Writer’s Corner

Writing the Research Paper

This guide is designed to help you to use the particular method of essay writing we’ve practiced with the Visual Literacy essay and the Rhetorical Analysis essay to write a Research Essay. You may be familiar with “research essays” in a different form: sometimes that name is used for long essays that give an historical explanation of some phenomenon using research, sometimes ending up close to a Wikipedia-style overview, or its also used for essays that discuss a range of scientific data and a conclusion on what it all means. The academic research paper described in this book is different to that, although elements of what you might have done before will be useful in different ways here.

The core of a research paper is research. It succeeds or fails on the quality of the research that you engage with, and on your ability to make use of and effectively analyze that research. “Research” does not mean, in this specific academic context, each factoid you find scattered across the web: it means academic, peer-reviewed journal articles or academic book chapters. Your work needs to be addressing, reviewing, analyzing, and challenging the work of other researchers, or it’s not a research essay.

Reliable Academic Sources

If a journal is “peer-reviewed” it means that every article you read was read by a team of experts and academics in the field and deemed “good research” by those academics before it was ever published. You can rely on a journal that “peer-reviews” its work for cutting-edge, contemporary research that has been carefully vetted by people who are specialists in the subject.

The same happens for chapters in academic books. If you compare the level of academic evaluation that texts like these have gone through before publication to almost any other publication in print or on the internet, including newspapers, blogs, museum websites, Wikipedia, magazines, and non-academic books, it is very clear that an “Academic Source” is a much more serious and reliable text than almost any other.

This “reliability” is important when writing a research paper, because if you’re building your argument on the basis of weak sources your own research paper is going to be weak. For a paper about 2500 words long you can expect to use at least five serious academic research papers and to explore some of them in more depth than others. These are the foundation of your argument – you are a critic and these are the other critics your paper is having a conversation with in writing.

It’s also important to engage with these papers in-depth, to read them in full, and to understand their arguments and the ways they differ from each other and you in the conclusions they draw from the same information, as a framework for establishing what you think about the topic. They are not simply a jumping-off point for your own writing, but a speaker you have to engage with and to speak back to with your essay.

TIP: You can find out if a text is peer-reviewed by searching for the journal the article is published in. The web results will probably say straightaway whether it is a peer-reviewed journal.

Research Questions and Answers

To talk to other researchers means you need a research question: something you’re trying to talk about and explain and answer, and preferably something you don’t know the exact answer to going in. The most common way students produce weak research essays is by failing to come up with a real question and to address how they’re going to answer that question in their introduction. The result is a paper that floats around without purpose from idea to idea and requires a large amount of rewriting in the second round. Skipping that crucial first stage of writing a specific, precise question leads to essays that aren’t really about anything, even when they have a lot of research cited during the essay.

After you write the first draft of your research question, try making it clearer and more specific by asking:

• • WHO is this about: Americans? Westerners? Midwesterners? Men? Women? African Americans? Africans? Asian Americans? Singaporeans? Each of these is important and you can’t assume your reader knows the scope of your research field without defining it in your question (or at least in your introduction).
  • WHEN is this about: This year? Last year? Next year? Four hundred years ago? Two hundred? How big is the timeframe you’re tracing (if it’s very big, you might risk writing an “historical survey” essay that limits your opportunity for analysis)?
  • WHERE is this relevant? Are these phenomena taking place in the West or the East or both? Which countries? How is the same phenomenon different in different countries? What’s culturally specific about the research problem?
  • WHY research it? If you don’t have something to add and are going to rely too heavily on long quotations from your research, we might as well just read your research rather than your paper. Often that “something” comes from the clash of different pieces of research that you bring together, compare, and analyze. That’s you adding to the critical conversation and synthesizing new ideas from the old – the most important part of achieving highly in a research paper.
  • HOW are you going to do it? This is more for your introduction than the question you write for yourself. Set out your plan of action for answering your question to some degree by the end of the limited space of your paper. How will you make a meaningful contribution to research in 2500, 5000, 20000, 100000 words?

Use your introduction to explain your question and to set out a plan of action. Often people write an essay and then return to write their introduction once they know what the essay is going to be about. I don’t recommend that for a research essay: get your question and your introduction sorted before you start. You can always go back and edit them as you go along. But if you can’t already write at least a draft of each at the start, you’re probably not ready to write the body of your essay.

Writing a “Saying What We See” Research Essay

So how does this all connect to the work you’ve done so far?

Ekphrasis > Analysis > Research > Synthesis

There are a few ways of looking at it. Your ekphrasis skills – your ability to describe objects of study, like paintings and films – kick in immediately. You need to describe your object of study: whatever your research topic is. After the introduction, you set out what exactly it is you’re looking at, describe the relevant elements of its history, and what the problem ‘looks like’ to you. So if you’re writing a paper on the history of Blackface minstrelsy, you’ll need to describe what you think that is and some of where it came from, and that would be your “ekphrasis”.

Rhetorical analysis, the skill of the second essay described in this book, becomes useful immediately, only you’re not just analyzing one research paper: you’re examining five or more. That skill that you honed is suddenly in high demand in a research paper. You can look back on the guidance for “Writing the Rhetorical Analysis Paper” for more help with that aspect of dealing with analyzing each source and apply it to differing degrees for different sources as appropriate.

After each source we return to further research, integrating new papers into the essay or going away to find more relevant ones to help the essay achieve the goal it set out in the question and the introduction. And then, after some reflection on our own writing and the writing of our research sources, it’s time to synthesize. Synthesis works in two ways in a research paper: one, in that fantastic big-bang moment of two colliding research papers that you compare in a way that allows you to develop a third conclusion, different even slightly to either of theirs. The other way is to then take that “third conclusion” and apply it to something elsewhere in your research, especially (in this book) some kind of image from your research. This second form of synthesis comes directly from the rhetorical analysis section too.

Since research papers are driven by you, the writer, discovering your question is your own journey. You might consider building a question like the following:

What continuing consequences does the legacy of Blackface performance have for the cultural representation of people of color in contemporary America, and what impact do those consequences have?

Notice how the question addresses when and where (contemporary America), who (people of color), and how (by identifying consequences and their impact). The “why” can be addressed in the introduction and each of these aspects of the question can also be elaborated on.

Conclusion: Becoming an Expert

A good question enables a good introduction which enables a good plan of action which enables good structure which enables good argument which enables synthesis which enables a unique contribution to research! Don’t skip those early, knotty, difficult discussions with yourself about what the essay will do, what it can achieve, and what it will really be about. Read your research before you start writing and you won’t start off on the wrong track. Skipping the early steps makes the later ones more and more difficult.

And when you make your question, the best advice is to choose something that you want to be an expert on by the end of the paper: something you want to bring up to your friends and family as something that you know something deep and special and unique about, something that interests you personally and profoundly.