quick review

We really have three main ways of acquiring information about life, the universe, and everything.

We go through life observing, using our senses, storing information about shapes and colors and tastes and scents and such; this is especially useful when we write descriptive essays. We have experiences that shape our personalities and beliefs which we store in our memories (or somewhere!), and we often reveal our characters when we recount them in narrative essays. A huge body of what we consider our knowledge comes from outside sources (other people, books, television, the internet, etc.)--these are called secondary (or second hand) sources.

If we are sharing information about a movie or a vacation spot, description is usually enough. When we want our writing to have high human interest and allow the reader to get to know us (in other words, when WE are the subject of the paper), narrative makes more sense. However, when we are writing a reasoned argument, supporting a stance on an issue, trying to analyze a complex idea or situation or work, we nearly always have to get support from outside sources; we need to do research.

Are there different kinds?

Your research paper is primarily an exploratory not an explanatory paper. That means your are not writing the sort of research paper you might have written in elementary, middle or high school where you just looked up facts about a country or a court decision in an encyclopedia and copied the information onto your own sheet of paper. Instead, you are arguing for one position about some issue; the research material is used to support your claims, your conclusions. I realize this is a much harder sort of paper to write, but it allows you to demonstrate your ability to make reasoned statements about the world--the sort of thinking demanded of college and university students.

Consider the following three situations:

  1. You want to describe a park in Santa Monica which is crowded with homeless people, and you see a marked contrast between their poverty and suffering and the gaily-painted playground area with laughing children and their sad toys and colorful Oskash-b'gosh overalls. You could go to the park with a notebook and record what you see, hear, etc. This would be appropriate for a descriptive essay (in this case using comparison/contrast).

  2. You want to share a day in the life of a homeless person, so you go to that park and ask questions, or perhaps you know someone who is homeless or you have been homeless yourself; in any case, you are trying to reveal what it's like to be homeless in Santa Monica. This would require you to use a lot of narrative (incidents, dialogue, etc.). You'd also want to use description in this essay (to set a scene, sketch a character). You rarely use just description or just narrative by itself.

  3. You want to discuss the inadequacy (or adequacy) of services available for the homeless in Santa Monica. Again, you could use description (describe a shelter), and you could include narrative (share an incident where a homeless person attempted to get relief and succeeded or failed), but that's not really enough to prove your point. You need more. You need to research exactly what is available, who is making use of the services, who is choosing not to make use of the services, how many homeless are turned away, etc. That would take a trip to the library or to city hall, to a homeless shelter and maybe back to that park. You might discover newspaper and magazine articles that add information to your topic. Television and the internet might supply you with even more information.

So you really need to size up the situation, to decide if your thesis can be proven sufficiently with your own observations and experiences, or if you need to gather more evidence to make a fully-reasoned case.

Of course, often you don't even have to think about it; your instructor assigns you a research paper. That pretty much settles that.

So now What do you Do?

There's no set order for beginning a research project. If the topic is assigned, start looking for information about the topic. If you have some choice, then you first need to decide on your topic.

For the third situation above, you're likely to end up with one of two thesis statements:

Although there are many services available to the homeless in Santa Monica, they are inadequate to meet the needs of a huge homeless population.

or

Although there are many homeless people in Santa Monica, there are many services available to help them.

You may actually intend to prove one thesis, but after you've done your research, you may switch to the other thesis. That's why you're doing the research, to find the evidence that allows you to make a reasonable argument.

if the assignment does require research?

Any decent standard college handbook will give you more than enough information on how to do each step in the research process; here's a quick list suggesting how you might organize the whole process (you have already done the first two, but you are likely still reading and gathering even more information):

notes and sources, sources and notes

Most everything you need to know about your research paper is discussed in the research chapters of your class handbook, and that is assigned reading. I expect you to return to those chapters often during the process. Answers to questions, techniques, samples--they're all there. But it is a lot of information, and reference books are not always the easiest things to read, so it's a good idea to break the process down a little here.

The first step applies to so many things in life: you need to assess the situation. Consider topic options (if there are any), paper length, required format, minimum number and kinds of sources required (if given), the purpose of the paper, and the audience for the paper. If there are samples you can look at, that's brilliant; if not, make sure you ask the teacher whatever questions you have. You don't want to turn in a three-page paper on gun control that cites one Michael Moore movie and is peppered with personal examples if the teacher expects a ten-page paper supported by fifteen sources from scientific journals on the consequences of a scientific discovery.

In a case where the teacher puts fairly strict limits on the topic choice, it actually simplifies things. If you were allowed to write about any issue, then it would be hard to know where to begin. Typing "issue" in the library database will generate a gazillion hits. Since you are limited to popular conspiracy theories from the last hundred years, you can go to GOOGLE or the databases and type in "conspiracy theory," and you will still have quite a lot of hits, but it will be relatively manageable. Wikipedia is not a source you will want to use for this assignment (it's unreliable and too general), but it's still not a bad starting spot to learn what kinds of conspiracy theories are popular.

You may be inspired by something you see on television (there are occasional conspiracy theory shows on network and cable channels; there's a whole series on The History Channel, for example). Just make sure you can find enough evidence, that you can narrow the topic (writing all there is to know about the Illuminti in less than a 1000 pages, for example, is not acceptable; however, exploring their possible involvement in the death of Michael Jackson is much more manageable).

small steps...with both feet   one foot is writing, the other is researching

In the words of the Pandarian monks in World of Warcraft, "Slow down." This is not a sit-down-at-the-typewriter-and-bang-out-a-paper-overnight project; it is a process. You will need to take small steps, considering what you know about your topic, looking up information, adding to your notes, finding more research material, modifying your notes again, and so on, step by step.

Once you think about your potential topic for a bit, jot down some very quick notes on a piece of paper. They don't have to be complete sentences, and they could be in all sorts of forms--brainstorming, clustering, a list, a scratch outline, a formal outline--whatever you want. What do you (think) you know about the topic? What are some issues that relate to the topic? What is the official version of the incident you are writing about (for example, officially, Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in the President Kennedy assassination)? What contrary version do you intend to support (for example, one theory suggests that Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover had Kennedy assassinated because Johnson wanted to be president and Hoover was being investigated for corruption in his running of the FBI)? What sorts of things would you have to put into the paper (and in what order) to develop this argument and, maybe, convince a general reader? Since you have not yet done much research, your first list of notes will probably be very short.

You need to start your research. Do some searches on the internet, check the college library's database (I recommend both JSTOR and EBSCO as starting points), look through a textbook that you remember has something about the topic, ask (interview) a teacher who might know somethign about the topic, make friends with the college reference librarian. See if there really is enough information (remember, you need at least four sources that you will actually quote supporting examples from). Do you have sources that look at the exact issue you are researching? Do they have evidence that supports the exact theory you are researching, or do they suggest that there are other conspirators and other motives (making you consider switching to that issue)? If there seems to be plenty of supporting information, then you can keep moving forward.

annotate your sources

Remember that you need to include direct quotations from credible sources. You need to follow those direct quotations with parenthetical citations. About 1/3 to 1/2 of your paper will be directly taken from your sources, word-for-word. There is no way you can remember all of that, where you found what, unless you annotate your sources. In the old days we wrote out all of our notes on index cards, but now you have TECHNOLOGY. Photocopy your print sources and mark up any passage that you think might be quotable, that provides compelling evidence to support your thesis. If you have a Web-bases source, print it out and annotate (highlight, underline, add marginal notes) the printout. For non-text sources (such as a DVD or a YouTube clip) you need to type up transcripts summarizing the source and including key bits of evidence you can use in your research paper.

With your notes growing a little and your focus being sharpened, you now have more specific things you are trying to find in your research sources. If you already have a tentative thesis, then you can quickly read sources for evidence that will support that thesis. Search and read and evaluate until you find at least four sources that really seem to fit your narrowed topic.

You will keep stepping forward annotating your sources and researching. Work to clarify and organize and expand your comments (notes/outline). Then read and evaluate your sources more fully. You may swap out some sources for others that better support your argument.

For Stephanie's paper on Roswell she read of an eye-witness (Mac Brazel) who saw the crash site. While researching Brazel, another name (Jesse Marcel) came up in one of her sources, and that caused her to add his name to her growing outline and to do some searches on him. Some of those searches revealed other names and evidence she hadn't originally known about, and her notes and outline grew. You are bound to change and grow your paper as you think more and read more. That's terrific. Becoming more informed about a topic, an issue, allows us to re-examine what we think we know. That is really the point of a broad education.

from notes to outline

There are lots of methods of prewriting which allow you to get ideas down on paper before you actually commit a lot of time to full-blown essay writing (these methods have been covered in your assigned handbook readings). Many instructors require that you produce one or more of these pre-writing exercises for each essay; I merely recommend you find a method of shaping your papers that works for you.

For the research paper, however, I required that start with a proposal that includes some very broad notes about the main areas you intend to develop for your paper. From there you started reading about your topic more and expanding on those notes. Eventually, a logical plan for your paper should emerge from those notes. Some people keep notes on scraps of paper or post its, but those often get lost or disorganized, so you are going to be turning your expanded notes into a full, formal sentence outline, which you will turn in as part of the research project.

Outlining (formal and otherwise) is a means of organizing your essays, of creating a plan that you can follow before you spend too much time typing up material that doesn't fit whatever thesis you are trying to prove. To be truly useful, you should do this before you complete a rough draft; the whole point of the outline is to give you a set of notes to follow, to remind you what you must include in your paper to support your thesis, and to explore the best sequence for presenting that information.

As you develop your outline, refer often to the assigned information on outlining in Rules for Writers. Outlines are not especially hard to write, but they are very, very picky.

the use of an outline

An informal outline (the kind you are not doing) is more of a list where key ideas are often just noted with asterisks or "bullets." Since different instructors require different sorts of outlines, we will be doing the most formal version (with the Roman numerals, upper-case letters, Arabic numerals, lower-case letters, complete sentences, etc. If you can conquer this, you can do any of them. Your handbook shows both.

A formal outline has a very precise, well, form; producing one on Word (or another Word Processor) can have you tearing your hair out (the spacing goes kablooey; the indentation takes on a life of its own). If possible, disable the auto-formatting features and put the thing together manually, as though you were using a traditional typewriter which allows you to TAB regularly without whole chunks of your paper shifting left and right. Ultimately, you want it to look and be organized like the one in the handbook or the sample outline at the bottom of this lecture.

Simply put, your outline is list of notes about what things you will include in your paper and in what order you will include them. To have any value your plan (an outline is just a plan) should be done BEFORE you write your rough draft; the point is to be able to move bits around on your plan easily, to see which areas you need do more research on, to make sure you stay on track as you draft your paper. All outlines should contain the following at the very least:

growing your outline

The following is not very useful:

THESIS: Although most evidence fails to prove that aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, there are enough inconsistencies in the U.S government's reports to suggest that some suspicious activity took place there.

What the heck is that? The thesis is a start (though it doesn't describe the nature of the conspiracy, the names of conspirators, the motive for some sort of cover-up), but that list is so broad that it's really no more than some initial quick notes (the kind that you might put on little Post-its). Of course it's not a formal outline, but it's actually OK to start with more of a list and refine it until you turn it into a formal outline once you've gathered more information.

Let's keep it informal (simple) for the time being, but let's turn the words into sentences and add some substance so that we can see what sorts of things are going to be researched and included in the paper

THESIS: The UFO crash-landing near Roswell, New Mexico in July, 1947 was covered up by President Harry S. Truman and Air Force General Roger Ramey due to fears of threats to national security and the risk of public hysteria.

Do that for all of the items on your informal list.

the formal sentence outline

As you research more, you will add to the items (both main categories and examples that you will include in your paper), and you will eventually be able to see the entire map of your essay. At this point, follow the instructions on the Purdue OWL site or look over information on the formal sentence outline on the Annotations/Outline Writing Assignment. Then turn whatever notes you have into a full formal sentence outline, something like this:

Click the link to view a portion of a sample formal sentence outline