Writing College
Research Papers (How It Differs From Writing in High School)
click
here for printed
copy
Much of what you learned in high school will be useful to you as you
approach writing in college: you will want to write clearly, to have an
interesting and arguable thesis, to construct paragraphs that are coherent
and focused, and so on.
Still, many students enter college relying on writing strategies that
served them well in high school but that won't work well for research
papers. The five-paragraph theme, for example, is not sophisticated or
flexible enough to provide a sound structure for a college paper. Also,
many old tricks -- such as using elevated language or repeating yourself
so that you might meet a ten-page requirement -- will fail you now. It is
obvious when a student pads a paper by using these old tricks.
So how does a student make a successful transition
from high school to college?
The first thing that you'll need to understand is that writing in college
is a particular kind of writing, called "academic writing." Academic
writing might be defined in many ways, there are three concepts that you
need to understand before you write your first academic paper.
1. Academic writing is writing done by scholars for other scholars. This
means you. As a college student, you are part of a community of scholars
engaged in activities that scholars have been engaged in for centuries:
you will read about, think about, argue about, and write about great
ideas.
2. Academic writing is devoted to topics and questions that are of
interest to the academic community. When you write an academic
paper, you must first try to find a topic or a question that is relevant
and appropriate. But how do you know when a topic is relevant and
appropriate? First of all, pay attention to what your professor is
saying. She will certainly be giving you a context into which you
can place your questions and observations. Second, understand that
your paper should be of interest to other students and scholars.
Remember that academic writing must be more than personal response or
opinion. In other words, you will want to write something that helps
your reader to better understand your topic or to see it in a new way.
3. Academic writing should present the reader with an informed argument.
To construct an informed argument, you must first try to sort out what you
know (knowledge) about a subject from what you think
(personal opinion) about a subject. If your paper fails to inform,
or if it fails to argue, then it will fail to meet the expectations of the
academic reader.
Constructing An
Informed Argument
What You Know—
Different writing assignments require different degrees of knowing.
A short paper written in response to a readings of Sherman Alexie's short
story, "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire for example, may not
require you to be familiar with Alexie's other works. It may not
even require you to have mastered the terms important to literary
criticism -- though clearly any knowledge you bring might help you to make
a thoughtful response to it.
However, if you are asked to write an academic paper on the short story,
then you will want to know more. You will want to have certain terms
in hand so that you can explain what Alexie is doing in key moments. You
will want to be familiar with Alexie's other works so that you can
understand what themes are important to him and his work. Moreover,
if you are this short story in an upper-level literature class, you will
want to be aware of different critical perspectives on Alexie's work and
on American Indian literature in general, so that you can "place" your
argument within the larger ongoing conversation.
When you sit down to write an academic paper, ask
yourself these questions:
What do I know about my topic?
Can I answer the
questions who, what, when, where, why, how?
What do I know about the context of my topic?
What historical or cultural influences do I know about that might be
important to my topic?
Does my topic belong to any particular genre or category of topics?
What do I know about this genre?
What seems
important to me about this topic?
If I were to
summarize what I know about this topic, what points would I focus on?
What points seem
less important?
Why do I think so?
How does this
topic relate to other things that I know?
What do I know
about the topic that might help my reader to understand it in new ways?
What DON'T I
know about my topic?
What do I need to
know?
How can I find out
more?
What You
Think—
In the process of really thinking about your topic, your aim is to come up
with a fresh observation. After all, it's not enough to summarize in
a paper what is already known and talked about. You must also add
something of your own to the conversation.
Understand, however, that "adding something of your own" is not an
invitation simply to bring your own personal associations, reactions, or
experiences to the reading of a text. To create an informed
argument, you must first recognize that your writing should be
analytical rather than personal. In other words, your
writing must show that your associations, reactions, and experiences of a
text have been framed in a critical, rather than a personal, way.
How does one move from personal response to analytical writing?
Summarize. First, summarize what the primary text is saying.
You'll notice that you can construct several different summaries,
depending on your agenda.
Evaluate. The process of evaluation is an ongoing one. You
evaluate a text the moment you encounter it, and -- if you aren't lazy --
you continue to evaluate and to re-evaluate as you go along.
Evaluating a text is different from simply reacting to a text. When
you evaluate for an academic purpose, it is important to be able to
clearly articulate and to support your own personal response. What
in the text is leading you to respond a certain way? What's not
in the text that might be contributing to your response? In
asking these questions, you are straddling two intellectual processes:
experiencing your own personal response, and analyzing the text.
Analyze. This step in constructing an informed argument asks you
first to consider the parts of your topic and then to examine how these
parts relate to each other or to the whole. To analyze a text(s),
you may want to break the stories down by examining particular scenes,
point of view, and so on. In short, you'll want to ask: What are the
components of this story, and how do these components contribute to the
story's theme? How do they contribute to the author's work as a
whole? When you analyze, you break the whole into parts so that you
might see the whole differently. In the process of analysis, you
find things that you might say.
Synthesize. When you analyze, you break down a text into its parts.
When you synthesize, you look for connections between ideas. In
analyzing, you might come up with elements that seem initially disparate.
You may have some observations that at first don't seem to gel. Or
you may have read various critical perspectives, all of them in
disagreement with one another. Now would be the time to consider
whether these disparate elements or observations might be reconciled, or
synthesized. This intellectual exercise requires that you create an
umbrella argument -- some larger argument under which several observations
and perspectives might stand. This is where you begin to think about
formulating a thesis.
Choosing An Appropriate
Topic
Many students writing in college have trouble figuring out what
constitutes an appropriate topic. Sometimes the professor will
provide you with a prompt. She will give you a question to explore,
or a problem to resolve.
It will be up to you to narrow your topic and to make sure that it's
appropriately academic. As you think about a topic, ask yourself the
following questions:
- Have you formed
an intellectual question? In other words, have you constructed a
question that will require a complex, thoughtful answer?
- Is the question
provocative? Startling? Controversial? Fresh?
- Will you be able
to answer this question adequately in a few pages? Or is the
question impossibly broad?
- If the question
seems broad, how might you narrow it?
- Does your
question address both text and context? In other words, have you
considered the historical and cultural circumstances that influenced
this text? Have you considered what other scholars have said about
it?
- Will your reader
care about this question? Or will she say, "So what?"
Finding a
Rhetorical Stance
When writing an academic paper, you must not only consider what you
want to say, you must also consider to whom you are saying it. In
other words, it's important to determine not only what you think
about a topic, but also what your audience is likely to think. What
are your audience's biases? Values? Expectations? Knowledge? To whom are
you writing, and for what purpose?
When you begin to answer all of these questions, you have started to
reckon with what has been called "the rhetorical stance." "Rhetorical
stance" refers to the position you take as a writer in terms of the
subject and the reader of your paper.
Consider Your Position—
When you write a paper, you take a stand on a topic. You determine
whether you are for or against, passionate or cool-headed. You
determine whether you are going to view this topic through a particular
perspective (feminist, for example), or whether you are going to make a
more general response. You also determine whether you are going to
analyze your topic through the lens of a particular discipline -- history,
for example. Your stance on the topic depends on the many decisions
you have made in the reading and thinking processes.
In order to make sure that your stance on a topic is appropriately
analytical, you might want to ask yourself some questions. Begin by
asking why you've taken this particular stance. Why did you find
some elements of the text more important than others? Does this
prioritizing reflect some bias or preconception on your part? If you
dismissed part of a text as boring or unimportant, why did you do so?
Do you have personal issues or experiences that lead you to be impatient
with certain claims? Is there any part of your response to the text
that might cause your reader to discount your paper as biased or
un-critical? If so, you might want to reconsider your position on
your topic.
Consider Your Audience—
Your position on a topic does not by itself determine your rhetorical
stance. You must also consider your reader. In the college
classroom, the audience is usually the professor or your classmates --
although occasionally your professor will instruct you to write for a more
particular or more general audience. No matter who your reader is,
you will want to consider him carefully before you start to write.
What do you know about your reader and his stance towards your topic?
What is he likely to know about the topic? What biases is he likely
to have? Moreover, what effect do you hope to have on the reader?
Is your aim to be controversial? Informative? Entertaining?
Will the reader appreciate or resent your intention?
Once you have determined who your reader is, you will want to consider how
you might best reach him or her. If, for example, you are an
authority on a subject and you are writing to readers who know little or
nothing about it, then you'll want to take an informative stance. If
you aren't yet confident about a topic, and you have more questions than
answers, you might want to take an inquisitive stance.
In any case, when you are deciding on a rhetorical stance, choose one that
allows you to be sincere. You don't want to take an authoritative
stance on a subject if you aren't confident about what you are saying.
On the other hand, you can't avoid taking a position on a subject: nothing
is worse than reading a paper in which the writer has refused to take a
stance. What if you are of two minds on a subject? Declare
that to the reader. Make ambivalence your clear rhetorical stance.
Considering Structure—
In high school you might have been taught various strategies for
structuring your papers. Some of you might have been raised on the
five paragraph theme, in which you introduce your topic, come up with
three supporting points, and then conclude by repeating what you've
already said. Others of you might have been told that the best
structure for a paper is the hour-glass model, in which you begin with a
general statement, make observations that are increasingly specific, and
then conclude with a statement that is once again general.
When you are writing papers in college, you will require structures that
will support ideas that are more complex than the ones you considered in
high school.
When creating an informed argument, you will want to rely on several
organizational strategies, but you will want to keep some general advice
in mind.
Introductions: Your introduction should accomplish two things: it should
declare your argument, and it should place your argument within the
larger, ongoing conversation about your topic. Often writers will do
the latter before they do the former. That is, they will begin by
summarizing what other scholars have said about their topic, and then they
will declare what they are adding to the conversation. Even when
your paper is not a research paper you will be expected to introduce your
argument as if into a larger conversation. "Place" your argument for
your reader by naming the text, the author, the issues it raises, and your
take on these issues.
Thesis Sentence: If you want to be safe, your paper will have a declared
thesis and it will appear where the reader expects it to appear: at the
end of the introduction. Your thesis should also be an arguable
point -- that is, it should declare something that is interesting and
controversial. Your thesis is probably the single most important
sentence in your paper.
The Other Side(s):
Because every thesis presents an arguable point, you as a writer are
obligated to acknowledge in your paper the other side(s) of an argument.
Consider what your opponents might say against your argument. Then
determine where and how you want to deal with the opposition. Do you
want to dismiss the opposition in the first paragraph? Do you want
to list each opposing argument and rebut them one by one? Your
decisions will determine how you structure your paper.
Supporting Paragraphs:
Every convincing argument must have support. Your argument's support
will be organized in your paper's paragraphs. These paragraphs must
each declare a point, usually formed as that paragraph's topic sentence.
A topic sentence
is like a thesis sentence -- except that instead of announcing the
argument of the entire paper, it announces the argument of that particular
paragraph. In this way, the topic sentence controls the paper's
evidence. The topic sentence is more flexible than the thesis in
that it can more readily appear in different places within the paragraph.
Most often, however, it appears at or near the beginning.
Conclusions:
Writing a good conclusion is difficult. You will want to sum up, but
you will want to do more than say what you have already said. You
will want to leave the reader with something to think about, but you will
want to avoid preaching. You might want to point to a new idea or
question, but you risk confusing the reader by introducing something that
he finds irrelevant.
Using Appropriate Tone and Style—
Professors are delighted when you make your point clearly, concisely, and
persuasively. Understand, too, that they are less delighted when you
have inflated your prose, pumped up your page count, or tried to impress
them by using terms that you didn't take the time to understand.
Consider some of the following tips,
designed to make the process of writing an academic paper go more
smoothly:
- Keep the
personal in check. Some assignments will
invite you to make a personal response to a text. For example, a
professor might want you to describe your experience of a text, or to
talk about personal experiences that are relevant to the topic at hand.
But if you haven't been invited to make a personal response, then it's
better not to digress. As interesting as Aunt Sally's story is
about having a baby out of wedlock, it probably doesn't have a place in
your academic paper about The Scarlet Letter.
- Rely on evidence
over feeling. You may be
very passionate about a subject, but that's no excuse to allow rhetoric
alone to carry the ball. Even if you have constructed some very
pretty phrases to argue against genetic engineering, they won't mean
much to your professor unless you back those pretty phrases with facts.
- Watch your
personal pronouns. Students
often wonder if it's OK to use the pronouns "I" and "you" in a paper.
In fact, it is OK -- provided you use them with care. Overusing
the "I" might make the reader feel that the paper was overly subjective.
In fact, when a writer too often invokes himself in the first person, he
may be doing so to avoid offering proof: "It's my own personal opinion,
and I have a right to it. I don't have to defend it." But of
course, he does. As to using the pronoun "you": Do you really want
to aim a remark directly at the reader? Doing so draws the reader
closer to the text and invites a more subjective (and sometimes more
intensely critical) response. Remember: certain academic
disciplines (in the sciences, for example) would frown on the use of
these pronouns. When in doubt, ask.
- Watch your
gendered pronouns. When you
write, you'll want to make sure that you don't do anything to make your
readers feel excluded. If you use "he" and "him" all the time, you
are excluding half of your potential readership. We'll acknowledge
that the he/she solution is a bit cumbersome in writing. However,
you might solve the problem as we have done in this document: by
alternating "he" and "she" throughout. Other writers advocate
always using "she" instead of "he" as a way of acknowledging a
long-standing exclusion of women from texts. Whatever decision you
make in the end, be sensitive to its effect on your readers.
- Be aware of
discipline-specific differences.
Each of the academic disciplines has its own conventions when it comes
to matters of tone and style. If you need more information about
discipline-specific matters, check out a style manual, such as the MLA
or APA style sheets.
- Avoid mechanical
errors. No matter what
audience you're writing for, you'll want to produce text that is
error-free. Errors in grammar and style slow your reader down.
Sometimes they even obscure your meaning. Always proofread your
text before passing it on to your reader.
Tips
For Newcomers
For those of you who are just beginning your academic careers, here are
some tips that might help you to survive:
- First of all,
keep up with your reading and go to class. You can't hope to be
part of a conversation if you are absent from it.
- Pay attention
not only to what others are saying, but also to how they are saying it.
Notice that sound arguments are never made without evidence.
- Don't confuse
evidence, assumption, and opinion. Evidence is something that you
can prove. Assumption is something that one can safely infer from
the evidence at hand. Opinion is your own particular
interpretation of the evidence.
- Pay attention to
the requirements of an assignment. When asked for evidence, don't
offer opinion. When asked for your opinion, don't simply present
the facts. Too often students write summary when they are asked to
write analysis. The assignment will cue you as to how to respond.
- Familiarize
yourself with new language. Every discipline has its own jargon.
While you will want to avoid unnecessary use of jargon in your own
writing, you will want to be sure before you write that you have a clear
understanding of important concepts and terms.
- Don't make the
mistake of thinking that because something is in print it has cornered
the market on truth. Your own interpretation of a text might be
just as valid (or even more valid) than something you've found in the
library or on the internet. Be critical of what you read, and have
confidence that you might say as much.
- Pay attention to
standards and rules. Your professors will expect you to write
carefully and clearly. They will expect your work to be free of
errors in grammar and style. They will expect you to follow the
rules for citing sources and to turn in work that is indeed your own.
If you have a question about a professor's standards, ask. You
will find that your professors are eager to help you.
|