MORE SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Barry
W. Hamilton, Ph.D.
Northeastern
Seminary
(
*Don’t organize your paper around your data. A paper organized around data looks like a cut-and-paste job—the kind of stuff college students do when they spend too much time watching television or the moon. Rather, organize your paper around your questions—use the thesis statement as the foundation for the structure of your research paper. Your questions and ruminations should bring form to the data—the data should not provide the form for your research paper. If you take your notes and paste them together to make a paper, you have not looked deeply enough into the nature of your subject. Probe your data with your own questions. Be motivated by your own curiosity and burning desire to solve a problem that bothers you.
*Keep the subject sharply defined. Project topics are often too broad, and the researcher quickly becomes overwhelmed with material. The first step in keeping a research topic manageable is proper definition. In the rare cases where the topic is too narrow, the researcher finds nothing or cannot produce enough material to build an argument.
*Select
and read your sources to answer the questions related to your thesis
statement. Use evidence to support a
structured argument. The paper needs to
state a thesis, ask related questions, provide supporting evidence, make a
strong conclusion that directly addresses the thesis statement, and (especially
in the case of theses or dissertations) ask a few questions for future
research.
*Make
photocopies of the title page and copyright information of books, and—when
possible—photocopy entire journal articles.
This might help you avoid checking out 38 books, with the attendant
responsibility of keeping track of due dates.
If possible, keep these photocopies in organized files, and place the
files in a designated space.
*At
first it’s best to read until you have a rough idea of the thesis
statement. Sometimes it takes some
freestyle writing based on your reading to articulate the beginning of a thesis
statement. You may have to take some
research notes on your reading in order to get the fire going. After you’ve taken some notes, you might
write a few freestyle paragraphs to put some flesh and blood on the
argument. Contrary to traditional
portrayals, research is not a rigid linear process that proceeds smoothly from
start to finish. Rather, research is an
organized inquiry and argued resolution
to a problem that takes place within the distinctive framework of the
researcher. Since the researcher must
actively construct new knowledge, s/he manifests an inherent ‘messiness’ while
crafting the results of her/his investigation.
*Sometimes
you have to practice freestyle writing around your thesis statement to put
structure on the paper. Sometimes-and
this might especially be true in the case of theses or dissertations—it’s best
to start with the chapter for which you are best prepared, and that might be in
the middle, not the beginning. When I
wrote my dissertation—and extensively revised for publication as a book—I
worked on several pieces at a time. Each
chapter was a separate WordPerfect file—I could work on each file, depending on
the evidence and ideas I had discovered during a particular week.
*Remember
that research is almost never done in a straight line. Good research travels in revolving loops,
with several phases of a project taking shape simultaneously. The research process is deliberative, moving
in ‘iterative cycles.’ You may be working on several pieces of a project at
once. But you must keep each phase moving toward a timely completion—striving
for perfection could stall the entire project.
You
must also have enough directionality throughout the project to keep the
argument moving convincingly toward a decisive conclusion.
*When
working on a large project with chapters (such as a thesis), organize notes by
chapter divisions. When I wrote my
dissertation, I kept notes on 3 ¼-inch ‘floppy disks’ (an early form of
removable media) since my laptop computer did not have a hard drive (286-series
microprocessor), and named the files with chapter divisions clearly identified. When using paper media, organize notes using
*While
it’s impossible to set down a schedule in concrete, it’s still a good idea to
rough out a timeline for the completion of your research project, especially
for large projects such as dissertations.
Try to strike a balance between the phases of your project—reading,
taking notes, writing the rough and final drafts—avoid getting fixated on a
single phase. You could read dozens of
books and write voluminous notes—and then be faced with the arduous task of
writing a 20-page paper overnight—or, more likely, the specter of an
“Incomplete.” Conceptualize the project
in its formative stages, and stay within limits. While you may be tempted to pursue certain
strands of thought, hew the straight line of your thesis statement. You can save the unexplored paths for future
research (after the due date for your project).
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Page
Last Modified
30
January 2006