of discovering something that no one else
knows.
But learning to do research is not like learning to ride a bike, the sort of
thing you learn once and never forget. Each of us has started projects that
forced us to rethink how we do our work. Whenever we’ve addressed a
new research community, we’ve had to learn its ways to help us
understand what its members think is important. But even then, we could
still rely on principles that all researchers follow, principles that we
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describe in this book. We think you will find them useful as your projects
and readers become more demanding, both in school and after.
We must be candid, though: doing research carefully and reporting it
clearly are hard work, consisting of many tasks, often competing for your
attention at the same time. And no matter how carefully you plan, research
follows a crooked path, taking unexpected turns, sometimes up blind
alleys, even looping back on itself. As complex as that process is, we will
work through it step-by-step so that you can see how its parts work
together. When you can manage its parts, you can manage the often
intimidating whole and look forward to doing more research with greater
confidence.
STARTING A RESEARCH PROJECT
If you are beginning your first project, the task may seem overwhelming:
How do I focus on a topic? Where do I find information on it? What do I
do when I find it? Even if you’ve done a “research paper” in a writing
class, the idea of another may be even more intimidating if this time it’s
the real thing. If so, you’re not alone. Even experienced researchers feel
anxious when they tackle a new kind of project for a new audience. So
whatever anxiety you feel, most researchers have felt it too. The difference
is that experienced researchers know what lies ahead—hard work, but also
pleasure; some frustration, but more satisfaction; periods of confusion, but
confidence that, in the end, it will all come together and that the result is
worth the effort. Most of all, experienced researchers know how to get
from start to finish not easily, perhaps, but as efficiently as the complexity
of their task allows. That’s the aim of this book.
WORKING WITH A PLAN
You will struggle with your project if you don’t know what readers look
for in a paper or how to help them find it. Experienced researchers know
that they most often produce a sound paper when they have a plan, no
matter how rough, even if only in their heads. In fact, they create two
kinds of plans: the first helps them prepare and conduct their research; the
second helps them draft their paper.
They usually begin with a question and a plan to guide their search for
an answer. They may not know exactly what they’ll find, but they know
generally what it will look like, even if it surprises them. They also know
that once they have an answer, they don’t just start writing, any more than
an experienced carpenter just starts sawing. They draw up a second plan, a
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rough blueprint for a first draft—maybe no more than a sketch of an
outline. Shrewd researchers, though, don’t let that plan box them in: they
change it if they run into a problem or discover something that leads them
in a new direction. But before they start a first draft, they begin with some
plan, even when they know they’ll almost certainly change it.
That plan for a draft helps researchers write, but it also helps their
readers read. In fact, researchers of all kinds use standard forms to
anticipate what readers look for:
• A newspaper reporter writes her story in traditional “pyramid” form, putting the most
important information first, not just to make her job of drafting easier, but also so that
her readers can find the gist of the news quickly, then decide whether to read on.
• An accountant follows a standard form for her audit report not just to organize her own
writing, but so that investors can find the information they need to decide whether the
company is another Enron or the next Apple.
• A Food and Drug Administration scientist follows the predictable form for a scientific
report—introduction, methods and materials, results, discussion, conclusion—not just
to order his own thoughts coherently, but to help readers find the specific issues they
have to consider before they accept his findings.
Within these forms, or genres, writers are free to emphasize different
ideas, to put a personal stamp on their work. But they know that a plan
helps them write efficiently and, no less important, helps their readers read
productively.
This book will help you create and execute a plan for doing your
research and another for reporting it in ways that not only encourage your
best thinking but help your readers see its value.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
The best way to deal with the complexity of research (and its anxieties) is
to read this book twice. First skim it to understand what lies ahead (flip
past what seems tedious or confusing). But then as you begin your work,
carefully read the chapters relevant to your immediate task. If you are new
to research, reread from the beginning. If you are in an intermediate course
but not yet at home in your field, skim part I, then concentrate on the rest.
If you are an experienced researcher, you will find chapter 4 and parts III
and IV most useful.
In part I, we address what those undertaking their first project must
think about deliberately: why readers expect us to write up our research in
particular ways (chapter 1), and why you should think of your project not
as solitary labor but as a conversation with those whose work you read and
with those who will in turn read your work (chapter 2).
In part II, we discuss how to frame and develop your project. We
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explain
• how to find a topic in an interest, then how to focus and question it (chapter 3);
• how to transform those questions into a research problem (chapter 4);
• how to find sources to guide your search for answers (chapter 5);
• how to engage sources in ways that encourage your own best thinking (chapter 6).
In part III, we discuss how to assemble a sound case in support of your
claim. That includes
• an overview of a research argument (chapter 7);
• how to evaluate your claim for its significance (chapter 8);
• how to judge what count as good reasons and sound evidence (chapter 9);
• how to acknowledge and respond to questions, objections, and alternative views
(chapter 10);
• how to make the logic of your argument clear (chapter 11).
In part IV, we lay out the steps in producing your paper:
• how to plan and execute a first draft (chapter 12);
• how to test and revise it (chapter 13);
• how to incorporate sources (chapter 14);
• how to present complex quantitative evidence clearly and pointedly (chapter 15);
• how to write an introduction and conclusion that convince readers your argument is
worth their time (chapter 16);
• how to edit your style to make it clear, direct, and readable (chapter 17).
Between some of the chapters you will find “Quick Tips,” brief sections
that complement the chapters with practical advice.
In an afterword, “The Ethics of Research,” we reflect on a matter that
goes beyond professional competence. Doing and reporting research is a
social activity with ethical implications. We often read about the dishonest
research of historians, scientists, stock analysts, and others. And we see
plagiarism among writers at all levels of achievement, from secondaryschool students to leaders of their professions. Such events highlight the
importance of doing and using your research ethically.
In a concluding essay, we address those who teach research. At the end
of the book is a bibliography of sources for beginning researchers and for
advanced researchers in particular fields.
Research is hard work, but like any challenging job done well, both its
process and its results can bring great satisfaction. No small part of that
satisfaction comes from knowing that your work sustains the fabric of a
community of people who share your interests, especially when you
discover something that you believe can improve your readers’ lives by
changing what and how they think.
20
1 Thinking in Print
The Uses of Research, Public and Private
In this chapter, we define research, then discuss how you benefit from learning to do it
well, why we value it, and why we hope you will too.
Whenever we read about a scientific breakthrough or a crisis in world
affairs, we benefit from the research of those who report it, who in turn
benefited from the research of countless others. When we walk into a
library, we are surrounded by more than twenty-five centuries of research.
When we go on the Internet, we can read millions of reports written by
researchers who have posed questions beyond number, gathered untold
amounts of information from the research of others to answer them, then
shared their answers with the rest of us so that we can carry on their work
by asking new questions and, we hope, answering them.
Teachers at all levels devote their lives to research. Governments spend
billions on it, businesses even more. Research goes on in laboratories and
libraries, in jungles and ocean depths, in caves and in outer space, in
offices and, in the information age, even in our own homes. Research is in
fact the world’s biggest industry. Those who cannot do it well or evaluate
that of others will find themselves sidelined in a world increasingly
dependent on sound ideas based on good information produced by
trustworthy inquiry and then presented clearly and accurately.
Without trustworthy published research, we all would be locked in the
opinions of the moment, prisoners of what we alone experience or dupes to
whatever we’re told. Of course, we want to believe that our opinions are
sound. Yet mistaken ideas, even dangerous ones, flourish because too
many people accept too many opinions based on too little evidence. And
as recent events have shown, those who act on unreliable evidence can
lead us—indeed have led us—into disaster.
That’s why in this book we will urge you to be amiably skeptical of the
research you read, to question it even as you realize how much you depend
on it.
1.1 WHAT IS RESEARCH?
In the broadest terms, we do research whenever we gather information to
answer a question that solves a problem:
PROBLEM: Where do I find a new head gasket for my ’65 Mustang?
RESEARCH: Look in the yellow pages for an auto-parts store, then call to see if it has
21
one in stock.
PROBLEM: To settle a bet, I need to know when Michael Jordan was born.
RESEARCH: You Google “Michael Jordan birthday.”
PROBLEM: I’m just curious about a new species of fish.
RESEARCH: You search the Internet for articles in newspapers and academic journals.
We all do that kind of research every day, and though we rarely write it up,
we rely on those who wrote up theirs: Jordan’s biographers, the fish
discoverers, the publishers of the yellow pages and the catalogs of the
auto-parts suppliers—they all wrote up their research because they knew
that one day someone would have a question that they could answer.
If you’re preparing to do a research project not because you want to but
because it’s been assigned, you might think that it is just make-work and
treat it as an empty exercise. We hope you won’t. Done well, your project
prepares you to join the oldest and most esteemed of human conversations,
one conducted for millennia among philosophers, engineers, biologists,
social scientists, historians, literary critics, linguists, theologians, not to
mention CEOs, lawyers, marketers, investment managers—the list is
endless.
Right now, if you are a beginner, you may feel that the conversation is
one-sided, that you have to listen more than you can speak because you
have little to contribute. If you are a student, you may feel that you have
only one reader: your teacher. All that may be true, for the moment. But at
some point, you will join a conversation that, at its best, can help you and
your community free us from ignorance, prejudice, and the half-baked
ideas that so many charlatans try to impose on us. It is no exaggeration to
say that, maybe not today or tomorrow but one day, the research you do
and the arguments you make using it can improve if not the whole world,
then at least your corner of it.
1.2 WHY WRITE IT UP?
For some of you, though, the invitation to join this conversation may still
seem easy to decline. If you accept it, you’ll have to find a good question,
search for sound data, formulate and support a good answer, and then write
it all up. Even if you turn out a first-rate paper, it may be read not by an
eager world but only by your teacher. And, besides, you may think, my
teacher knows all about my topic. What do I gain from writing up my
research, other than proving I can do it?
One answer is that we write not just to share our work, but to improve it
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before we do.
1.2.1 Write to Remember
Experienced researchers first write just to remember what they’ve read. A
few talented people can hold in mind masses of information, but most of
us get lost when we think about what Smith found in light of Wong’s
position, and compare both to the odd data in Brunelli, especially as they
are supported by Boskowitz—but what was it that Smith said? When you
don’t take notes on what you read, you’re likely to forget or, worse,
misremember it.
1.2.2 Write to Understand
A second reason for writing is to see larger patterns in what you read.
When you arrange and rearrange the results of your research in new ways,
you discover new implications, connections, and complications. Even if
you could hold it all in mind, you would need help to line up arguments
that pull in different directions, plot out complicated relationships, sort out
disagreements among experts. I want to use these claims from Wong, but
her argument is undercut by Smith’s data. When I put them side by side, I
see that Smith ignores this last part of Wong’s argument. Aha! If I
introduce it with this part from Brunelli, I can focus on Wong more
clearly. That’s why careful researchers never put off writing until they’ve
gathered all the data they need: they write from the start of their projects to
help them assemble their information in new ways.
1.2.3 Write to Test Your Thinking
A third reason to write is to get your thoughts out of your head and onto
paper, where you’ll see what you really can think. Just about all of us,
students and professionals alike, believe our ideas are more compelling in
the dark of our minds than they turn out to be in the cold light of print.
You can’t know how good your ideas are until you separate them from the
swift and muddy flow of thought and fix them in an organized form that
you—and your readers—can study.
In short, we write to remember more accurately, understand better, and
evaluate what we think more objectively. (And as you will discover, the
more you write, the better you read.)
1.3 WHY A FORMAL PAPER?
But even when they agree that writing is an important part of learning,
23
thinking, and understanding, some still wonder why they can’t write up
their research in their own way, why they have to satisfy demands imposed
by a community that they have not joined (or even want to) and conform to
conventions they did nothing to create. Why should I adopt language and
forms that are not mine? Aren’t you just trying to turn me into an
academic like yourself? If I write as you expect me to, I risk losing my
identity.
Such concerns are legitimate (most teachers wish students would raise
them more often). But it would be a feeble education that did not change
you at all, and the deeper your education, the more it will change the “you”
that you are or want to be. That’s why it is so important to choose carefully
what you study and with whom. But it would be a mistake to think that
learning to report sound research must threaten your true identity. It will
change the way you think, but only by giving you more ways of thinking.
You will be different by being freer to choose whom you want to be and
what you want to do with your life.
But the most important reason for learning to write in ways readers
expect is that when you write for others, you demand more of yourself
than when you write for yourself alone. By the time you fix your ideas in
writing, they are so familiar to you that you need help to see them not for
what you want them to be but for what they really are. You will
understand your own work better when you try to anticipate your readers’
inevitable and critical questions: How have you evaluated your evidence?
Why do you think it’s relevant? What ideas have you considered but
rejected?
All researchers, including us, can recall moments when in writing to
meet their readers’ expectations, they found a flaw or blunder in their
thinking or even discovered a new insight that escaped them in a first draft
written for themselves. You can do that only once you imagine and then
meet the needs and expectations of informed and careful readers. When
you do that, you create what we call a rhetorical community of shared
values.
You might think, OK, I’ll write for readers, but why not in my own
way? The traditional forms that readers expect are more than just empty
vessels into which you must pour your ideas. They also help writers think
and communicate in ways they might not otherwise, and they embody the
shared values of a research community. Whatever community you join,
you’ll be expected to show that you understand its practices by presenting
your research in the standard forms, or genres, that a community uses to
represent what it knows and how it knows. The various genres of research24
based writing—the research paper, the scholarly article, the research
report, the conference paper, the legal brief, and a great many others—
have evolved to meet the needs of the communities that use them.
Relatively stable, they allow both newcomers and longtime members of a
community to come together through shared practices and expectations.
Once you know the genres that belong to and define your particular
research community, you’ll be better able to answer your community’s
predictable questions and understand what its members care about and
why. As you learn to write the genres of a field or profession, you become
a member of that research community.
But as different as research communities are, what counts as good work
is the same, whether it’s in the academic world or the world of
government, commerce, or technology. If you learn to do research well
now, you gain an immense advantage in the kind of research you will do
later, no matter where you do it.
1.4 WRITING IS THINKING
Writing up your research is, finally, thinking with and for your readers.
When you write for others, you disentangle your ideas from your
memories and wishes, so that you—and others—can explore, expand,
combine, and understand them more fully. Thinking for others is more
careful, more sustained, more insightful—in short, more thoughtful—than
just about any other kind of thinking.
You can, of course, take the easy way: do just enough to satisfy your
teacher. This book will help you do that, but you’ll shortchange yourself if
that’s all you do. If instead you find a topic that you care about, ask a
question that you want to answer, then pursue that answer as best you can,
your project can have the fascination of a mystery whose solution richly
rewards your efforts. Nothing contributes more to successful research than
your commitment to it, and nothing teaches you more about how to think
than making a successful (or even unsuccessful) argument using it.
Some of the world’s most important research has been done by those who persevered
in the face of indifference or even hostility, because they never lost faith in their
vision. The geneticist Barbara McClintock struggled for years unappreciated because
her research community considered her work uninteresting. But she believed in it and
pressed on. When her colleagues finally realized that she had already answered
questions that they were just starting to ask, she won science’s highest honor, the
Nobel Prize.
25
We wish we could tell you how to balance your belief in the worth of
your project with the need to accommodate the demands of teachers and
colleagues, but we cannot. If you believe in what you’re doing and cannot
find anyone else who shares your beliefs, all you can do is put your head
down and press on. With our admiration.
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2 Connecting with Your Reader
Creating a Role for Yourself and Your Readers
Research counts for little if few read it. Yet even experienced researchers sometimes
forget to keep their readers in mind as they plan and draft. In this chapter, we show
you how to think about readers even before you begin your project.
Most of the important things we do, we do with others. Some students
think research is different. They imagine the lone scholar in a hushed
library. But no place is more filled with imagined voices than a library or
lab. The view of research you see walking by these sites is only part of the
story. When you read a book or a scientific paper, you silently converse
with its writers—and through them with everyone else they have read. In
fact, every time you go to a written source for information, you join a
conversation between writers and readers that began more than five
thousand years ago. And when you report your own research, you add your
voice and can hope that other voices will respond to you, so that you can in
turn respond to them. So it goes and, we hope, will continue for a long
time to come.
2.1 CONVERSING WITH YOUR READERS
Conversations are social activities in which we are expected to play our
parts. Face-to-face, we can judge how well we and others do that by
sensing how a conversation is going. Do we treat each other as equals,
speaking and listening civilly, answering each other’s questions directly?
Or does one of us seem to be playing the role of expert, assigning others
the role of audience? We can judge how well a conversation is going as we
have it, and we can adjust our roles and behavior to repair mistakes and
misunderstandings as they occur. But writing is an imagined conversation.
Once we decide what role to play and what role to assign our readers,
those roles are fixed. If as we read we think, Well, Abrams acknowledges
Stanik’s evidence, but he’s dogmatic in criticizing it and ignores obvious
counterexamples, Abrams can’t change what we read next to recover from
our judgment.
Of course, judgments go both ways: just as readers judge writers, so
writers also judge readers, but they do so before they write. Consider these
two sentences:
Interruption of REM sleep has been shown not only to inhibit memory consolidation,
especially for declarative memories, but also to significantly impair cognitive processes
dependent on working memory function.
27
If you don’t get enough sleep, not only will you struggle to retain facts and concepts, but
your working memory function will also be impaired, making it difficult for you to hold
information in mind and consequently to understand, think, and learn.
Both writers make judgments about their readers’ needs and goals. The
first addresses herself to knowledgeable colleagues interested in learning
about the psychology of sleep and memory. She therefore focuses on
abstract concepts and freely uses technical terms. The second presents
himself as an expert patiently explaining a complicated matter to readers
who know little about it, and so he largely avoids technical vocabulary. He
also assumes that his readers want practical advice, and so he addresses
them directly as “you” and shows them what his information means to
them.
The two sentences are very different: the first reads like an excerpt from
an advanced textbook; the second, like it comes from a guide on good
study habits. But both would be effective if their writers judged their
readers correctly.
But suppose the writers switched passages. Readers ignorant of
cognitive psychology looking for practical advice would think that the
writer of the first was indifferent to their needs; readers knowledgeable
about sleep and memory would think that the writer of the second was
talking down to them. When writers misjudge their readers in this way,
they risk losing them.
In fact, writers can’t avoid creating some role for themselves and their
readers, planned or not. So those roles are worth thinking about from the
beginning, before you write a word. If you ignore or miscast your readers,
you’ll leave so many traces of that mistake in your early drafts that you
won’t easily fix them in the final one.
In writing this book, we tried to imagine you—what you’re like, what
you know about research, whether you even care about it. We imagined a
persona for you, a role we hoped you would adopt: someone who is
interested in learning how to do and report research and who shares our
belief in its importance (or at least is open to being persuaded). Then we
imagined a persona of our own: writers committed to the value of research,
interested in sharing how it works, talking not at you like a lecturer or
down to you like a pedant, but with the “you” we hoped you want to
become. We tried to speak as easily to those of you starting your first
project as to those of you doing advanced work. We hoped that new
researchers would not be frustrated when we discussed issues they haven’t
yet faced and that more experienced readers would be patient as we
covered familiar ground. Only you can judge how well we’ve succeeded.
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2.2 UNDERSTANDING YOUR ROLE
Since few people read formal research papers for entertainment, you have
to create a relationship that encourages them to see why it’s in their
interest to read yours. That’s not easy. Too many beginning researchers
offer readers a relationship that caricatures a bad classroom: Teacher, I
know less than you. So my role is to show you how many facts I can dig up.
Yours is to say whether I’ve found enough to give me a good grade. Do
that and you turn your project into a pointless drill that demeans both you
and your teacher. Worse, you cast yourself in a role exactly opposite to
that of a true researcher.
In true research, you must switch the roles of student and teacher. When
you do research, you learn something that others don’t know. So when you
report it, you must think of your reader as someone who doesn’t know it
but needs to and yourself as someone who will give her reason to want to
know it. You must imagine a relationship that goes beyond Here are some
facts I’ve dug up about fourteenth-century Tibetan weaving. Are they
enough of the right ones?
There are three better reasons for offering those facts; the third is most
common in academic research.
2.2.1 I’ve Found Some New and Interesting Information
You take the first step toward true research when you say to your reader,
Here are some facts about fourteenth-century Tibetan weaving that you do
not know and may find interesting. This offer assumes, of course, that your
reader wants to know. But even if not, you must still cast yourself in the
role of someone who has found something your reader will find interesting
and your reader as someone who wants to know, whether she really will or
not. Down the road, you’ll be expected to find (or create) a community of
readers who not only share an interest in your topic (or can be convinced
to), but also have questions about it that you can answer. But even if you
don’t have that audience right now, you must write as if you do. You must
present yourself as interested in, even enthusiastic about, wanting to share
something new, because the interest you show in your work roughly
predicts the interest your reader will take in it.
2.2.2 I’ve Found a Solution to an Important Practical Problem
You take a step toward more significant research when you can say to
readers not just Here are some facts that should interest you, but These
facts will help you do something to solve a problem you care about. That is
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the kind of research that people do every day in business, government, and
the professions. They confront practical problems whose solutions require
research into the facts of the matter, first to understand the problem, then
to figure out how to solve it—problems ranging from insomnia to falling
profits to terrorism.
To help new researchers learn that role, teachers sometimes invent “real
world” scenarios: an environmental science professor might assign you to
write a report for the director of the state Environmental Protection
Agency on how to clean up a local lake. In this scenario you are playing
the role not of a student delivering data to a teacher, but of a professional
giving practical advice to someone who needs it. To make your report
credible, however, you must use the right terminology, cite the right
sources, find and present the right evidence, all in the right format. But
most important, you have to design your report around a specific intention
that defines your role: to advise a decision maker on what to do to solve a
problem. That kind of research is typical in the world at large but is less
common in academic research than the next one.
2.2.3 I’ve Found an Answer to an Important Question
Although academic researchers sometimes advise EPA directors on what
to do, their more common role is that of scholars who help their research
community simply understand something better. Others might use their
findings to solve a practical problem—a discovery about the distribution of
prime numbers, for example, helped cryptologists design an unbreakable
code. But that research itself was aimed at solving not the practical
problem of keeping secrets, but the conceptual problem of not entirely
understanding prime numbers. Some researchers call this kind of research
“pure” as opposed to “applied.”
Teachers occasionally invent “real world” scenarios involving
conceptual problems: a political science professor asks you to play the role
of a senator’s intern researching the voting habits of out-of-state college
students. But more typically they expect you to imagine yourself as what
you are learning to be: a researcher addressing a community of other
researchers interested in issues that they want to understand better. Your
report on fourteenth-century Tibetan weaving, for example, could possibly
help rug designers sell more rugs, but its main aim is to help scholars
better understand something about Tibetan art, such as How did
fourteenth-century Tibetan rugs influence the art of modern China?
2.3 IMAGINING YOUR READERS’ ROLE
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You establish your side of the relationship with your readers when you
adopt one of those three roles—I have information for you; I can help you
fix a problem; I can help you understand something better. You must,
however, cast your readers in a complementary role by offering them a
social contract: I’ll play my part if you play yours. But that means you
have to understand their role. If you cast them in a role they won’t accept,
you’re likely to lose them entirely. In this case, the old advice to “consider
your audience” means that you must report your research in a way that
motivates your readers to play the role you have imagined for them.
For example, suppose you’re an expert on blimps and zeppelins. You’ve
been asked to share your research with three different groups with three
different reasons for wanting to hear about it. How they receive you will
depend on how accurately you imagine the role each intends to play and
how well you match your role to theirs. For that, you must understand
what they want and what they are in return willing and able to do for you.
2.3.1 Entertain Me
Imagine the first group that invited you to speak is the local Zeppelin Club.
Its members are not experts, but they know a lot about zeppelins. They
read about them, visit historic sites, and collect zeppelin memorabilia. You
decide to share some new facts you’ve found in a letter from your GreatUncle Otto describing his transatlantic zeppelin flight in 1936, along with
some photographs and a menu he saved. His letter comments on the grilled
oysters he had for dinner and tells a funny story about why he happened to
take the trip in the first place.
In planning your talk, you judge that what’s at stake is just a diverting
hour of zeppelin trivia. You meet your side of the bargain when you share
whatever you think might interest them—hunches, speculation, even
unsubstantiated rumors. You won’t show PowerPoint slides, present data,
or cite scholarly sources to substantiate your claims. Your audience will
play its role by listening with interest, asking questions, maybe sharing
their own anecdotes. You don’t expect them to challenge the authenticity
of the letter from Great-Uncle Otto or question how the photos are relevant
to the social history of zeppelins, much less of lighter-than-air travel in
general. Your job is to give an engaging talk; theirs is to be amiably
engaged.
Some beginning researchers imagine their readers belong to a Zeppelin
Club, already fascinated by their topic and eager to hear anything new
about it. While that sometimes works for experts with the right audience
(see the box on page 24), it rarely works for students learning to do and
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report serious research. Your teachers expect you to report not just what
you find, but what you can do with it.
2.3.2 Help Me Solve My Practical Problem
Imagine that your next meeting is with True-to-Life Films. They plan to
make a movie about a zeppelin flight in 1936 and want you to help them
get the historical details right, including a scene in the dining cabin. They
want to know how the cabin was furnished, what people ate, what the
menus looked like, and so on. They don’t care whether your facts are new,
only whether they are right, so that they can make the scene authentic. You
show them your photos and the menu and describe the oysters Great-Uncle
Otto ate, but you don’t bother with why he took the trip. To succeed in this
role, you must help them solve a practical problem whose solution you
base not on all the data you can find, no matter how new, but on just those
particular facts that are relevant to the problem of authenticity and whose
sources you can show are reliable. Your audience will listen intently and
critically, because they want to get the details right.
That’s the kind of task you’re likely to face if your teacher invents a
“real world” assignment—write to an EPA official who needs to do
something about a polluted lake. Academic researchers sometimes address
practical problems like these, but for them another kind of problem is far
more common. So pose a practical problem only if your teacher creates
one; otherwise, check with her first. (We’ll discuss practical problems in
more detail in chapter 4.)
2.3.3 Help Me Understand Something Better
Now imagine that your audience is the faculty of Zeppo University’s
Department of Lighter-than-Air Studies. They study all aspects of blimps
and zeppelins, do research on their economics and aerodynamics, and
participate in a worldwide conversation about their history and social
significance. They compete with other lighter-than-air scholars to produce
new lighter-than-air knowledge and theories that they publish in lighterthan-air journals and books read by everyone in their lighter-than-air field.
These scholars have invited you to talk about your specialty: the social
history of zeppelin travel in the 1930s. They don’t want you just to amuse
them with new facts (though they’ll be happy if you do) or to help them do
something (though they’d be pleased if you got them consulting work with
True-to-Life Films). They want you to use whatever new facts you have to
help them better understand the social history of zeppelin travel or, better
still, of lighter-than-air culture in general.
32
Because these lighter-than-air scholars are intensely committed to
finding the Truth about zeppelins, you know they expect you to be
objective, rigorously logical, and able to examine every issue from all
sides. You also know that if you don’t nail down your facts, they’ll
hammer you during the question period and if you don’t have good
answers, slice you up afterward over the wine and cheese, not just to be
contentious or even nasty (though some will be), but to get as close as they
can to the Truth about zeppelins in the 1930s. If you offer new data, like
Great-Uncle Otto’s photos, letter, and menu, they’ll be glad to see them,
but they’ll want to know why they matter and might even question their
authenticity.
Above all, they will care about your documents only if you can show
how they serve as evidence that helps you answer a question important to
understanding something about zeppelins that is more important than your
uncle’s trip. They will receive you especially well if you can convince
them that they do not understand the social history of zeppelins as well as
they thought and that your new data will improve their flawed
understanding. If you can’t do that, they’ll respond not with I don’t agree
—we all learn to live with that; some of us even thrive on it—but with a
response far more devastating: I don’t care.
So you begin your talk:
We all have been led to believe by a number of studies on the food service on
transatlantic zeppelin flights in the 1930s (especially Schmidt 1986 and Kloepfer 1998)
that items were never cooked over an open flame because of the danger of explosions.
However, I have recently discovered a menu from the July 12, 1936, crossing of the
Hindenburg indicating that oysters grilled over charcoal were served. . . . [You then go on
to show why that new knowledge matters.]
That is the kind of conversation you join when you report research to a
community of scholars. You must imagine them imagining this
conversation with you: Never mind whether your style is graceful (though
I will admire your work more if it is); don’t bother me with amusing
anecdotes about your Great-Uncle Otto (though I like hearing them if they
help me understand your ideas better); ignore whether what you know will
make me rich (though I would be happy if it did). Just tell me something I
don’t know so that I can better understand our common interest.
Who Cares about That?
Academic researchers are often scoffed at for studying esoteric topics that matter to no
one but themselves. The charge is usually unfair, but some researchers do become
fascinated with matters that seem to have little significance. Williams once attended
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the dissertation defense of a PhD candidate who had discovered reels and reels of film
shot by European anthropologists in Africa and Asia in the early twentieth century.
This previously unknown footage fascinated the film scholars on the committee. But
when Williams asked the candidate, “How do these new films improve our
understanding of movies then or now?” she could answer only that “no one has ever
seen this footage before.” Williams put his question in different ways but never got a
better answer. The film scholars, on the other hand, were untroubled (and found
Williams’s questions naive), because they were already imagining how the footage
might change their thinking about early film. And in any event, they all loved old film
for its own sake. So sometimes new data alone are enough to interest the right readers.
But if that candidate hopes to write anything that interests anyone but a tiny coterie of
specialists, she will have to make an offer better than Here’s some new stuff.
Your academic readers will almost always adopt this third role. They
will think you’ve fulfilled your side of the social contract only when you
treat them as who they think they are: scholars interested in greater
knowledge and better understanding. To be sure, the faculty over in
chemistry or philosophy care little about zeppelins, much less their meal
service. (Can you believe the trivia they study over in Helium Hall?) But
then you don’t much care about their issues, either. You are concerned
with your particular community of readers, with their interests and
expectations, with improving their understanding, based on the best
evidence you can find. That’s the social contract that all researchers must
establish with their readers.
Quick Tip: A Checklist for Understanding Your Readers
Think about your readers from the start, knowing that you’ll understand
them better as you work through your project. Answer these questions
early on, then revisit them when you start planning and again when you
revise.
1. Who will read my paper?
• Professionals who expect me to follow every academic convention and use a
standard format?
• Well-informed general readers?
• General readers who know little about the topic?
2. What do they expect me to do? Should I
• entertain them?
• provide new factual knowledge?
• help them understand something better?
• help them do something to solve a practical problem in the world?
3. How much can I expect them to know already?
• What do they know about my topic?
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• Is the problem one that they already recognize?
• Is it one that they have but haven’t yet recognized?
• Is the problem not theirs, but only mine?
• Will they take the problem seriously, or must I convince them that it matters?
4. How will readers respond to the solution/answer in my main claim?
• Will it contradict what they already believe? How?
• Will they make standard arguments against my solution?
• Will they want to see the steps that led me to the solution?
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PART II
Asking Questions, Finding Answers
36
Prologue
Planning Your Project—An Overview
If you’ve skimmed this book once, you’re ready to begin your project. If
you have a research question and know how to look for its answer, review
the next two chapters quickly; then read the remaining ones carefully as
they become relevant to your task. You may, however, feel bewildered if
you’re starting from scratch, without even a topic to guide you. But you
can manage if you have a plan and take one step at a time.
If you are starting from scratch, your first task is to find a research
question worth investigating that will lead to a research problem worth
solving. Here are four steps to that end:
1. Find a topic specific enough to let you master a reasonable amount of information on it
in the time you have: not, for example, the history of scientific writing but essays in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society (1675–1750) as precursors to the modern scientific
article; not doctors in seventeenth-century drama but Molière’s mockery of doctors in
three early plays.
2. Question that topic until you find questions that catch your interest. For example, How
did early Royal Society authors demonstrate that their evidence was reliable? Or, Why
did Molière mock doctors?
3. Determine the kinds of evidence your readers will expect you to offer in support of
your answer. Will they accept reports of facts from secondary sources, or will they
expect you to consult primary sources (see 5.1.1)? Will they expect quantitative data,
quotations from authorities, or firsthand observations?
4. Determine whether you can find this evidence. There’s no point researching a topic
unless you have a good chance of finding the right kind of evidence.
Once you think you have enough data to support at least a plausible
answer to your question, you’ll be ready to assemble an argument that
makes your case (see part III), then to plan, draft, and revise it (see part
IV).
You’ll discover, however, that you can’t march through those steps in
the neat order we present them. You’ll think of a tentative answer to your
research question before you have all the evidence you need to support it.
And when you think you have an argument worth making, you may
discover that you need more and maybe different evidence from new
sources. You may even modify your topic. Doing research is not like
strolling along an easy, well-marked path to a familiar destination; it’s
more like zigzagging up and down a rocky hill through overgrown woods,
sometimes in a fog, searching for something you won’t recognize until you
see it. But no matter how indirect your path, you can make progress if at
each step of the way you plan for predictable detours (and maybe even
avoid some of them).
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What Is Your Evidence?
No matter their field, researchers collect information to use as evidence to support
their claims. But researchers in different fields call that information by different
names. We call it data. By data we mean not just the numbers that natural and social
scientists collect, but anything you find “out there” relevant to answering your
research question. The term is used less often by researchers in the humanities, but
they, too, gather data in the form of quotations, historical facts, and so on. Data are
inert, however, until you use them to support a claim that answers your research
question. At that point, your data become evidence. If you don’t have more data than
you can use as evidence, you haven’t collected enough. (Incidentally, data is plural; a
single bit of data is a datum.)
Resolve to do lots of writing along the way. Much of it will be routine
note-taking, but you should also write reflectively, to understand: make
outlines; explain why you disagree with a source; draw diagrams to
connect disparate facts; summarize sources, positions, and schools; record
even random thoughts. Many researchers find it useful to keep a journal
for hunches, new ideas, random thoughts, problems, and so on. You might
not include much of this writing-to-discover-and-understand in your final
draft. But when you write as you go, every day, you encourage your own
best critical thinking, understand your sources better, and, when the time
comes, draft more productively.
Quick Tip: Creating a Writing Group
A downside of academic research is its isolation. Except for group
projects, you’ll read and write mostly alone. But it doesn’t have to be that
way. Look for someone other than your instructor or adviser who will talk
with you about your progress, review your drafts, even pester you about
how much you’ve written. That might be a generous friend, but even better
is another writer so that you can comment on each other’s ideas and drafts.
Best of all is a group of four or five people working on their own
projects who meet regularly to read and discuss one another’s work. Early
on, each meeting should start with a summary of each person’s project in
this three-part sentence: I’m working on X because I want to find out Y, so
that I (and you) can better understand Z (more about this in 3.4). As your
projects advance, develop an opening “elevator story,” a short summary of
your project that you could give someone on the way to a meeting. It
should include your research question, your best guess at an answer, and
the kind of evidence you expect to use to support it. The group can then
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follow up with questions, responses, and suggestions.
Don’t limit your talk to just your story, however. Talk about your
readers: Why should they be interested in your question? How might they
respond to your argument? Will they trust your evidence? Will they have
other evidence in mind? Such questions help you plan an argument that
anticipates what your readers expect. Your group can even help you
brainstorm when you bog down. Later the group can read one another’s
outlines and drafts to imagine how their final readers will respond. If your
group has a problem with your draft, so will those readers. But for most
writers, a writing group is most valuable for the discipline it imposes. It is
easier to meet a schedule when you know you must report to others.
Writing groups are common for those writing theses or dissertations.
But the rules differ for a class paper. Some teachers think that a group or
writing partner provides more help than is appropriate, so be clear what
your instructor allows.
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3 From Topics to Questions
In this chapter, we discuss how to find a topic among your interests, refine it to a
manageable scope, then question it to find the makings of a problem that can guide
your research. If you are an experienced researcher or know the topic you want to
pursue, skip to chapter 4. But if you are starting your first project, you will find this
chapter useful.
If you are new to research, the freedom to pick your own topic can seem
daunting. Where do you begin? How do you tell a good topic from a bad
one? Inexperienced researchers typically wonder, Will I find enough
information on this topic to write about it? To their surprise they often
compile too much information, much of it not very useful. They do so
because their topic lacks focus. Without that focus, any evidence you
assemble risks appearing to your readers as little more than a mound of
random facts. As you begin a research project, you will want to distinguish
a topic from a subject. A subject is a broad area of knowledge (e.g.,
climate change), while a topic is a specific interest within that area (e.g.,
the effect of climate change on migratory birds). However, finding a topic
is not simply a matter of narrowing your subject. A topic is an approach to
a subject, one that asks a question whose answer solves a problem that
your readers care about.
In all research communities, some questions are “in the air,” widely
debated and researched, such as whether traits like shyness or an attraction
to risk are learned or genetically inherited. But other questions may
intrigue only the researcher: Why do cats rub their faces against us? Why
does a coffee spill dry up in the shape of a ring? That’s how a lot of
research begins—not with a big question that attracts everyone in a field,
but with a mental itch about a small question that only a single researcher
wants to scratch. If you feel that itch, start scratching. But at some point,
you must decide whether the answer to your question solves a problem
significant to some community of researchers or even to a public whose
lives your research could change.
Question or Problem?
You may have noticed that we’ve been using the words question and problem almost
interchangeably. But they are not quite the same. Some questions raise problems;
others do not. A question raises a problem if not answering it keeps us from knowing
something more important than its answer. For example, if we cannot answer the
question Are there ultimate particles?, we cannot know something even more
important: the nature of physical existence. On the other hand, a question does not
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raise a problem if not answering it has no apparent consequences. For example, Was
Abraham Lincoln’s right thumb longer than his nose? We cannot think of what we
would gain by knowing. At least at the moment.
Now, that word problem is itself a problem. Commonly, a problem
means trouble, but among researchers it has a meaning so special that we
devote the next chapter to it. But before you can frame your research
problem, you have to find a topic that might lead to one. So we’ll start
there, with finding a topic.
3.1 FROM AN INTEREST TO A TOPIC
Most of us have more than enough interests, but beginners often find it
hard to locate among theirs a topic focused enough to support a substantial
research project. They may also believe they lack the expertise for the
project. However, a research topic is an interest stated specifically enough
for you to imagine becoming a local expert on it. That doesn’t mean you
already know a lot about it or that you’ll have to know more about it than
others, including your teacher. You just want to know a lot more about it
than you do now.
If you can work on any topic, we offer only a cliché: start with what
most interests you. Nothing contributes to the quality of your work more
than your commitment to it. But also ask yourself: What interests me about
this topic? What would interest others?
3.1.1 Finding a Topic in a Writing Course
Start by listing as many interests as you can that you’d like to explore.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think might interest a teacher or make
you look like a serious student. Let your ideas flow. Prime the pump by
asking friends, classmates, even your teacher about topics that interest
them. If no good topics come to mind, consult the Quick Tip at the end of
this chapter.
Once you have a list of topics, choose the one or two that interest you
most and explore their research potential. Do this:
• In the library, look up your topic in a general guide such as CQ Researcher and skim
the subheadings. In an online database such as Academic Search Premier, you can
explore your topic through subject terms. If you have a more narrow focus, you can do
the same with specialized guides such as Women’s Studies International. While some
libraries will have copies of general and specialized guides on the shelf, most now
subscribe to their online equivalents, but not all of them let you skim subject headings.
(We discuss these resources in chapter 5 and list several in the appendix.)
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• On the Internet, Google your topic, but don’t surf indiscriminately. Look first for
websites that are roughly like sources you would find in a library, such as online
encyclopedias. Read the entry on your general topic, and then copy the list of
references at the end for a closer look. Use Wikipedia to find ideas and sources, but
always confirm what you find there in a reliable source. Few experienced researchers
trust Wikipedia, so under no circumstances cite it as a source of evidence (unless your
topic is Wikipedia itself).
• Remember, at this point you are exploring a topic to spur your thinking and to see if
that topic is viable. With that in mind, you can also find ideas in blogs, which discuss
almost every contentious issue. Since most issues are usually too big for a research
paper, look for posts that take a position on narrow aspects of larger issues. If you
disagree with a view, investigate it.
3.1.2 Finding a Topic for a First Research Project in a Particular Field
Start by listing topics relevant to your particular class and that interest you,
then narrow them to one or two promising ones. If the topic is general,
such as religious masks, you’ll have to do some random reading to narrow
it. But read with a plan:
• Skim encyclopedia entries in your library or online. Start with standard ones such as
the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then consult specialized ones such as the Encyclopedia
of Religion or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Skim headings in specialized indexes such as the Philosopher’s Index, Psychological
Abstracts, or Women’s Studies Abstracts. Use subheadings for ideas of how others have
narrowed your topic.
• Google your topic, but not indiscriminately. Use Google Scholar, a search engine that
focuses on scholarly journals and books. Skim the articles it turns up, especially their
lists of sources.
When you know the general outline of your topic and how others have
narrowed theirs, try to narrow yours. If you can’t, browse through journals
and websites until your topic becomes more clearly defined. That takes
time, so start early.
3.1.3 Finding a Topic for an Advanced Project
Most advanced students already have interests in topics relevant to their
field. Often topics find them as they become immersed in a field. If that is
not yet the case, focus on what interests you, but remember that you must
eventually show why it should also interest others.
• Find what interests other researchers. Look online for recurring issues and debates in
the archives of professional discussion lists relevant to your interests. Search online and
in journals like the Chronicle of Higher Education for conference announcements,
conference programs, calls for papers, anything that reflects what others find
interesting.
• Skim the latest issues of journals in your field, not just for articles, but also for
conference announcements, calls for papers, and reviews. Skim recent articles in your
library’s online databases in your field (e.g., the MLA International Bibliography).
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• Investigate the resources that your library is particularly rich in. If, for example, it (or a
library nearby) holds a collection of rare papers on an interesting topic, you have found
not only a topic but a way into it. Many unexpected finds await discovery in your
library’s archives.
3.2 FROM A BROAD TOPIC TO A FOCUSED ONE
The most useful way to think about a topic is as a starting place for your
research. (The word “topic” comes from topos, which is Greek for
“place.”) From this starting place, you can head off in a particular direction
and thus narrow an overly broad topic into a productively focused one. At
this point, your biggest risk is settling on a topic so broad that it could be a
subheading in a library catalog: spaceflight; Shakespeare’s problem plays;
natural law. A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five
words:
Free will in Tolstoy
The history of commercial aviation
A topic so broad can intimidate you with the task of finding, much less
reading, even a fraction of the sources available. So narrow it down:
Free will in Tolstoy
→ The conflict of free will and inevitability in Tolstoy’s description
of three battles in War and Peace
The history of
commercial aviation
→ The contribution of the military in developing the DC-3 in the
early years of commercial aviation
We narrowed those topics by adding words and phrases, but of a special
kind: conflict, description, contribution, and developing. Those nouns are
derived from verbs expressing actions or relationships: to conflict, to
describe, to contribute, and to develop. Lacking such “action” words, your
topic is a static thing.
Note what happens when we restate static topics as full sentences.
Topics (1) and (2) change almost not at all:
(1) Free will in Tolstoytopic → There is free will in Tolstoy’s novels.claim
(2) The history of commercial aviationtopic → Commercial aviation has a history.claim
In reality, (1) and (2) are not topics at all because they do not lead
anywhere. But when (3) and (4) are revised into full sentences, they are
closer to claims that a reader might find interesting.
(3) The conflict of free will and inevitability in Tolstoy’s description of three battles in
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War and Peacetopic → In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes three battles in which free
will and inevitability conflict.claim
(4) The contribution of the military in developing the DC-3 in the early years of
commercial aviationtopic → In the early years of commercial aviation, the military
contributed to the way the DC-3 developed.claim
Such claims may at first seem thin, but you’ll make them richer as you
work through your project. And that’s the point: these topics are actually
paths to pursue when devising your project.
Caution: Don’t narrow your topic so much that you can’t find
information on it. Too much information is available on the history of
commercial aviation but too little (at least for beginning researchers) on
the decision to lengthen the wingtips on the DC-3 prototype for military
use as a cargo carrier.
3.3 FROM A FOCUSED TOPIC TO QUESTIONS
Once they have a focused topic, many new researchers make a beginner’s
mistake: they immediately start plowing through all the sources they can
find on the topic, taking notes on everything they read. With a promising
topic such as the political origins of legends about the Battle of the Alamo,
they mound up endless facts connected with the battle: what led up to it,
histories of the Texas Revolution, the floor plan of the mission, even
biographies of generals Santa Anna and Sam Houston. They accumulate
notes, summaries, descriptions of differences and similarities, ways in
which the stories conflict with one another and with what historians think
really happened, and so on. Then they dump it all into a paper that
concludes, Thus we see many differences and similarities between . . .
Many high school teachers would reward such a paper with a good
grade, because it shows that the writer can focus on a topic, find
information on it, and assemble that information into a report, no small
achievement—for a first project. But in any college course, such a report
falls short if it is seen as just a pastiche of vaguely related facts. If a writer
asks no specific question worth asking, he can offer no specific answer
worth supporting. And without an answer to support, he cannot select from
all the data he could find on a topic just those relevant to his answer. To be
sure, those fascinated by Elvis Presley movie posters or the first generation
of video games will read anything new about them, no matter how trivial.
Serious researchers, however, do not document information for its own
sake, but to support the answer to a question that they (and they hope their
readers) think is worth asking.
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So the best way to begin working on your focused topic is not to find all
the information you can on it, but to formulate questions that direct you to
just that information you need to answer them.
Start with the standard journalistic questions: who, what, when, and
where, but focus on how and why. To engage your best critical thinking,
systematically ask questions about your topic’s history, composition, and
categories. Then ask any other question you can think of or find in your
sources. Record all the questions, but don’t stop to answer them even when
one or two grab your attention. This inventory of possible questions will
help to direct your search activities and enable you to make sense of
information you find. (Don’t worry about keeping these categories
straight; their only purpose is to stimulate questions and organize your
answers.) Let’s take up the example of masks mentioned earlier.
3.3.1 Ask about the History of Your Topic
• How does it fit into a larger developmental context? Why did your topic come into
being? What came before masks? How were masks invented? Why? What might come
after masks?
• What is its own internal history? How and why has the topic itself changed through
time? How have Native American masks changed? Why? How have Halloween masks
changed? How has the role of masks in society changed? How has the booming market
for kachina masks influenced traditional design? Why have masks helped make
Halloween the biggest American holiday after Christmas?
3.3.2 Ask about Its Structure and Composition
• How does your topic fit into the context of a larger structure or function as part of
a larger system? How do masks reflect the values of different societies and cultures?
What roles do masks play in Hopi dances? In scary movies? In masquerade parties?
How are masks used other than for disguise?
• How do its parts fit together as a system? What parts of a mask are most significant in
Hopi ceremonies? Why? Why do some masks cover only the eyes? Why do few masks
cover just the bottom half of the face? How do their colors play a role in their
function?
3.3.3 Ask How Your Topic Is Categorized
• How can your topic be grouped into kinds? What are the different kinds of masks? Of
Halloween masks? Of African masks? How are they categorized by appearance? By
use? By geography or society? What are the different qualities of masks?
• How does your topic compare to and contrast with others like it? How do Native
American ceremonial masks differ from those in Japan? How do Halloween masks
compare with Mardi Gras masks?
3.3.4 Turn Positive Questions into Negative Ones
• Why have masks not become a part of other holidays, like Presidents’ Day or
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Memorial Day? How do Native American masks not differ from those in Africa? What
parts of masks are typically not significant in religious ceremonies?
3.3.5 Ask What If? and Other Speculative Questions
• How would things be different if your topic never existed, disappeared, or were put
into a new context? What if no one ever wore masks except for safety? What if
everyone wore masks in public? What if it were customary to wear masks on blind
dates? In marriage ceremonies? At funerals? Why are masks common in African
religions but not in Western ones? Why don’t hunters in camouflage wear masks? How
are masks and cosmetic surgery alike?
3.3.6 Ask Questions Suggested by Your Sources
You won’t be able to do this until you’ve done some reading on your
topic. Ask questions that build on agreement:
• If a source makes a claim you think is persuasive, ask questions that might extend its
reach. Elias shows that masked balls became popular in eighteenth-century London in
response to anxieties about social mobility. Did the same anxieties cause similar
developments in Venice?
• Ask questions that might support the same claim with new evidence. Elias supports his
claim about masked balls with published sources. Is it also supported by letters and
diaries?
• Ask questions analogous to those that sources have asked about similar topics. Smith
analyzes costumes from an economic point of view. What would an economic analysis
of masks turn up?
Now ask questions that reflect disagreement:
• Martinez claims that carnival masks uniquely allow wearers to escape social norms. But
could there be a larger pattern of all masks creating a sense of alternative forms of
social or spiritual life?
(We discuss in more detail how to use disagreements with sources in 6.4.)
If you are an experienced researcher, look for questions that other
researchers ask but don’t answer. Many journal articles end with a
paragraph or two about open questions, ideas for more research, and so on
(see 4.3.2 for an example). You might not be able to do all the research
they suggest, but you might carve out a piece of it. You can also look for
Internet discussions on your topic, then “lurk,” just reading the exchanges
to understand the kinds of questions those on the list debate. Record
questions that spark your interest. You can also post questions to the list if
they are specific and narrowly focused.
3.3.7 Evaluate Your Questions
After asking all the questions you can think of, evaluate them, because not
all questions are equally good. Look for questions whose answers might
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make you (and, ideally, your readers) think about your topic in a new way.
Avoid questions like these:
• Their answers are settled fact that you could just look up. Do the Inuit use masks in
their wedding ceremonies? Questions that ask how and why invite deeper thinking than
who, what, when, or where, and deeper thinking leads to more interesting answers.
• Their answers would be merely speculative. Would church services be as well attended
if the congregation all wore masks? If you can’t imagine finding hard data that might
settle the question, it’s a question you can’t settle.
• Their answers are dead ends. How many black cats slept in the Alamo the night before
the battle? It is hard to see how an answer would help us think about any larger issue
worth understanding better, so it’s a question that’s probably not worth asking.
You might, however, be wrong about that. Some questions that seemed
trivial, even silly, have answers more significant than expected. One
researcher wondered why a coffee spill dries up in the form of a ring and
discovered things about the properties of fluids that others in his field
thought important—and that paint manufacturers found valuable. So who
knows where a question about cats in the Alamo might take you? You
can’t know until you get there.
Once you have a few promising questions, try to combine them into
larger ones. For example, many questions about the Alamo story ask about
the interests of the storytellers and their effects on their stories: How have
politicians used the story? How have the storytellers’ motives changed?
Whose purposes does each story serve? These can be combined into a
single question:
How and why have users of the Alamo story given the event a mythic quality?
A question like this gives direction to your research (and helps avoid the
gathering of endless information). And it begins to imagine readers who
will judge whether your question is significant.
3.4 THE MOST SIGNIFICANT QUESTION: SO WHAT?
Even if you are an experienced researcher, you might not be able to take
the next step until you are well into your project, and if you are a beginner,
you may find it frustrating. Even so, once you have a question that holds
your interest, you must pose a tougher one about it: So what? Beyond your
own interest in its answer, why would others think it a question worth
asking? You might not be able to answer that So what? question early on,
but it’s one you have to start thinking about, because it forces you to look
beyond your own interests to consider how your work might strike others.
Think of it like this: What will be lost if you don’t answer your
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question? How will not answering it keep us from understanding
something else better than we do? Start by asking So what? at first of
yourself:
So what if I don’t know or understand how butterflies know where to go in the winter, or
how fifteenth-century musicians tuned their instruments, or why the Alamo story has
become a myth? So what if I can’t answer my question? What do we lose?
Your answer might be Nothing. I just want to know. Good enough to
start, but not to finish, because eventually your readers will ask as well,
and they will want an answer beyond Just curious. Answering So what?
vexes all researchers, beginners and experienced alike, because when you
have only a question, it’s hard to predict whether others will think its
answer is significant. But you must work toward that answer throughout
your project. You can do that in three steps.
3.4.1 Step 1: Name Your Topic
If you are beginning a project with only a topic and maybe the
glimmerings of a good question or two, start by naming your project:
I am trying to learn about/working on/studying ____________.
Fill in the blank with your topic, using some of those nouns derived from
verbs:
I am studying the causes of the disappearance of large North American mammals . . .
I am working on Lincoln’s beliefs about predestination and their influence on his
reasoning . . .
3.4.2 Step 2: Add an Indirect Question
Add an indirect question that indicates what you do not know or
understand about your topic:
1. I am studying/working on ____________
2. because I want to find out who/what/when/where/whether/why/how
____________.
1. I am studying the causes of the disappearance of large North American mammals
2. because I want to find out whether they were hunted to extinction . . .
1. I am working on Lincoln’s beliefs about predestination and its influence on his
reasoning
2. because I want to find out how his belief in destiny influenced his
understanding of the causes of the Civil War . . .
When you add that because I want to find out how/why/whether clause,
you state why you are pursuing your topic: to answer a question important
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to you.
If you are a new researcher and get this far, congratulate yourself,
because you have moved beyond the aimless collection of data. But now,
if you can, take one step more. It’s one that advanced researchers know
they must take, because they know their work will be judged not by its
significance to them but by its significance to others in their field. They
must have an answer to So what?
3.4.3 Step 3: Answer So What? by Motivating Your Question
This step tells you whether your question might interest not just you but
others. To do that, add a second indirect question that explains why you
asked your first question. Introduce this second implied question with in
order to help my reader understand how, why, or whether:
1. I am studying the causes of the disappearance of large North American mammals
2. because I want to find out whether the earliest peoples hunted them to extinction,
3. in order to help my reader understand whether native peoples lived in
harmony with nature or helped destroy it.
1. I am working on Lincoln’s beliefs about predestination and their influence on his
reasoning
2. because I want to find out how his belief in destiny and God’s will influenced his
understanding of the causes of the Civil War,
3. in order to help my reader understand how his religious beliefs may
have influenced his military decisions.
It is the indirect question in step 3 that you hope will seize your readers’
interest. If it touches on issues important to your field, even indirectly,
then your readers should care about its answer.
Some advanced researchers begin with questions that others in their
field already care about: Why did the giant sloth and woolly mammoth
disappear from North America? Or: Is risk taking genetically based? But
many researchers, including at times the five of us, find that they can’t
flesh out the last step in that three-part sentence until they finish a first
draft. So you make no mistake beginning your research without a good
answer to that third question—Why does this matter?—but you face a
problem when you finish your research without having thought through
those three steps at all. And if you are doing advanced research, you must
take that step, because answering that last question is your ticket into the
conversation of your community of researchers.
Regularly test your progress by asking a roommate, relative, or friend to
force you to flesh out those three steps. Even if you can’t take them all
confidently, you’ll know where you are and where you still have to go. To
summarize: Your aim is to explain
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1. what you are writing about—I am working on the topic of . . .
2. what you don’t know about it—because I want to find out . . .
3. why you want your reader to know and care about it—in order to help my
reader understand better . . .
In the following chapters, we return to those three steps and their
implied questions, because they are crucial not just for finding questions
but for framing the research problem that you want your readers to value.
Quick Tip: Finding Topics
If you are a beginner, start with our suggestions about exploring the
Internet and skimming bibliographical guides (see 3.1). If you still draw a
blank, try these steps.
FOR GENERAL INTEREST TOPICS
• What special interest do you have—sailing, chess, finches, old comic books? The less
common, the better. Investigate something about it you don’t know: its origins, its
technology, how it is practiced in another culture, and so on.
• Where would you like to travel? Surf the Internet, finding out all you can about your
destination. What particular aspect surprises you or makes you want to know more?
• Wander through a museum with exhibitions that appeal to you—artworks, dinosaurs,
old cars. If you can’t browse in person, browse a “virtual museum” on the Internet.
Stop when something catches your interest. What more do you want to know about it?
• Wander through a shopping mall or store, asking yourself, How do they make that? Or,
I wonder who thought up that product?
• Leaf through a Sunday newspaper, especially its features sections. Skim reviews of
books or movies, in newspapers or on the Internet.
• Browse a large magazine rack. Look for trade magazines or those that cater to
specialized interests. Investigate whatever catches your interest.
• Tune into talk radio or interview programs on TV until you hear a claim that you
disagree with. Or find something to disagree with on the websites connected with wellknown talk shows. See whether you can make a case to refute it.
• Use an Internet search engine to find websites related to your topic. These include
blogs maintained by individuals and organizations. You’ll get hundreds of hits, but
look only at the ones that surprise you.
• Is there a common belief that you suspect is simplistic or just wrong? A common
practice that you find pointless or irritating? Do research to make a case against it.
• What courses will you take in the future? What research would help you prepare for
them?
FOR TOPICS FOCUSED ON A PARTICULAR FIELD
If you have experience in your field, review 3.1.2–3.
• Browse through a textbook of a course that is one level beyond yours or a course that
you know you will have to take. Look especially hard at the study questions.
• Attend a lecture for an advanced class in your field, and listen for something you
disagree with, don’t understand, or want to know more about.
• Ask your instructor about the most contested issues in your field.
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• Find an Internet discussion list in your field. Browse its archives, looking for matters of
controversy or uncertainty.
• Surf the websites of departments at major universities, including class sites. Also check
websites of museums, national associations, and government agencies, if they seem
relevant.
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4 From Questions to a Problem
In this chapter, we explain how to turn a question into a problem that readers think is
worth solving. If you are an advanced researcher, you know how essential this step is.
If you are new to research, we hope to convince you of its importance, because what
you learn here will be essential to all your future projects.
In the last chapter, we suggested that you can identify the significance of
your research question by fleshing out this three-step formula:
1. Topic: I am studying _________
2. Question: because I want to find out what/why/how ________,
3. Significance: in order to help my reader understand _________.
These steps describe not only the development of your project but your
own development as a researcher.
• When you move from step 1 to 2, you are no longer a mere data collector but a
researcher interested in understanding something better.
• When you then move from step 2 to 3, you focus on why that understanding is
significant.
That significance might at first be just for yourself, but you join a
community of researchers when you can state that significance from your
readers’ point of view. In so doing, you create a stronger relationship with
readers because you promise something in return for their interest in your
report—a deeper understanding of something that matters to them. At that
point, you have posed a problem that they recognize needs a solution.
4.1 UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH PROBLEMS
Too many researchers at all levels write as if their task is to answer a
question that interests themselves alone. That’s wrong: to make your
research matter, you must address a problem that others in your
community—your readers—also want to solve. To understand why, you
have to understand what research problems look like. And to do that, you
have to understand two other kinds of probl…

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