Section 5: Researching and Making Claims

Introduction

Seth Graves

Picture this: You’re walking through the forest (or a big park with trees in it—just go with it) with a friend. You’ve got a field guide (or a smartphone) and have begun to identify the trees you see: Leyland Cypress, Red Oak, Silver Bell. Your friend asks you, “Which one do you like the most?” You look around. They all do seem quite different now. You each have your own answer. As you pay more attention to the differences between these trees—and really begin to see each tree in the forest—you become aware of our own feelings about this debate. Only half an hour ago, you’d simply called every tree in the forest a tree—now you’re in full-scale debate about trees. What happened?

Learning more about a topic expands your capacity for emotion. In this sense, research has the power to change us. It invites us to think and feel things about the world with ever-greater depth.

In fact, all writing is research, and every “paper” is a research paper. In each writing act we’re trying to learn something more about ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Even if you don’t draw from an outside source—either a secondary source you found through, say, library resources, or a primary source you found through your own information gathering—you may still be drawing from your own experience, or at least offering your own claims. And those are forms of research, too.

So why do we do research? For one, it provides us with a check-and-balance system for claims. It also provides credibility for our claims. Credibility is more important now than ever. If you don’t believe this claim, consider the example of “fake news.” A recent study at Stanford University looked at students’ understanding of how credibility works on the internet. In one part of the study, students were asked to review Washington, D.C., lobbyist-run website MinimumWage.com. The study states:

In open web searches, only nine percent of high school students in an Advanced Placement history course were able to see through MinimumWage.com’s language to determine that it was a front group for a D.C. lobbyist . . . Among college students the results were actually worse: Ninety-three percent of students were snared. The simple act of Googling “Employment Policies Institute” and the word “funding” turns up [a] Salon article [discussing the website as an “Industry PR Firm Posing as a Think Tank”] along with a host of other exposés. Most students never moved beyond the site itself. (Wineburg 5)

To repeat, this study found that only 7% of college students were able to see that a source was not credible.

The study also showed that the majority of students were unfamiliar with the phrase “sponsored content,” which appears on advertisements intentionally designed to look like articles. Many students were unable to discern whether something posted on social media was simply popular or whether it actually was true. One student suggested a source was credible because it had “a large following on Twitter.”

Credibility contributes to the ethos of the person making the claim. Without ethos, a person may not have a valid reason to be believed, or may have trouble reaching their audience. In a way, integrating research gives the writer an opportunity to practice a kind of humility—of drawing upon the work of someone with more expertise. Research ensures that the author has engaged in a process of listening to a conversation of key voices—and has then joined the conversation.

This section introduces the research process, discusses finding, evaluating, and incorporating sources into your own writing, explains ways of finding a thesis for your research project (“Stasis Theory”) and ways of organizing your writing in this genre (“Using Toulmin to Organize Your Thinking” and “Organizing an Argument”).

Examples of research-based genres of writing in this section include anthropologist Emily Martin’s classic piece on how sexism influences how we view “objective” scientific findings (“The Egg and the Sperm); “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in which tech writer Nicholas Carr examines scientific research into technology’s effects on our brains; “Tip Jars and the New Economy” by sociologist Dalton Conley, which explores the social and economic implications of tipping culture for service workers and society as a whole. In “The Russians Are (Still?) Coming,” Baruch student Arin Kukharsky argues that the U.S. film industry has helped create and perpetuate stereotypes about Russian people for economic and political reasons, and in “Avoiding Misconceptions: Immigrants are Beneficial to Society,” student Suhaib Qasim uses research to dispel negative stereotypes about immigration in America.

Work Cited

Wineburg, Sam, et. al.. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford, CA: Stanford Digital Repository, 2016.