EWP #7: Research Writing (WIDboard)

[WIDboard]

EWP #7: Research Writing

Welcome to the 7th installment of Essentials of Writing Pedagogy, the WIDboard original series on teaching writing. The focus for this issue is Research Writing, a critical element to much of college-level academic writing—one that bears special attention. As always, the tips or suggestions included in EWP are not mandatory. Take what works for you, and enjoy!

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Note: This EWP post works from the assumption that much of research writing consists of using evidence to back up claims, usually (though not exclusively) argumentative ones. If that is not the standard for your discipline, then this post may be less helpful for you, though you may find useful elements to bring to your classes nonetheless.

Major Issues in Student Research Papers:
Certain major issues stand out in frequency and severity in student research writing. Though we at the WIDboard emphasize a process-oriented model, it’s often useful to start with the tangible issues in writing products, and to work backward from there. Some of the major issues that might come up in WID course’s research writing are:

• Plagiarism
  
• Lack of thoroughness in research
  
• Flawed argument and/or logic
  
• “Awkward” or unskilled integration of evidence/quotations
  

When instructors find such issues, it can be helpful to think of them as identifiable symptoms that pay point to larger underlying problems with the writing processes and tools that students have at their disposal as they attempt research writing.

Possible Underlying Problems in Student Writing Processes:
In looking for the root causes of these product-level issues in student research writing, instructors often blame student ‘laziness.’ Though indeed, laziness may sometimes be to blame, the problem is not always—or even usually—quite so simple. ‘Laziness’ is easy source for instructors to cite, because it puts all of the fault—and all of the required action to remedy the solution—on the students. Even if laziness is to blame some of the time, for the benefit of the students who are trying hard, it is important to understand other possible causes of these product-level issues. Below, we’ll look at some of the possible underlying problems in student writing processes—other than laziness—that might be to blame for these common issues in student-writing. Though many of the challenges students face will be more severe when they are underclassmen, instructors should nonetheless be aware of these problems for writers of all levels.

Plagiarism
One of the most severe issues that students face with regard to research writing, plagiarism, generally speaking, falls into one of two categories: intentional or unintentional.
Intentional plagiarism often results from one of these lapses:

• Students not being warned seriously about the significance of intellectual property conventions,
  
• Students not being asked to consider the reasons behind such conventions, or
  
• Students rushing to finish and deciding that copying another writer’s ideas is their only option to meet a deadline.

Unintentional plagiarism, on the other hand, may occur because of:

• Students being unaware of intellectual property conventions (i.e. what needs to be cited, what is considered ‘common knowledge,’ and when a thought is their own or another’s), or
  
• Students failing to adequately document their research as they read a number of different articles or sources, thereby losing track of which ideas are original and which came from sources.

Lack of Thoroughness
Lack of thoroughness in student research may present as students’ failure to use the number or quality of sources that an instructor feels is adequate, or as a failure to use the sources “in-depth,” according to the instructor’s judgment. Lack of thoroughness can often be the result of a few different underlying problems:

• Failure to manage time effectively
  
• Unfamiliarity with research processes, or how to find adequate sources
  
• Reading comprehension challenges in dealing with sources
  
• Lack of interest and/or enthusiasm for the topic
  
• A sense that the student must “cherry pick” only research that supports his/her claims
  
• Difference between student and instructor understanding of what constitutes “thoroughness” for a given assignment

Flawed Argument and/or Logic
If a student has flawed logic or argumentative claims (including failing to make any argumentative claims at all) in his or her paper, any of the following may be to blame:

• Failure to plan/outline the paper effectively
  
• Failure to follow an established plan that would otherwise be effective
  
• Insistence on adhering to a previous plan/claim when further research does not support that claim
  
• Reading comprehension issues in understanding the full meaning of employed evidence
  
• Lack of consultation with peers or instructors prior to drafting
  
• Failure to re-read or re-assess the overall argument that the paper makes for continuity and logical consistency

“Awkward” or unskilled integration of evidence/quotations
When we say that a student “awkwardly” or unskillfully integrates evidence or quotations, we refer to problems such as including, but not limited to,
a) using too-frequent quotations or too large ones,
b) simply stating what another writer says without real analysis,
d) shying away from criticizing or questioning the source’s position,
e) struggling to apply a variety of sentence structures for integrating evidence, or
f) basic language-level issues of strained wording and the like.
Such product-level issues are often caused by two underlying problems:

• Intimidation at the task of critiquing/working closely with the work of published writers.
  
• Unfamiliarity with the sorts of ‘rhetorical moves’ that are common to much of successful academic writing.

Implications for Assignment Design

Plagiarism
To help avoid plagiarism, you might consider any of the following ideas when structuring research-based assignments:

• Plan each assignment on a schedule that, even if demanding, legitimately allows students the time that is necessary to complete the given tasks
  
• At the beginning of the semester, set up an assignment, reading, or class discussion that clearly establishes expectations and conventions of intellectual property and citation. Before or as part of each subsequent research assignment, remind students of those expectations.
  
• Design multiple points at which students must “check in” with you or with others regarding their work, so that you can see a clearly established history of a student’s ideas in development. Consider breaking research projects into “stages,” in which not all of the research is done at once, even so that not all of it can be done the night before the project is due.
  
• Ask that students provide some form of ‘source summaries,’ or a preliminary bibliography, or research notes in advance of their first draft’s due date. These notes need not be extremely extensive, nor must they be the only work from which subsequent writing be conducted, but they may help provide an organizational scheme to which students can refer as they document their own research.
  
• Consider explicitly practicing or demonstrating on an overhead/chalkboard the process of citing a source as you use the information, as opposed to trying to come back and add citations to the work later.

Lack of Thoroughness
To help alleviate a lack of thoroughness in student research, you might consider any of the following ideas when structuring research-based assignments:

• Allow students some choice over their topics, in order to encourage them to feel a sense of ownership or enthusiasm about the topic. This may provide students with increased motivation to be thorough.
  
• Be explicit about your expectations for what constitutes “thorough” research.
  
• Consider providing students with some sort of guidelines for the types of sources that might be helpful to them (if there are particular types of periodicals or databases, for example, that could be particularly relevant).
  
• Insist that students get your approval on a preliminary (though not exhaustive) list of sources that might be consulted. This will ensure that students have at least some acceptable research completed ahead of the deadline-crunch.
  
• Consider scheduling a research instruction session with the GW librarians at some point during the semester (see the Library Resources of WIDboard for more information).
  
• Throughout the semester, particularly in the lead-up to the research assignment, assign students readings for homework that are similar to the types of sources that might be useful to them (perhaps in escalating difficulty). This can gradually acclimate students to the density of scholarly writing in your discipline, and can enable you to head-off any patterns of difficulties in reading comprehension. It may also make students feel more at ease when attempting to find their own resources during their research.
  
• Emphasize that students’ research should not only “cherry pick” the points that back up their own positions, but should instead account for the dissenting voices. Either those voices must be addressed and their claims discredited, or the student’s position must be slightly altered.

Flawed Argument and/or Logic
To help improve students’ logic and/or argumentative processes, you might consider any of the following:

• Be explicit about exactly what you expect in terms of an argument to be made. Do you want an argument? Do you expect a thesis-driven paper? If not, what do you expect?
  
• Break the assignment up into stages, so that at several points students must check in with the instructor or with peers, any of whom might be able to help foresee or find logical or argumentative flaws.
  
• Heavily encourage (or perhaps require) students to outline and/or plan out their papers before beginning the actual drafting stage. The level of detail each instructor expects from this outline will vary, and students need not stick exactly to the outline, if their research and writing develops further points. Encourage students to think of such planning devices as “working outlines” that can be adaptive to the needs of the paper as it forms.
  
• Emphasize that much of students’ research should happen before they begin drafting, since research should give rise to the position they take in their papers. Remind students that unlike in the five-paragraph essay form, when a thesis is created and evidence is conjured to support that thesis, much of academic writing relies on theses that are only in a preliminary stage at the beginning of writing, and that often evolve as the paper develops.

“Awkward” or unskilled integration of evidence.
To help students improve their integration of evidence, you might consider any of the following:

• For larger research projects, preface the project with an exercise or assignment that helps students to understand how academic research happens and where writers get their ideas. Consider adapting the “Conceptual Archeology” exercise posted in the Assignment Design section of WIDboard. Assignments such as these can helpfully demystify and break down the process of research into steps that students can understand and put into practice in their own writing.
  
• Explicitly demonstrating how quotations can be integrated using specific rhetorical tools and strategies. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have written a spectacular book, They Say/I Say The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing that addresses this concern in particular (the book is also listed in the WID Bibliography in the General Instructional Resources section of WIDboard). Further, in the Assignment Design section of WIDboard you will find a “Rhetorical Moves” handout on the same topic.

For any assignment, especially the first large research assignment of a semester, it is usually a very good idea to have an explicit assignment sheet that very clearly states exactly what is expected of the students, in order to avoid miscommunication.

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That's all for now, folks! Check back soon for more updates!