Dictionary Abuse

I'm going to be blunt here. Very rarely is it appropriate to open an essay with a definition.

I'm talking about essays where the author says something like, “Merriam-Webster defines (insert term here) as...”. These statements almost never provide relevant context for the issue at hand, and frankly do more harm than good to your own argument. A lot of the reasons we write or argue something is to better understand it, but much of the time when this strategy is employed, it oversimplifies the term being used and broadens the essay's content in the process, while also suggesting the author is not familiar enough with the term itself, and the extent of their research capabilities is looking up a word in a dictionary. Or it suggests you don’t trust your audience’s knowledge and capabilities.

I believe there are a few reasons why students do this:

• First, and most frighteningly, they're taught to do it.
• Second, it's an easy way to do “research” and add another source to a bibliography.
• Third establishes how a specific term is going to be used.
• Fourth, they've seen it done elsewhere, especially in published works, suggesting this is an established and acceptable practice. However, in these published cases, rarely is it as simple as just quoting a definition.

The first two reasons need little explaining. The third and fourth, however, do warrant some explanation.

Sometimes, an author is using a common term in an uncommon way that may not be the first thing their readers will think of. In these situations the essay's thesis relies on a very specific, potentially specialized, unconventional definition. The thing here is your standard dictionaries tend to give the more general, conventional answers, those most people will already be familiar with. This is where using specialized definitions and resources can, however, come in handy. Different disciplines will use the same and similar words in different ways, and if a piece is aimed at an audience who may not share that specialization, defining the term is appropriate. However, these cases are rarely just definitions: they warrant more explanation and examples to help the nonspecialized audience.

The fourth one is a special case, especially because these sometimes pull definitions from several dictionaries. The point of these essays is to point out the problems these definitions have. In these situations, the purpose in bringing definitions into the essay is not to simply define the term but to show how the definitions disagree or leave holes. This then centers the entire essay on the issue of defining the term. It brings definitions together not to say “here’s what this term means,” but to say, “this term isn’t that simple.” In such a case, once you reach the end of the essay, you should be able to look back at the definitions quoted and see how and why they are incomplete or inadequate.

If your use of dictionary or encyclopedia entries doesn't fall into one of these two situations, then it's very likely you're doing more harm than good. Unless you need to define a term in a specialized or unfamiliar way or you’re finding issues with definitions, it’s better to trust your reader to already be familiar with whatever term you’re using. This can be particularly true in student essays where terms and concepts students should be exploring in detail, deconstructing, or should be applying, are merely defined. It’s kind of like summarizing a story or an article rather than analyzing it.

When providing a definition, it better be needed: the definition needs to be unconventional or one worth calling into question. If you find a definition you agree with and expect your reader will also, and if, by the end of the essay, you still agree with the definition and your reader should as well, then you're just wasting time and space.

More than Quaint Quotes: Source Assessment

Once, a student asked me how to cite a webpage for a research essay. The page in question was a collection of quotes, each one removed from its broader context. Quaint little quotes may seem useful, but they’re like buzzing flies in your house. Obnoxious and out of place. The student just wanted something fancy from someone important so they could meet the required number of sources. I've addressed this issue elsewhere, but I want to explore a different facet of it now: Source Assessment.

Source Assessment deals with how a source is useful in a larger project. It requires a researcher to go beyond “this is relevant” to “I will use this source to do this or for this purpose.” However, not all sources can be treated the same way. Just as you need to evaluate a source to determine its reliability, you need to consider the part each source will play in your research project. There are at least four different jobs each source can do for you.

Background

You have to start somewhere, and researching basic background information ultimately fulfills two purposes: it’s a way for you to make sure you know your field, and to show your reader that you do. 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. 

Grounds

It is one thing to understand the basics in the field, but it is another thing to demonstrate and suggest ways to apply specific information. Sources that work as Grounds meet this need: more specific information that ties closely to and supports your thesis. Grounds are therefore the closest information you can find to your own thesis. These will involve studies of closely related information or research you’ve used, the key concepts, theories, and studies that are the foundations to your study.

Backings

Backings exist in a weird place, and can sometimes be sources that don't at first seem too relevant to your own topic. Backings, however, serve the important role of supporting your logic. In the same way Grounds relate to and support your thesis, Backings support the internal logic of your argument, and are therefore usually broader in their scope than your Grounds. In choosing sources as Backings, you need to think about the decisions you’re making as part of your argument and what research you can find to support them. In that regard, Backings are sources we sometimes find later, whereas the others are some of the first sources we should find.

Rebuttals

Also known as counterarguments, rebuttals offer opposing viewpoints to your own. While simply ignoring or dismissing rebuttals is an attractive idea, it's better to acknowledge, address, and, most importantly, resolve conflicts. Researching potential rebuttals is therefore a good way to strengthen your argument. By extension, additional sources can be used to either counter rebuttals or adjust your own argument to accommodate them.

In summary:

• Background Information gives information about your field.
• Grounds gives your individual argument a foundation (no pun intended, at least on my part).
• Backings basically say “It worked for them: it should therefore work for me.”
• Rebuttals offer opposing viewpoints to your own.

Overall, Source Assessment is vital because it helps you get past the quaint quotes problem: simply digging through a source for something that sounds good. It’s important to really think about the information a source has and consider how you can use it. When you're researching, don't just ask if you understand the information or if the piece is reliable, but ask how it contributes to your argument?

To see how these different types of source uses fit in a broader schematic, check out the Toulmin Method.

Note: The blog post is an updated version of the post “How will you use it? Evaluating Research Sources” posted February 10, 2015.

Audience Research

One purpose of research is to replace our assumptions with reliable facts. Sometimes, the research confirms our assumptions: other times, research proves us wrong. Regardless, properly done research leaves people with better information than when they started.

So once you have your information, what’s the best way to present it? That depends on your audience, and sometimes, researching your audience is just as important as researching your topic.

Unfortunately, we rarely take the time to understand just who it is we're writing to; we're much more concerned with our topics and arguments – what we're writing about – to stop and take a good look at whom we're writing to. This leads to making important decisions about how we write – our use of Pathos – based on unfounded assumptions. Therefore, just as we research our topics, we should research our audiences.

Researching an audience requires different methods and sources, frequently ones we’re unfamiliar with: article databases, reference books, and scholarly publications are about things not people or groups. The important thing is our research tells us worthwhile information about our audience. To do so, it is helpful to look for the following types of sources:

• Biographies and profiles: This is the first place to go. Profiles of your audience will give basic information about them, and more importantly some of their duties and responsibilities as well. It can be easy to dismiss these because they can be simple, but they are often invaluable in knowing where to go for more research.
• Publications by the audience: Publications by your audience can give an in-depth look at their stance on specific issues. It gives an opportunity to see how they view a situation: a glimpse at how they think and operate. There can be some risk here, as people normally want to present themselves, their ideas and conclusions in the best light.
• Publications about the audience: Important people and groups are often talked about by others, for good and bad. By investigating these conversations, you can get a better perspective of your audience. However, just as a person may try to put themselves in the best light, others may do the same, or even try to tear them down, so these sources should be carefully evaluated.
• Affiliated organizations: This is an interesting one. Most research involves going more specific, but this involves going broader and looking at what duties or responsibilities your audience has based on what organizations they belong to. It's worthwhile to consider this information because your audience may have to operate according to the regulations of these groups, or just being part of a group can influence their decisions.
• Demographic information: Researching information about the demographics your audience belongs to. For example, if they’re a teacher, what does your research tell you about teachers in general? While this kind of information can be useful, it is the broadest and can be the least helpful. This is not to say demographic information isn't reliable, but it's possible your audience doesn't fit the mold and can lead to oversimplifying a complex individual or group based on information describing entire sections of people. If you’re using demographic information, be sure to include other types of sources, ensuring you recognize your audience as an individual, rather than running the risk of stereotyping.

This is ultimately an issue of Pathos. In order to be aware of how your audience thinks and acts, you need to look at how they have acted and presented their thoughts. With this research in hand, you can make reasonably sound judgments about how best to write. Your audience ceases to be a name or an address, and becomes an active, living person or group, capable of making decisions and influencing others. Once you realize this, you're not just producing words, but producing them with the purpose of influencing someone else. In short, if you want your words to be powerful, you have to understand where they're going.

Research All Grown Up: The Literature Review

All Annotated Bibliographies want to be Literature Reviews when they grow up.

So you’ve done your research, you’ve developed your thesis, you have a good idea of what you want to do for your research essay. You have all this helpful research, but you’re at a loss of how to incorporate it it, and prove you’re not just spouting random things, that you’re ideas are grounded in the work of the experts.

This is why we have Literature Reviews. The granddaddy of the Annotated Bibliography, this is a form of writing that fulfills many of the same purposes of the Annotated Bibliography, but while putting them into the essay itself. This isn’t literature as in fiction; rather, this refers to the influential works and writings of the scholars and experts in a field. Basically, you’re taking what the experts have said and bringing it all together.

Both genres, the Annotated Bibliography and the Literature Review, are ways for researchers to present their research. However, Annotated Bibliographies are preliminary pieces, done before the main ideas and concepts are formed, generally so the author can catalogue and make sure they have a basic understanding of their topic and what the experts say about it. Annotated Bibliographies are rarely published and remain a resource for the researcher as they work on a larger piece. The Annotated Bibliography is work researchers do for themselves, which is why it is a popular assignment in writing classes: go through the process of understanding and evaluating your research early on.

Literature Reviews are different. First and foremost, they get published, though not usually independently; they are significant parts of larger pieces of research and fulfill specific purposes. Find a major scientific study and the first couple of pages will likely focus on work other people have done, identifying current theories and concepts. They won’t be comprehensive, i.e., bringing every piece of research ever that’s related to the topic, but it will focus on more recent and more significant ones.

The Literature Review, though, is not where authors provide and discuss their own ideas and conclusions. The Literature Review opens a piece as a kind of information genealogy. In a way, you are taking your Annotated Bibliography and sorting the information by theme or concept (generally using a graduated or comparative method of organization), and showing how different scholars and researchers have addressed similar issues that contribute to your own work. It is a matter of showing how you can take other’s ideas and concepts and synthesize them. Therefore, Literature Reviews generally do three closely related things.

First, it’s how researchers can demonstrate their expertise. Major research pieces can have bibliographies that go on for pages, but some of these sources can be mentioned a handful of times in a research piece. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s the researcher’s opportunity to show the work they’ve done, and the extent of their knowledge and familiarity with the information.

Second, it is where the researcher traces how they developed their ideas, and that their work fits with the rest of the literature. They can take different ideas and synthesize them, bring them together to generate new knowledge and information, tracing the history of their topic, within their own research, and contextualize their work within the greater picture.

Third, it shows how your research fits in the bigger picture. You don't want to just know a lot of stuff, but show you can fit your work in with the work of others. Writing and research don’t take place in a vacuum, and if you try to, or even if you only do some research, you’ll likely just make claims others have made, and done a better job making, before. It’s a good way to showcase your ignorance, and you don’t want to do that.

There’s a lot riding on a Literature Review. It’s an exercise in establishing your credibility and showing the people who know about your topic you’re worth taking seriously. A bad Literature Review can break your piece faster than a bad idea. You could have a great idea, but if you can’t show where it fits with the rest of the research being done, nor can you demonstrate your own familiarity with the discipline, it’s going to be really hard for those who do know to take you seriously.

Don't sink too deep: Inappropriate Topics

When I first started teaching composition as a graduate student, some of my colleagues openly encouraged their students to write about sensitive, controversial issues: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc... Others forbade students from addressing these topics. It seems standard composition teachers will go one way or the other. On the surface, this can seem like the instructor's bias: they don't want to get a lot of essays that disagree with their own personal beliefs or opinions, or they have an agenda they want to push. While I'm sure there are instructors that do take such an approach, there are more practical reasons for restricting available topics.

For example, a student of mine once proposed writing about No Child Left Behind. Granted this isn't as sensitive a topic as those listed above, but it's still significant. I emailed the student saying if they were to write about No Child Left Behind, they would need to start by reading the law itself. I provided a link to the 670 page document.

And No Child Left Behind is just a simple example. Doing gun control, abortion, or gay marriage would require careful analysis of decades of legislation, court cases; and then accompanying sociological, psychological, biological, and chemical research, before diving into the world of ethics. To complicate matters, the myriad of opinion pieces on such topics found in newspapers, magazines, and blogs are highly subjective and therefore questionable, resulting in a continuation of Confirmation Bias on any side of the issue. So, properly addressing one of these topics would require hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of research; not all of it reliable, spanning decades of both primary and secondary sources, to be in a situation to authoritatively say something about it. Not many freshmen feel like putting that much effort into three pages.

When you consider the scope of research, this actually broadens inappropriate topics into less controversial areas, like childhood obesity and organic farming, and even more mundane, less controversial areas. Let me share one of my favorite examples. A colleague of mine said that a student of hers wanted to prove who Jack the Ripper was... in a freshman composition course. At the end of the semester but before the final essays were due, my colleague said she asked the student who Jack the Ripper was. The student hadn't come to a conclusion.

Personally, I’m not a criminologist, but I don't think there's a branch of anything that hasn't contributed something to the resolution of this Victorian murder mystery. Psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, even literature has offered conjectures. There have been hundreds of books on the matter, and, I'm sure, many more articles, all of it ranging from the fanciful to the serious. To definitively prove the identity of Jack the Ripper in a matter of weeks would be to try and do what hundreds or thousands of experts have tried to do for more than a century.

Whether or not a topic is or is not appropriate should be determined by the structure of the class. Some topics, because of their scope and the research it would take to handle them, go far beyond the demands of a general education composition course. Education should be challenging and students should rise to that challenge, but it can be far too easy to get yourself in too deep.

I want my students to push and challenge themselves. I want them to branch out, learn, and grow; but my students are college undergraduates taking a course that is designed to give them writing tools for other courses. Many haven't settled on what to major in and are taking three or four courses in addition to mine, as well as their own social lives, jobs, and family obligations. I want to challenge my students; not set them up for failure.

Returning to my colleagues who encouraged students to write about controversial issues. After a year of teaching, pretty much all of them had changed their tune: they forbid their students from such topics. They hadn't undergone a moral or ethical change, but they had a better understanding of what their students could handle.

Show that you Know: Source Integration Overview

Source integration is a matter of properly introducing, referencing, citing, and explaining research sources. On the one hand this is important for coherent writing. On the other, it's an important way to demonstrate familiarity with the research itself. If a source is poorly integrated, it suggests the writer didn't understand the information.

So, when you embark on a research project and are faced with referencing your research in your essay, take the following into consideration.

• Research First: When starting a research project, you shouldn't start with drafting the actual essay. Instead, invest in research and learn more about your topic.
• Active Research: Good source integration means good research, and good research means taking the time to read closely, take notes, and evaluate your sources.
• Take Notes: Jotting down interesting information, highlighting or bookmarking intriguing passages, and otherwise making personal records of what you learn from your research.
• Introduce & Explain sources: Any time you put research into your own writing you are repurposing and recontextualizing it. Therefore, it is essential to take the time to explain your research before summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting it (also, see Hit & Run Quotes below).
• Summarize: Explaining the main points, thesis, and arguments of a source.
• Paraphrase: Taking a selection of a larger piece and reiterating the main points in your own words.
• Quote: Using the exact words of a source in your own piece.
• Blended Words: Carefully integrating a quote with your own words.
• In-Text Citations: Knowing where to place in-text citations, and why they go there.
• Synthesis: Finding and recognizing where your sources have related points so you can reference them together.

Knowing how to integrate sources is important, but sometimes a good way to figure out why we do something is to understand how not to do it.

• Hit & Run Quotes: This term comes from a book entitled They Say/I Say, and it refers to improperly introduced and explained quotes.
• Patchwriting: Paraphrasing and quoting at the same time and without quotation marks. This involves taking a selection from a source, changing a few words here and there, and not treating it as a quote. This can be borderline plagiarism. Instead, quote or use more of your own words.
• Just the first few pages: Don't just rely on a few pithy statements from the opening pages of a book or article; take the time to go through the entire piece and you'll find more useful information.
• Excessive Integration: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Sometimes, it's easier to just quote ad nauseum or even give too much supplementary information.
• Plagiarism: The failure to properly acknowledge research, or, taking the work of another passing it off as your own. This is one of the worst things you can ever do.

Improper source integration can harm an essay. Sometimes it’s easy to just drop in quotes or citations and call it good. However, good source integration is more than just a stylistic issue. Coherent writing means a coherent thought process, so coherently integrating sources suggests a better understanding of the material. An author who drops in quotes willy-nilly probably just found and crammed them in there and doesn’t understand what they are saying. Taking the time to introduce, explain, synthesize, and blend shows you know the information well enough it is part of your own thought process and knowledge: it shows you are confident in your knowledge and you can control the information.

Is It Worth Using? The Appropriateness of Sources and The Rhetorical Triangle

Not all sources are created equally. Some sources are better than others.

This post deals with research, but not how to use research. Rather, whether or not the sources are worth using. Unreliable or inappropriate sources can actually hurt your credibility because it suggests your research is insufficient, and if the information you are using to develop your argument is bad, then your argument will also be bad.

The hard part is in determining whether or not a source is reliable. Granted there are some indicators that will almost guarantee good sources – government web pages, peer reviewed journals, university publications – but these aren't the only reliable sources, and only deal with one aspect of reliability: who published it? While this can be a good start, it is important to evaluate a source from multiple angles. The angles I recommend evaluating from stem from the Rhetorical Triangle:

• Ethos: In a way, Ethos is how an author presents themselves in their writing: their ability to demonstrate their authority in the text itself. They may do this by referencing their own research or referencing their experience and work in the field, which is sometimes evident through their terminology and style. In short, whether or not the text presents itself authoritatively.
• Logos: If the source's conclusions don't make sense, or if they rely on logical fallacies to support their claims, then the source is not reliable. The source should move easily from topic to topic, without any jumps in logic, and should be in agreement with other sources on the same topic.
• Pathos: For whom was it written? This actually returns to the issue of publication; peer reviewed pieces will be written for experts. It is possible to identify the intended readership of a piece based on how detailed it is, or on the terminology used. A piece that appropriately uses specified vocabulary will be for a more educated audience than one that doesn't, and one that misuses terminology will be one to stay away from.

Evaluating sources is a matter of looking for textual evidence showing the author's appropriate use of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. For a classic example, I turn to Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets a bad rap because it is collaborative - anyone and everyone can go and make changes to it and it is frequently shot down on that basis alone. However, like I said before, that’s only looking at it from one perspective: it’s important to consider it from multiple angles:

• Ethos: Despite the collaborative, anyone-can-do-it nature of Wikipedia, most Wikipedia pages have references lists and citations, like any decent piece of research. These pages are also checked and double checked by users who make sure that the information is correct and accurately presented. Whatever few bad vandals there are, there are many more that make sure the information is good.
• Logos: The information on Wikipedia tends to make sense: it's logical, and users can keep the information straight. With this in mind though, it's a good idea to go back and double check Wikipedia pages in case there was faulty information. So, it could not be reliable on this basis, but it isn't the nail in the coffin for this resource.
• Pathos: It's an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are designed to be neutral and provide readily understandable information for people who have even a superficial understanding. This means the information on Wikipedia, while likely trustworthy, will not go into any substantial depth. The information is cursory; superficial. It's basic information that someone doing serious research should already know.

In short, Wikipedia is a reliable source – but it is not an appropriate one. It’s information is accurate, but superficial. You can do better.

Once we stop and understand that just because something is reliable does not mean it is appropriate, we can look at our research differently. It's like when I have students who count fact sheets as resources: lists of dates, figures, and sometimes fancy info-graphics without any serious analysis. The information may be perfectly reliable, but if you are committed to doing serious research, leave the sundries aside and focus on the sources that explore the concepts in detail.

Active Research: An Overview of Research

Every composition course I’ve ever taught has had a research component, and in some it’s more prevalent than others. With each course, I hope my students understand that they take composition classes not just to learn to write but to be better prepared to work in the disciplines they're studying. I want my students to understand research is an important part of why they’re in school. We don't just research to satisfy assignment requirements, but to learn: it’s the same reason we go to school.

Good research requires more than skimming a few sources and quoting a few quaint lines. It involves a lot of work to properly read and understand the research being done, so here’s a few things to bear in mind:

• Selection: Taking the first few results on a Google search or books from the library shelf and only using these is not research. It's important to read, or even skim, through a plethora of sources to determine which ones are worth taking a closer look at. It may take some time to find sources pertinent to your topic.
• Close Reading and Note Taking: Skimming is okay when selecting which sources to use, but research requires more than just that. Research involves reading closely and taking notes to help yourself understand, process, and, most importantly, retain the information.
• Authority: An expert in a field can tell when someone who isn't an expert tries to pass themselves off as one. Having authority as a researcher and writer means you recognize and understand the breadth and complexity of your field, while also understanding there is a lot you just don't know yet.
• Hypothesis: A hypothesis is what you expect your thesis to be. In order to properly hypothesize, you need to have a basic understanding of the topic – and you need research to do that.
• Quoting and Paraphrasing: It isn't enough to just read something and cite it; you need to take the information and fairly and correctly present it in your writing and develop upon those ideas.
• Summary: Similar to quoting and paraphrasing, but rather than selections from a piece, summarizing involves describing the entire piece, cover to cover.
• Evaluation: Determining whether or not a source is worth using. This is more than the aforementioned selection because it’s going from if a source is worth reading to considering its reliability or how it can be used.
• Citing: Making sure you are showing credit where credit is due. Properly citing shows your understanding of conventions in your discipline and respect for those whose work you are using. Any time you use the ideas, concepts, or words of others, you show where it came from.
• Plagiarism: Failing to cite. Not showing where you got your ideas from is tantamount to stealing. Don't do it.

In addition to relevant topics, a few genres deal specifically with research.

• Annotated Bibliography: A list of sources with accompanying commentary, general summaries or evaluations of the sources in question. These are rarely published but are extremely useful tools in research.
• Literature Review: These can be stand alone essays, but are generally the opening pages to research pieces. They address the research going into the piece itself, demonstrating how the writer developed their conclusions and hypotheses, while simultaneously establishing their authority through their familiarity with the research.

When you approach research assignments, don't just stop when you have enough to fill a works cited page and scatter a few citations in your writing. Research is an invaluable opportunity to learn, to become more knowledgeable and expert about your topic, to hone your interests in specific ways, or to even learn just where your interests lie. Research, therefore, cannot be passive: it has to be active, involving multiple steps and hard work, not because it's important to do research assignments, but because it is important to learn.

When (Not) to Quote

I wish to start this post with a pair of related essay experiences. Both essays turned to quotes from major historical figures to help prove their points. One quoted Winston Churchill, the other, Mahatma Gandhi. When I share this in my classes, I ask my students what they think these essays were about. The answers invariably center around war, politics, history, Britain, and major geopolitical issues of the last century.

Nope. The essays were about horse training and...childhood obesity.

That's right. Someone padded an essay on childhood obesity by turning to the man famous for hunger strikes.

I haven't had many students try to defend these choices, and I will admit, this is far from the worst transgression committed in composition class, but it is a symptom of at least one of three issues: procrastination and poor research, and lazy writing.

Procrastination and Poor Research

Examples include: a bibliography page that barely meets the required number of sources.

This means the student was required to find X number of sources, and rather than find and read books and articles to find the best, most relevant information available, they worked until they found one less than X sources. Then, to reach the required number, they turned to something like Wikiquote and looked up famous people – whether or not the quote or the person being quoted was related to their topic. They drop the quote in their essay and voila! X number of sources achieved! 

This generally happens because of procrastination and using the first available sources rather than the best ones. Had the student been concerned with finding the best sources, they would have found more than the required minimum and would have familiarized themselves with enough of them so, even in a pinch when the due date is fast encroaching, they can turn to solid research to fill the requirement. Best case scenario, though, you never have to think about the number of sources because you've done enough research you'll meet and exceed the required amount easily.

Lazy Writing

Examples include: introductions or conclusions that have more words from, probably dead, famous people rather than the author’s own words.

My tongue-in-cheek comment is not dealing with plagiarism (which is one of the worst sins committed in composition courses), but rather taking the profound statements of others and using them to prove a point you should be trying to prove in your essay. It's lazy writing because, rather than taking the time to really think about what you have to say, you're relying on the words of someone more famous and perhaps more eloquent than yourself. In that respect, it's related to filling space on the bibliography: it's filling space in the body of an essay to reach a page count.

These quotes are usually misplaced and taken out of context. They also may be unnecessarily long and rely more on the reputation of the person being quoted than on what the words actually express. 

The biggest problem is relying on fame rather than expertise: Churchill and Gandhi are certainly famous people, but they are not qualified in horse training and childhood obesity. Being able to properly integrate the works of experts builds your own authority as a writer: you have something to contribute because you know the literature well enough to work with it. But if you default to major historical figures unrelated to your field, it says you don't know what's going on in your field and therefore you don't know what you're writing about.

Conclusion

Quoting for the sake of quoting is a bad practice. It leads to quotes taken out of context, often with unnecessary fanfare that distracts from the subject of the essay. It becomes a matter of building false authority rather than proving your knowledge and your qualifications to write on the subject. There is a lot to gain from quoting, but it can all be undone by doing it poorly. Before quoting, make sure you properly understand what it is you are quoting, where it came from, what it means, and the qualifications, not the fame or popularity, of the person you are quoting.

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 2

Last week, I posted about how using grandiose statements like “mankind,” “humanity,” and “the dawn of time” can severely hurt a piece of writing. This week, I am posting about how doing this can hurt your appearance as a writer.

Taking it Seriously

Sometimes we encounter broad, vague statements in advertisements or editorials. These aren't serious research pieces; they rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to get an audience reaction as fast as possible. We're willing to give these situations some breathing room because they're not providing solid and conclusive facts: these genres have other motives.

Research is serious. We can forgive an advertiser peddling a product, and we can forgive a hastily written piece driven more by subjectivity than objectivity. But when it comes down to serious research and learning the finer nuances of major social or academic issues, there's none of that subjective breathing room. Serious research is a time for specificity and concrete research to back it up.

Poor Research

If you're trying to talk about how something has been a certain way since “time immemorial” then there is missing research. This is particularly interesting when I get essays on topics like dentistry or computers: stuff that, however primitive it may have been in its inception, had some beginning in recorded history.

Just think how that sounds. “Mankind has exhibited an irrational fear of dentists for all time.” Or even worse, “Man has eaten bread since the dawn of time.”

Some topics, like food, are extremely old. I think it's safe to say earliest man, in whatever form, consumed something for sustenance, but a lot had to happen before bread. But if I were to start making claims about frequency of meals, dieting habits, or the nature of hunting, gathering, and the shift to agriculture that allowed for bread, I had better have access to the studies on skeletal remains of these ancient humans, the test results showing the composition of the remains, and at least a dozen other broad fields of knowledge that I'm unaware of because I haven't and don't study prehistoric man and his lifestyle habits.

False Authority

Returning to Professor Jared Diamond and issues of authority. It takes a lot of time, research, and devotion to any discipline to be able to authoritatively discuss it, let alone its entire history. Such experts are also familiar enough with their disciplines to be able to affix more specific details in terms of time, place, and the demographics in question. They know it’s never as simple as “all of human history” and will demonstrate that knowledge in their writing.

This means that, while it may sound authoritative to express a history-spanning knowledge of something, it actually shows you do not have a solid enough base of information to understand the discipline is complex. It also degrades the work of professional researchers like Dr. Jared Diamond who devote their lives to their fields. It degrades your presentation by suggesting you haven’t done sufficient research. It degrades yourself because it shows you don't take it seriously enough to be talking about it in the first place, and you rely on cliches and cheap rhetoric to defend your ideas more than concrete evidence. It is a presentation of false authority and disrespects those who can address it authoritatively.

Conclusion

Be respectful of your discipline and researched subject matter. Recognize and understand whatever you are researching is far more complex than you think it is, and a failure to recognize that complexity shows a failure as a researcher and as a writer. It may seem like a good idea to bolster a piece of writing with hyperbole and all-encompassing statements, but relying on them will do more to harm to your credibility as a writer than it will ever help you.

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 1

I want to start this post off by talking about a man named Jared Diamond. 

Dr. Diamond earned his PhD at Cambridge and is a professor of geography at UCLA. He is perhaps most famous for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wherein he postulates how Europeans were able to colonize the extent they did because of issued based on agriculture. It’s a fascinating book and interesting premise based on thirty years of research done after Diamond was a PhD carrying professor.

I bring this up not to discuss Professor Diamond’s premise or conclusions, but to address how he is one of very few individuals who has earned the privilege to talk about “mankind”. Compare it to Albert Einstein or Dr. Stephen Hawking talking about “time.” Being able to talk about monumental ideas represents the accumulation of years of research, education, and training. These people are in positions of authority to address topics normally beyond the reach of some professional scholars, let alone newcomers.

And yet, people say and write cliches like “man has always” and “since the dawn of time” on a regular basis. The simple fact is they shouldn’t. This stems back to what I wrote last week about making unqualified or broad claims. If you say something about “time immemorial” or how “humanity has always” you need a lot of math, artifacts, or research to substantiate it. And that's just the start.

Introductions and Impossible Expectations

I tell my students an introduction is a promise to the reader. In so many words, you give a brief but precise overview of the key subjects that will be addressed, culminating in the thesis. From there, a reader trusts what is in the introduction will be addressed in the essay. So, when a writer mentions “humanity,”it creates an expectation “humanity” is going to be one of the guiding topics of the essay.

Most research essays I assign students are three to six double spaced pages, and that isn’t enough space to write anything conclusive or argumentative about the expanse that is “humanity.” Once my students drop the cliche, they move on and get closer to their topic, never again returning to issues regarding “humanity”. They have set up an impossible expectation for themselves, especially when the topic of the essay is not on mankind or time, but is rather on more basic issues, like shoes.

Everything is Relevant

The only excuse I can think of to introduce “time immemorial” into an essay is a fancy way to lazily say “I can write about anything and it’ll work,” as if to claim there is no way to run out of stuff to write about. For example, an essay on “The History of Music” could start off with assumptions about prehistoric man banging sticks together, and then move to a discussion of representations of music in the middle ages, before discussing Bach, the Beatles, and Beck.

This is not an essay I have received, but just thinking about it makes me cringe.

The problem is, when you give yourself such a wide breadth as “the history of music” you will end up saying, at best, a few unrelated things about tangentially related topics. This will lead to an essay bereft of thesis, organization, and coherence. Maybe you could draw significant connections between medieval music, Bach, the Beatles, and Beck, but if you did, you won’t be writing about the history of music. You’ll be writing about the connections between them.

Conclusion

This is just a start of the reasons why using such all-encompassing hyperbolic statements are bad when structuring and writing your piece, but there’s more to it than that. It also makes you look bad as a writer and researcher.

More on that next week.

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.

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.

Happy Accidents in Research

I have on my bookshelf a copy of a 1996 book entitled Novel to Film, written by a professor named Brian McFarlane. I discovered this book rather recently, but I wish I’d had it years ago.

When I was an undergraduate I did a research project, basically my senior thesis, on novel to film adaptation. My approach was simple and direct, and coincidentally, very similar to the approach taken by McFarlane. I was surprised to discover that what I had done, someone else had done years before. There were, of course, substantial differences: different films and criteria for selecting them, and different terminology; but the theory, the approach, and the premise of my study and his book parallelled one another.

When I learned this I was disappointed, but not because I saw a piece of work with a similar premise much better than mine. I was just disappointed I didn't have this book years ago when I did that study. if I’d had this book at my disposal, I could have spent my time and energy developing upon McFarlane's ideas rather than unknowingly presenting a variation.


It may not seem like it but coincidences like this are something to be happy about. Research has twists and turns, and sometimes projects need to be significantly diverted from where they were originally expected to go. Some research projects are undone because something new is discovered, and other projects are enhanced by it. Yet no matter, what a researcher, regardless of skill or experience, can't get discouraged by changes or new information. It is better to use it to further develop your thoughts and ideas. Just as you ought to with any other piece of research.


Had I found McFarlane's book back then, I wouldn't have changed my project much. I still had something worth saying despite the similarities. I still had something worth adding to this academic discussion. If I am to be upset about anything, it isn’t my work becoming redundant but that I missed an opportunity to do more with a subject that I care deeply about.


There's a lot of information out there. Young researchers taking their first serious steps away from Wikipedia and into the academic writing deluge may find their ideas, or some variation thereof, have already been tackled by another. Someone else's work on a similar premise is merely an opportunity to further your own research, to put your own spin on it, to find something they overlooked, misinterpreted, or to test their premise in a new and different way. That's really all I did with McFarlane's work. I just didn't know it until years later.