From Hypothesis to Thesis

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
         - Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (189)

When you set out to research something, hopefully you already have some basic understanding, some background in the field. With that background, you should have an idea of what specific topics you are interested in, and an understanding of how things work in that field. Therefore, you can hypothesize and make reasonable assumptions about how you think the research is going to end and what your eventual thesis will be.

There's a problem, though. Sometimes, the tendency is to find research that supports a hypothesis, rather than research for the sake of learning and becoming more knowledgeable about the topic. Research is learning, and learning is gaining a better understanding of something. That information you already knew becomes more refined and more specific. Therefore, your hypothesis, which will become your thesis, should change.

There are really two ways that your thesis can change: first, by becoming more specific and more nuanced, the second, is to qualify it to avoid expressing unfounded absolutes.

More nuanced, more specific

Part of what happens in research is you become more aware of the complexities of your subject, especially if you realize the subject you started researching is really two, or three, or a dozen different topics. Be careful you don’t try to address additional topics that aren’t essential to your topic, or that will make your topic too broad and vague.

For example, you may want to write and research the middle ages. A little research should show there are thousands of facts relevant to the middle ages. You'll learn that situations varied considerably from century to century, from place to place, across social strata, etc.. It then becomes dangerous to say something about “the middle ages” because it won't be the same everywhere. You then have to focus your research on a specific place, a specific time, a specific social class, etc. It then becomes a matter of filling in the Six Journalistic Questions and returning to that tool as a way to refine and limit one's topic so that it doesn't get out of hand.

Becoming Qualified

We like to think in absolutes, but the world is rarely so easily distinguishable into black and white. For example, maybe you hypothesized “all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king,” then any British nobles who weren’t loyal to their king would disprove your thesis (for this example, you don't need to look much further than the Magna Carta to disprove it, but, to be fair, King John was a jerk). You can then qualify your thesis by replacing the “all” with words like “Most” or “some” or “few.”

This little change, though, will have repercussions in the rest of the essay:

If it’s “all” then all of your evidence should show that, yes indeed, all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king. No exceptions.

If it’s “most” then you should have evidence showing the majority were loyal while acknowledging that some weren’t.

“Some” and, more specifically, “few” suggest most were not loyal to the crown, and so most examples you reference should show disloyalty among medieval British nobles.

Conclusion

Whatever the path you take as you research, your hypothesis should undergo changes, becoming more nuanced, more specific, and, if needs be, qualified, as you go through your research. Use your hypothesis as a way to gauge the effectiveness of your research. If your thesis doesn't change, then odds are you aren't paying enough attention to your research.

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Works Cited

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003. 187-205. Print.

How will you use it? Evaluating Research Sources

This post has been replaced by the post "More than Quaint Quotes: Source Assessment", posted Wednesday, April 27th. Please refer to that post.

Part of evaluating sources, particularly for annotated bibliographies, is determining how and why they are useful. Apart from considering whether or not a source is reliable, it is important to survey how you expect to use the information you’ve found. To describe this, I have identified three different ways to use sources: as background Information, thesis Support, and results. By considering your sources in these different ways, it gives you a good idea of what to look for in them and how you will end up using them in your research. Also, bear in mind that one source may be useful in more than one area.

Background Information

Depending on your topic or your audience, you may need to take some time to address some of the basics in your field or a sub field if you are bringing several topics together. For example, if you were writing about what music to have playing during athletics practice and you were writing it to coaches, you’ll need to find sources that offer basic information on music. This helps to show your own understanding of the field and briefly introduces your audience to the field. This information generally appears in literature reviews at the start of formal research essays and demonstrates your own understanding of the field.

Thesis Support

It is one thing to understand the basics in the field, It is another thing to demonstrate and suggest ways to apply specific information. This information is more specific and gives additional credence to your thesis by showing how you reached it in the first place. It may be easy to shirk thesis support because a thesis is your own ideas and thoughts, but it is still important to show how your ideas work within the ideological framework of your discipline.

Returning to the music in athletic practice example, you could find studies that look at different genres of music and athletic performance. There could be certain songs, artists, themes to the lyrics, or tempos that could shape your own hypothesis. Maybe some researchers have looked at how some songs are better for practices, and others in preparation for big games. Once you have this information, you can demonstrate you have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject as you build it up to support your thesis.

Results

Being able to demonstrate the validity of your claim or argument, or to show it is more than an abstract theory, involves demonstrating your idea works by focusing on its outcome. This can be your experimentation, tangible evidence done elsewhere, or a thought exercise; it can vary depending on the situation or discipline.

This information generally comes in two forms: it can be either anticipatory or proven. If it is anticipatory, it hasn’t been proven by experimentation, but you have something to suggest what you think is reasonable. If it is proven, then you have concrete examples to support your conclusions. For the athletics and music example, there might be studies that have already employed what you are suggesting. If so, you could cite these studies, possibly as both evidence of results and as part of your thesis support. 

Including a discussion of your results, whether anticipated or proven, with research to back it up, to show an understanding of how information and practice can coalesce into a solid result. It shows you’ve thought your ideas through from start to finish, and you can find ways to make your ideas and your research useful beyond abstract concepts.

No matter what, a strong research piece should have a smattering of each research source. Without any one of them, a piece will be lackluster, missing important information to either establish author credibility r, thesis validity, and the usability of the new ideas.

When evaluating sources, consider not just whether or not a source is useful, but how it will be useful. Consider what kind of information it is and how you will use it so you know where to include it.

The Art of Summary

A summary is when you use your own words to explain something written by someone else.

Summaries are an important aspect of writing. They offer a way to provide background information, explain research, events, or other texts in fewer words than originally presented. They are also a manifestation of the writer's own skill and understanding of whatever it is they are summarizing.

When to Summarize

Summarize when you need information from somewhere else. Need. Don't just summarize for the sake of providing information or filling space. Make sure the information you provide by summarizing is relevant to your own argument or project. If you’re summarizing a book, it's unlikely you will need a paragraph explaining the premise of every single chapter; just a description of the main points relevant to what you are saying.

Summaries provide more than just additional information. They're a way to demonstrate your understanding of a text, and, in turn, how knowledgeable and reliable you are about the topic you're writing about. For example, in an episode of The Simpsons, Bart summarizes Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as “the story of a Russian farmer and his tool.” Bart deserves some credit for creativity, but from this incorrect summary, it'll be difficult to trust anything else he has to say on the subject.

A poorly written or inaccurate summary let alone misinterpreting the very premise of the text, says you either did not read whatever it is you are summarizing, or you didn't understand it. The only solutions for bad summaries are either get to know the original text better, or just not summarize it.

Summarize Ethically

Here's a situation. You're well into a research project. You find a source that seems useful, but halfway through, it starts making perfectly valid claims that refute the thesis of your own research. What do you do?

What you should do is revise your thesis to accommodate the new research.

What you should not do is ignore the new information, or, even worse, include the source but conveniently omit the details that refute your thesis. That's an unethical summary. When you summarize, represent what you summarize honestly. Don't ignore something just because it doesn't fit with what you were saying in the first place.

In short, honestly provide the information that is relevant.

Providing Citations

Any time you use information from somewhere or someone else, provide a citation. This is especially true of summaries because you don't use quotation marks to set their exact words, and summaries can span several sentences. Give credit where credit is due. Take a few words or a sentence to signal you are using someone else's idea and provide the appropriate citation, in-text and on your Works Cited/References/Bibliography page. If you don't signal you're summarizing, the border between your ideas and their ideas gets fuzzy. If you don't cite, your information can't be checked or further researched by your reader; and it’s being lazy.

If you don't introduce the summary and cite it, then there's nothing to say the information is someone else's. That's called plagiarism.

Summarizing is an important part of writing, and writing research in particular; but if it’s not done appropriately, it can cause problems, the least of which is making yourself look bad. The worst is looking like a thief. Respect your sources. Do them justice. Treat them fairly, and as the property of others.

Writing Exercise: The Annotated Bibliography

I will not mince words. Annotated Bibliographies are weird. They almost always precede larger research projects, are rarely published, and have a set of rules far apart from most every other form of writing.

Rather than the steady flow from paragraph to paragraph, each one building on ideas and concepts, Annotated Bibliographies list citations of research sources, accompanied by annotations of the important aspects of the research. Hence the name Annotated Bibliography.

They’re like archipelagos: scattered, separated, independent, but interrelated.

People who encounter them for the first time sometimes have a hard time figuring out just what exactly it is they’re dealing with and why they’re dealing with it. A lot of the major rules about writing - transitions, organization, and in some instances the valued thesis, introduction, and conclusion are tossed to the wind. But annotated bibliographies can be invaluable in a research project.

Part of the problem is that the requirements vary from situation to situation. I’ve assigned annotated bibliographies for five different courses at three different schools, and was assigned them as an undergraduate and graduate student. Each time the parameters have been different, but there are a few constants.

The main constant is the form. At its core, an annotated bibliography is a list of citations with annotations, i.e., a few paragraphs describing the citation. What these annotations contain varies.

The first, and most common, annotation is the summary, an explanation of the source itself. This represents the content of the source without any interpretation, criticism, or other analysis. If you can’t reiterate the main points of a source, then you can’t summarize it. If you can’t understand it well enough to put it into your words, you should sit down with your research and get to know it better so you can.

The second annotation focuses on the rhetoric, and is sometimes called the evaluation. Rather than determine whether or not a source is useful, this determines whether or not it’s credible and reliable, generally through a rhetorical analysis. This considers the quality of the source’s arguments, if the piece is properly written, whether or not the author is credible.

The third annotation is an evaluation of the sources’ usefulness and can sometimes be called an assessment or reflection. Here, the writer gauges how helpful and relevant the research is. This is an opportunity for the writer to move from the research alone and consider their project in the long run. Sometimes determining a source’s usefulness calls for references to other pieces of research, but the main thing here is you can identify what you expect to do with the source.

There are certainly more out there, but these seem to show up the most.

Different circumstances will call for different approaches. Sometimes you may only need a summary. If it’s for a class, some teachers may be more interested in their students deciphering rhetoric than applying the source to a larger project. The purpose though is largely the same regardless of the situation. Annotated bibliographies exist so we can put aside a lot of the issues that come with writing a research essay and just focus on the research.