Making the Turn to Research Writing

-- Valerie Ross Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. --Sir Francis Bacon You will now turn to a series of short, incrementally more demanding research assignments organized around your seminars assigned scholarly text and designed to introduce you to scholarly writing. The sequence teaches you how to approach research writing conceptually as well as logistically, moving beyond papers assigned by teachers to learning how to gain access to and participate in the domain knowledge of a discipline or profession. Upon completion of this sequence, you will be ready to enter professional and scholarly conversations as a young scholar in your own right, limited like any other scholar by your knowledge of the topic, but not by an ignorance of how to write about it. This sequence also provides you with your first opportunity to put to work the tools of reasoning and writing that you learned in the past few weeks. You will need them as you now learn how to do advanced research-writing, which is to say learning how to write as you researchin tandem with your research, rather than as if research (and writing) were separate, linear steps in which you find and read your sources and then sit down and write a paper. Writing in units of thought as you digest the research allows you to record data and sources as well as work through the reasoning and evidence of your evolving proposition. This approach to research-writing allows you to build upon your knowledge and fill in gaps as you go along. You never lose track of the facts and insights (as well as sources) that you gather along the way. The first step in advanced research is to learn how to reador in the sciences and social sciences, how to analyze data--closely and carefully. Thereafter you will put your object of study, in this case a scholarly book, through the kinds of paces typical of scholars: study and evaluate it, focusing ever more finely on an issue or hypothesis, researching it in greater depth, contextualizing it, and finally taking a position on it or perhaps providing an expanded explanation of it, depending upon your goals and audience. At this stage, you will have acquired a certain expertise and thus write with an understanding of scholarly work in a voice of earned confidence and authority, rather than the posturing that too often attends novice research papers. In the first half of the semester, you were mainly asked to do simple synthesis--one book or article or issue, and your position on it or explanation of it. You likely employed inductive reasoning, moving from the particulars of your reading and thoughts to generalizations: propositions and reasons. Much of this may have felt familiar to you as a high school graduate. We did, however, add a few significant new challenges. For example, we required you to be a disciplined thinker, adhering to the rules of reasoning and evidence demanded of scholars, professionals, and others upon whose knowledge realworld decisions are based. We required you to engage in original thinking, coming up with your own propositions rather than having the teacher assign the topics for you, and to adhere to standards of logical as well as semantic coherence. We asked you to write for an audience of your peers, rather than only to your teacher. And for some the most frustrating of all, we required you to engage in close, detailed analysis of your own and others writing. These says/does outlines, we well know, are

painstaking, tedious work, but they lead you to internalize, at a very accelerated rate, a repertoire of knowledge about writing and reasoning and with this an ability to identify your own and others strengths and weaknesses, rather than be relegated to nitpicking their spelling and grammar.. The ability to assess writing (or any art form) typically takes years of study and practice. Most of you have now mastered the fundamentals in a semester. As is probably becoming clear, critical writing is that which sets out to explain, persuade, or justify. Its the sort of writing one does as a scholar, businessperson, engineer, doctor, lawyer, or intellectual and for the most part its quite unlike creative writing, though they do share a bit of common ground. Critical writing values idea and reasoning above all. The favored style is clarity, concision, precision and lucidity of expression. In science writing, for example, the ideal is to be so precise that ones reader can actually enact what the writer describes. In such a situation, any dissonance between the writers intention and the readers interpretation is a problem. In contrast, creative writers celebrate such dissonance; the ambiguity and instability of language are creative tools and critical impediments. A creative writer hopes to unleash many meanings, to celebrate the beauty and playfulness of language. A critical writer uses language to tease out, nail down and communicate an idea. If you have a message, send a telegram, advise the creative writing professors. Whats your point? is the refrain of scholarly readers. However remarkable such differences in purpose and aesthetic, its useful to underscore that no workshop or writing seminar can fully prepare you for the particulars of writing for any class or job. Writing assignments are as individual as those who assign them, even within a given field. No one can ready you for the boss who hates semicolons or the professor who regards contractions as vulgar. Some assignments may be fewer than 50 words, others may extend to 150 pages. What you should be prepared to do, by semesters end, is to know how to go about the business of writing in whatever setting you find yourself. Just follow the steps you will now be taught. Take a book, article, paper or report that your professor or employer considers a good example of writing, and analyze what its saying and what its doing: what are its moves? Then consider it in light of its community: how do others in the same field respond to it? If your writing is based on one or more books, look up their reviews, trace a few of their footnotes. You will be remarkably well-prepared to write for a professor or an employer, for you will do what professional writers do when theyre on assignment: they study and emulate the writing of that tribe. A Word about Documentation Style Unfortunately, there is not a uniform documentation style, so you will always need to find out from your professors which style they prefer. Your writing instructor will advise you about which documentation style to use for your portfolio. But do familiarize yourself with the three major modes: MLA, APA, and Chicago. You can use your grammar handbook for the basics on each of these styles of documentation. Equally important, pay close attention to how scholars in the course, particularly the author of your research text, introduce and handle quotations. There is an art to this, or rather, a set of moves that should be emulated. Like grammar and mechanics, citation practices are part of the etiquette as well as the ethics of writing. Make note of this as you write for courses across the disciplines, or in your profession.

A Word about Documenting I hope that by the time you finish this sequence, you will appreciate the work that goes into a scholarly text. There are several reasons why scholars document their work, and why we ask you to get into the habit as well. The first is so that we can build on the work and wisdom of those who came before us. A scholar gives you her sources so that you can read them as well, confident that these sources are related to the issue at hand: the scholar has done some advance research work for us. A scholar also provides sources to give credit to anothers hard work. Last, but hardly exhaustive, a scholar cites sources to demonstrate the depth and breadth of the scholarly foundation supporting her own scholarship: her research adds to the credibility of her work as well as honors the work of those she relied upon to advance her understanding. Thus it is that scholars are always a bit surprised when a student plagiarizes, for why wouldnt a student want to giveand takecredit for consulting others work? Such labor is the lifeblood of scholarly achievement.