Researching for AP Language

Harrison High School/Jamison

Why should I bother writing it down?

Write to Remember: Experienced researchers first write just to remember what they’ve read. When you don’t take notes on what you read, you’re likely to forget, or worse, misremember it.

Write to Understand: See the larger patterns in what you read. Careful researchers write from the beginning of their project to help them assemble their information in new ways.

Write to Test Your Thinking: Get your thoughts out of your held and onto paper, where you’ll see what you really can think.

Answers the question, “Why do we have to do this?”

Who Needs Research? Research exists in everyday life and

encompasses infinitely more than just an assignment for school.o Most successful people are also effective researchers.

Oprah, Yahoo creator Jerry Yang, or the manager of every pro sports team has to be an expert on research and in using research from others (Booth 3).

o Learning how to research helps us to understand what we read, the validity of what other people say and report, and how to better understand the world around us.

Thinking in Print: The Uses of Research

“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 log on to 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 reported by others, in writing, is the source of most of what we believe”(Booth 9).

Understanding your role and your audience

The purpose of a research paper or researched argument is not to gather a ton of facts and hope the teacher will reward those facts. In a research report, you must think of your reader as someone who doesn’t know it but needs to.

Before you write anything, whether it is a literary analysis or a scientific report, you must consider that there must be a need for that knowledge and an interest on your part. If you approach it as only another assignment, you will not write to your full potential.

Three Reasons for Choosing a Topic

1. I’ve found some new and interesting information. 2. I’ve found a solution to an important practical

problem.3. I’ve found an answer to an important question.

4. See the handout #1 (Understanding Your Role) for students. This activity would work for a pre-writing session (25 minutes?)

5. Link to handout

From Topics to Questions

After you pick your topic, don’t just start collecting data. Now is the time to turn your topic into a question whose answer solves a problem that you can convince readers to care about.

What is the difference between a question and a problem?

Topic. Question. Problem.

Questions and Problems Questions and problems 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 raise a problem if not answering it has no apparent consequences. For example, Was Abraham Lincoln’s right thumb longer than his nose? What would readers gain by knowing this?

Activity: Students will evaluate each other’s topics and questions. Do the topics logically progress toward a problem that needs to be solved?

From a Broad Topic to a Focused One

A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five words: o Free will in Tolstoyo The history of commercial aviation

A topic too broad will be impossible to research! Here’s how we narrow it:

Students should reword their existing topics into more focused ones.

• The conflict of free will and inevitability in Tolstoy’s description of three battles in War and Peace

Free will in Tolstoy

• The contribution of the military in developing the DC-3 in the early years of commercial aviation

The history of commerci

al aviation

From a Focused Topic to Questions

The best way to begin working on your specific topic is not to find all the data you can on your general topic, but to formulate questions that point you to just those data that you need to answer them.

Students should look at Handout From Focused Topic to Questions

Ask about the history of your topic

Ask about its structure and composition

Ask how your topic is categorized

Turn positive questions into negative ones

Ask What if? and other speculative questions

Why All These Questions?

Without a research question to answer, with out a topic to guide your way, you will gather data aimlessly and endlessly, with no way of knowing when you have enough.

To avoid this, you need a research problem that focuses you on finding just those data that will help you solve it. It might take awhile to figure out what that problem is, but from the outset, you have to think about it.

Student ActivityHandout #2: From Question to Significance

Student ActivitySee Handout #2 Activity: Work through the following three steps in order to discover your

topic’s significance. 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 lean about _________________________. Step 2 – Add an Indirect Question: Add an indirect question that indicates what

you do not know or understand about your topic: I am studying/working on_____________________ because I want to find out

who/what/where/when/whether/why/how_____________________. 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. Introduc4e this second implied question with in order to help my reader understand how, why, or whether:

I am studying __________________ because I want to discover__________________ in order to help my reader understand __________________________.

A Typical Beginner’s MistakeNo one can solve the world’s great problems in a five or even a fifty-page paper. But you might help us better understand a small part of one, and that can move us closer to a practical solution. So if you care deeply about a practical problem, such as destructive forest fires, carve out of it a conceptual question that is small enough to answer but whose answer might ultimately contribute to a practical solution: How important are fires to the ecological health of a forest? How do local fire codes affect the spread of a forest fire?

Help students avoid this common problem.

Finding a Good Research Problem

1. Thinking about your “problem” early will save you hours of

work in the long run.

2. Ask for Help: Do what

experienced researchers do:

talk to teachers,

classmates, relatives, friends,

neighbors – anyone who

might be interested.

3. Look for Problems as You Read: Where in your sources do

you see contradictions, inconsistencies,

incomplete explanations?

4. Look at your Own Conclusion:

We usually do our best thinking

in the last few pages we write. It is often only then that we

begin to formulate a final claim that we did

not anticipate when we started.

Student Activity/Suggestions

Get control over your topic by writing about it along the way. Don’t just retype or photocopy sources: write summaries, critiques, questions, responses to your sources. Keep a journal in which you reflect on your progress. The more you write, no matter how sketchily, the more confidently you will face that intimidating first draft.

Know that uncertainty and anxiety are natural and inevitable.

Count on your teachers to understand your struggles. Set realistic goals. Recognize that this struggle is a huge learning

experience! Keep reviewing, writing, and persevering.

Identifying Types of Sources

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.

From Problems to Sources

Primary Sources: These provide the raw data that you use first to test your working hypothesis and then as evidence to support your claim. In history, for example, primary sources include documents from the period or person you are studying, objects, maps, even clothing; in literature or philosophy, your main primary source is usually the text you are studying, and your data are the words on the page. In such fields, you can rarely write a research paper without using primary sources.

Links to a Few Primary Sources

Some examples of sites that allow free viewing of primary sources: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/treasures1.html

How to find primary sources: http://www.library.mun.ca/guides/howto/primary.php

New York Times Archive: 1894 Article about Grammar School: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A0DE2DE1531E033A25751C1A9619C94659ED7CF

Walt Whitman’s Death 1892: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9502E2DC1F39E233A25754C2A9659C94639ED7CF

Secondary Sources Secondary sources are research reports that

use primary data to solve research problems, written for scholarly and professional audiences. Researchers read them to keep up with their field and use what they read to frame problems of their own by disputing other researchers'’ conclusions or question their methods. You can use their data to support your argument, but only if you cannot find those data in a primary source. A secondary source becomes a primary source when you study its argument as part of a debate in a field, such as whether patriotic historians deliberately distorted Alamo stories.

Secondary and Tertiary Sources

Information about Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources http://

www.lib.umd.edu/guides/primary-sources.html#secondaryComparison Across the

DisciplinesUniversity Libraries, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)405-0800

SUBJECT PRIMARY SECONDARY TERTIARY

Art and Architecture Painting by Manet Article critiquing art piece ArtStor database

Chemistry/Life Sciences

Einstein's diaryMonograph on Einstein's life

Dictionary on Theory of Relativity

Engineering/Physical Sciences

Patent NTIS databaseManual on using invention

HumanitiesLetters by Martin Luther King

Web site on King's writings

Encyclopedia on Civil Rights Movement

Social SciencesNotes taken by clinical psychologist

Magazine article about the psychological condition

Textbook on clinical psychology

Performing Arts Movie filmed in 1942 Biography of the director Guide to the movie

Tertiary Sources These are books and articles that synthesize and

report on secondary sources for general readers, such as textbooks, articles in encyclopedias and mass-circulation publications like Psychology Today, and what standard search engines turn up first on the Web. In the early stages of research, you can use tertiary sources to get a feel for a topic. But if you use what you find in a tertiary source to support a scholarly argument, most of your readers won’t trust your report – or you.

Evaluating Sources Relevance (if your source

is a book): 1. Skim its index for your key

words, then skim the page on which those words occur (this is very easy to accomplish on Google Books).

2. Skim the first and last paragraphs in chapters that use a lot of your key words.

3. Skim prologues, introductions, summary chapters, and so on.

4. If the source is a collection of articles, skim the editor’s introduction.

5. Check the bibliography for titles relevant to your topic.

If your source is an article: 1. Read the abstract, if it has

one. 2. Skim the intro and conclusion,

or if they are not marked off by headings, skim the first six or seven paragraphs and the last four or five.

3. Skim for section headings, and read the first and last paragraphs of those sections.

4. Check the bibliography for titles relevant to your project.

Don’t Reinvent the Research Wheel

Checking the bibliography can help you find useful

sources quicker! Why start from scratch when someone

else has already done the work for you?

Searching and Seeking in the Deep

Web: Primary Sources on the Internet

From Working in the Archives by Elizabeth Yakel

The Challenges of the “Deep Web”

Comprehensive searching requires scholars to master different search strategies than they have previously employed.

Online Sources of Archival Materials: When using primary sources a sound research methodology includes a systematic search for archival and manuscript materials on a given subject. The following (in increasing order of detail) are sources with information about archives and manuscripts:

Directories and Websites

Directories for archival repositorieso Repositories of

Primary Sources, which provides links to archival collections around the worls at http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html.

Web Sites: Three key details to keep in mind: o Is the database

or listing of collections complete?

o Is there information about searching for collections in their systems?

o Whom do you contact for more information?

Online Bibliographic Catalogs

Primary and secondary sources are integrated online

Catalog records contain brief descriptions of collections including the author, title, date, access or use restrictions, etc.

The major bibliographies database is the OCLC’s WorldCat.

Three ways to search WorldCat:

1. Free version on the web at http://www.worldcat.org/.

2. WorldCat database, which most colleges and universities subscribe to

3. Library of Congress offers free WorldCat at http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc

4. Copyright Law: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap11.pdf

More Resources

Online archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ Rocky Mountain Online Archive: http://rmoa.unm.edu Northwest Digital Archives http://nwda.wsulibs.wsu.edu/ For example, say you want to dig in the archives of

Theodore Roethke: http://

nwda-db.orbiscascade.org/nwda-search/fstyle.aspx?doc=WAUMSS0418_0653_1484_1624_1922_1923.xml&t=k&q=New+Media+and+Composition+Theory

Each of these is freely available on the web.

When students say “I can’t find any good information on my topic!”

Take Notes as you Research

Most of the archival resources available online have organized the boxes and files of many documents (some hundreds of years old). The Internet makes it easy for researchers to know what is out there.

Whatever you do, take notes as you research. It is easy to forget where we have “surfed” on the Web, especially since there are so many web sites and resources available to us. The old-fashioned paper and pen never hurts. Record your Research!

Why bring up Archival Research? Because there is so much more available to researchers on the Internet than just Google or Wikipedia (although both of these resources are quickly growing in scope and credibility).

BibliographyBooth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of

Research. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008. Print.

Common Core State Standards. 2011. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. <https://eboard.eboardsolutions.com/meetings/Attachment.aspx?S=1262&AID=245075&MID=15932>.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009. Print.

MacNealy, Mary Sue. Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. Print

Yakel, Elizabeth. Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition. By Alexis E. Ramsey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 102-18. Print