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“Alternative Ways to Present Your Research” by Steven D. Krause

Not All Research Comes in “Papers” or Essays”

While research essay writing tasks vary quite a bit, there are some general guidelines that you will want to consider when you are asked by a college professor to write a “research paper” or “research essay.”

Of course, the traditional essay form (typed, double-spaced, thesis-driven, written in a linear “from beginning to end” style) is still the most common writing assignment in college classrooms, and this will probably remain the case for some time to come.  Increasingly however, college teachers are considering alternatives to this form.  Some of these alternatives have actually been common in composition classes for a while now– for example, the “I-Search” research essay (which was pioneered by Ken Macrorie in the late 1980s) and portfolio-based writing projects and assessments.

Others alternatives are more recent.  The increased power and availability of computer technology has played a significant role in presenting research in a way that is different from the conventional essay.  For example, the World Wide Web allows (some might even say requires) writers to publish documents that include graphics and photographs, and even audio and video files.

After all, you are still trying to convince and inform an audience about a particular point, and you do this with your use and interpretation of evidence. In other ways, presenting your research in an alternative fashion and with alternative sorts of evidence change in interesting ways the role and place in research in both academic and non-academic settings.  Besides that, writing about your research in a “non-traditional” way might shed a different and informative light on your topic, and it might even be fun.

Obviously, there is no limit to the number of alternatives and variations to the traditional research essay.  In this chapter, I will describe three ways of approaching research writing differently:  The research portfolio/narrative essay, the Web-based research project, and the poster session project.  These projects could be completed either along with or instead of a more traditional research essay, and I would also encourage you to experiment and explore other alternatives and combinations of projects.

The Research Portfolio/Narrative Essay

A “research portfolio” is a collection of writing you’ve done in the process of completing your research. Of course, the details about what is included in this portfolio will vary based on the class assignments.

A research portfolio might also include your work on some of the various exercises in The Process of Research Writing and other assignments given to you from your teacher. The goal of the exercises is to help you work through the process of research writing, and to help you write an essay.

This project, “The Research Portfolio/Narrative Essay” is similar to a more conventional research essay in that the writer uses cited evidence to support the point exemplified in a working thesis.  However, it is different in that the writer focuses on the process of researching his topic, a narrative about how he developed and explored the working thesis.

A Student Example:

“The Story of My Working Thesis Malfunction” by Amanda Kenger

Amanda said that she originally chose to write a portfolio/narrative essay because “I thought it would be a piece of cake.  I was wrong.”  She soon realized that this assignment required her to think carefully about how to present her research to her readers, and it required her to follow an approach that was different from her previous academic writing experiences.  Overall, Amanda was glad she chose this writing option “because it gave me an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary.”

Web-Based Research Project

Most academics—students and teachers alike—have become comfortable with using the Internet for at least a part of their research.  You have to be cautious when using many web-based sources because they aren’t necessarily as credible as other popular and academic sources.  Nonetheless, the Web still represents a great place to find information on a wide variety of topics, and it is a great place for you to publish research on almost any topic.

The Advantages of the Web-Based Research Project

There are many advantages to creating Web sites that have nothing to do with writing research projects.  Making Web pages is fun—the Internet is a great place to post pictures of your friends and pets, and it’s a good way to share your writing with others through blogging or posting your poetry or short stories.  But for the purposes of publishing academic research, I believe the Web has three main advantages over more traditional “paper” outlets.

•    The Web allows you to present your research with graphics, with multimedia, and/or as a “hypertext.”

While paper-based research projects limit you to black-and-white typed text on a page (with perhaps a few graphic elements here and there), Web-based research projects will almost certainly include colors and graphics to enhance the effectiveness of the site.  It’s also possible to include some simple multimedia elements into your research project—sound clips, short video clips, or animation, for example.

The Web also makes it possible to present your research project not as a linear “beginning to end” essay but as a “hypertext,” a type of text that allows for—even encourages—different approaches and readings.  I discuss this in a bit more detail later on in this chapter.

•    Your research project can become available to a broad, diverse, and international audience.

Traditional paper-based research projects usually only reach a small audience—your classmates, your teacher, and perhaps other friends and colleagues.  Web-based research projects are available to any of the tens of millions of people all over the world who spend at least some time surfing the Web.

Now, let’s be realistic:  your Web site is not going to have as many readers as popular sites like Yahoo! or the CNN web site.  Just as is the case with traditional publishing, simply making your writing available is no guarantee that you will attract a large audience of readers.

However, the potential reach of your Web-based research project is enormous, certainly much larger than the potential audience of a more traditional research project.  Further, if you register your site with various search engines and search directories (and most of them provide information on how to do this), your site will eventually show up on the searches that other researchers conduct.

•    The Web Facilitates Collaboration

Chances are, you are already familiar with one of the Web’s most powerful features, the “link:” the highlighted element of text that a Web reader clicks on in order to go to another Web page.  The ability to link your Web page to just about any other Web page out there allows you to make a lot of very literal connections to other writers and publications, which is in itself a form of collaboration.

But in a more concrete sense, the Web facilitates collaboration with your colleagues since you can build links to each others’ Web sites.  This allows writers to work simultaneously on different parts of the same document, and to link to each other when it comes time to put the research project together.  In my experiences as writer and a teacher, this approach is an excellent balance between the two extremes of collaboration I describe in Chapter Four (“How to Collaborate and Write With Others”).

The Disadvantages of the Web-Based Research Project

While the advantages of creating Web sites for your research are significant, the disadvantages are significant as well.  So before you commit yourself and your colleagues to Web-based research project, you need to take a moment to consider some of the challenges you’ll face in making your Web site and your abilities to cope with these potential problems.

•    Computer hardware and software access

To make a Web page, you obviously need to have easy access to a personal computer connected to the Internet, either one you own, one where you live, or one at your school that you can use on a fairly regular basis.  You will also need to have at least some basic software to create and edit your Web site and to manipulate graphics.  Last, and far from least, you need to have access to a server, which is a computer on a network that delivers (or serves) Web pages to users.  I discuss all of these issues in more detail later in this chapter.

For some students and teachers, these access issues are very difficult to overcome.  For example, at the university where I teach, students don’t have “easy access” to a server where they can publish their Web sites.  While this is a state of affairs that is changing, it means that it is quite challenging for my students to publish their Web sites, even though most of them have access to a personal computer.

•    Learning about HTML and other computer literacy skills

Making web pages using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and HTML editing software is actually surprisingly easy.  Making a basic Web site—made up of individual Web pages that are just text, links, and simple graphics— is not “computer programming” in the sense that it requires special computer skills or training.

However, making a Web site does require a degree of computer skill and literacy that many of my students and fellow English teachers have not quite achieved.  In other words, while you don’t have to be a “computer geek” to make a simple Web site, you do need to be relatively “computer literate” to learn how to make a Web site.

•    Time, time, and time!

Creating, uploading, trouble-shooting, and editing Web sites simply takes time, certainly more time than simply typing an essay with a word processor.  You are already probably spending a lot of time researching and writing about your research project; given the time it takes to learn how to make Web pages and then to actually make them, it might be logistically impossible for you and your classmates to put together Web-based research projects in an academic term.

But it is also more time consuming because when you create a web site—even a simple one as a class project—you are moving from the role of “academic writer” to “Web publisher.”  And as a Web publisher, you need to concern yourself with things like layout, colors, links, and graphics.  So if you and your classmates decide to present your research on the Web, you should probably budget more time for completing the final version of your web site than you would if you were writing an essay or creating a research portfolio.

Web Publishing versus Hypertext

After considering the advantages and disadvantages of creating a research-based Web site in the first place, the next step is to decide if you want to merely publish your research essay on the Web, or if you want to develop a hypertext version of your research project.

By merely “publish,” I mean the process where you take your research essay as it exists on paper, convert it into an “HTML file” or as a “PDF file” (Portable Document Format) and then upload it to the Web. By hypertext, I mean the process where you create a series of HTML files that contain the text to your research project and that contain highlighted words, phrases, or images that allow potential readers to explore and read your research in nonsequential ways.

A Web published research essay is really no different than the sort of traditional research essay project, except that it is available on the World Wide Web.  If we were to map this essay, it might look something like this:

With Web published research essay projects, you are expecting your readers to read in a particular order, from beginning to end, from “A” to “F.”  In fact, each of these different parts of your research essay project could be part of one text file, available to your reader to scroll through or print and read later.  And of course, if you decide to publish your research essay as a PDF, then readers will have to either print your essay or use software like Adobe Acrobat Reader to read your essay.

There are two advantages to web publishing your essays like this:

•    It is easy to do. Since most word processing software allows users to convert files into HTML or PDFs, publishing a paper-based research project is simply a matter of saving in a different format and uploading to a server.

•    Web publishing preserves the order and “feel” of a paper-based research project.This is especially true of PDFs.

The main disadvantage of Web publishing like this is it isn’t as dynamic or as flexible as a hypertextual research project.  This depends on the audience of course, but often times, web readers are more likely to read and use your web site if it is presented as hypertext intended to be read on the screen.

A “hypertextual” research project might be mapped like this:

In this example, each of the boxes represents a different part of the Web site, and thus a different file—instead of scrolling from one part of the Web site to the next, readers have to follow links to other parts of the site.  While most hypertext Web sites begin with some starting point (often a sort of “table of contents” page), they are written and designed in a way that allows for multiple ways of reading.  Readers could as easily read from point “D” to point “F” as they can read from point “A” to point “B,” and, if the hypertext is effectively presented, both readings will be informative to the reader.

The main advantage of presenting a research project as a hypertext is basically the opposite of simply “Web publishing” a research essay:  hypertexts are dynamic and more interactive than traditional essays presented on the Web, and readers they give readers more and different opportunities to interact with them.

Think of your own reading habits when it comes to the World Wide Web:  chances are, you are more likely to read through a site that presents text in small chunks and that allows you to select links to the part of the site that interests you.  Further, if you are a typical Web reader, you are less likely to read through a site if you have to scroll down the page or print out the site to read it.

Along these lines, the main disadvantages of research projects presented as hypertexts are the opposite of Web published research essays:

•    They aren’t as easy to make.  For one thing, it might take a considerable amount of work to divide up the parts of your research project into different parts of a hypertext.  For another, each separate part or “page” of your Web site (represented here by the different lettered boxes) is a separate HTML document that you need to create and maintain.  While this isn’t difficult to do, it does take some time and effort, certainly more so than if you were to simply convert a word-processed file into a Web page.

•    Hypertextual research projects can’t preserve the order of presentation.  After all, one of the points of a hypertext is to give your reader options in how they want to read it.  While you can create hypertexts that give readers the option of reading the project straight through, your readers might not choose to read that way, which can cause some confusion.

A Web Writing Recipe:  What You Need to Get Started, and Where You Can Go To Get Help

If you want to publish your research writing on the web, you will need to learn a few basic computer skills, you’ll need some modest computer hardware and software, and you’ll need to have access to computer server space that can host your web sites.  Here is a basic “Web Writing recipe” to get you started.

A little knowledge of HTML.  Hypertext Markup Language is the basic coding system that makes the Web work.  Technically, you don’t have to use HTML to make your web sites, but not knowing anything about HTML can be very confusing.

Fortunately, HTML is fairly easy to learn.  There are many guides to HTML available for free on the Web (and the The Process of Research Writing Catalyst Web site links to some of them), and there are also many books available that provide basic instruction in working with HTML.

Some basic computer hardware and software.  Most personal computers connected to the Internet can be used to make Web pages.  However, not all personal computers have the basic software needed to make Web pages.

You can make a Web page with just about any text editing program, even something as simple as “Note Pad,” which comes on all Windows-based personal computers.  However, you will probably want to use a software application specifically designed for making Web pages.  There are a variety of free applications that can help you, and there are links to some of these programs at the The Process of Research Writing Catalyst Web site, though the best programs are commercial products.  Currently, the two best known products for making Web sites are Microsoft’s FrontPage and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.  You may want to ask the Information Technology specialists at school about the availability of this software on your campus.

Finally, since you will probably want to include some graphics and photographic images with your Web site, you will also need software that handles graphics and photographs.  Again, some of these products are free (though the best ones are not), and you may want to ask the Information Technology specialists at school about the availability of this software.

Access to a web server. In order to make your Web site available to other readers, you need to upload your Web site (the HTML files and any of the graphics accompany your site) to a Web server.   A server “serves” files to Web readers (usually known as “clients” or “users”) when they request a particular Web site by entering in a specific web address.

Increasingly, many colleges and universities are providing web server space to the academic community so that they can publish their work on the World Wide Web.  Ask your local Information Technology specialist for information.  There are also numerous other ways to make your Web site available on a server, both for a modest cost or for free.

Poster Session

At many academic conferences in a variety of different disciplines, faculty and student participants often have the option to present their research to other conference participants in a “Poster Session.”  It’s similar in some ways to a science fair of the sort you might remember from junior high school:  participants literally make a poster or some other sort of multi-media presentation (photographs, charts, sound recordings, video) that represent the presenter’s research.

The poster session project is different from the other alternatives to the traditional research paper I’ve discussed in this chapter because it is a supplement rather than a replacement for other research writing projects.  But poster sessions are important supplements to other writing projects because they provide a different way for researchers to interact with each other and their projects, and they can work well for students in composition courses, too.