One of the most important genres you will need to master as a college writer is the Research Essay. Research-based essay projects are required for all academic disciplines, and understanding the expectations and requirements for college-level research-based essays is essential for success at the college level. The second half of our semester will specifically focus on the process and skills necessary to complete the college-level research essay.

Why Write Research Essays?

As you’ve already seen, there are some basic differences between the writing you did in high school and the writing you will be required to do in college. These differences are all related to the rhetorical situation of the college classroom. Research-based writing at the college level differs from the research-based writing you might have done in high school in one essential way:

Understanding this main difference is essential to understanding the expectations of college-level research essays. If your research in previous classes consisted of using Google or Google Scholar or simply finding a few key words or phrases that support what you already believed about the topic, the research-based writing you do in college will require something very different. When you’re taking courses from professors who are highly-trained experts in their fields, it’s much more difficult to fake your own knowledge of the topic. You will not simply report on the information you discovered.

Instead, the research-based writing that you do in college needs to come from deep knowledge about the topic and demonstrate your own voice and thinking as you enter the conversation.

Information Is Everywhere

Today, technology has made information readily available. Anyone with an internet connection has almost instant access to Wikipedia, with its millions of entries, and Google with it’s seemingly unlimited search capabilities. Any question you have can be immediately answered with a series of short searches on your smart phone.

In high school, you might have been asked to simply find information about a topic or subject. You then reported back on what you found. Hopefully, your teachers talked about how to evaluate sources for reliability. Maybe they even talked about finding multiple sources that agreed, so you could be sure that the information you presented was correct. In college, evaluating, analyzing, and critiquing the evidence you use to support your thesis becomes one of the central skills and requirements of the research essay.

You might be asking why this is necessary if college-level writing requires library sources? Aren’t library sources all relevant and reliable?

In short, yes. But as you proceed through your college career, you’ll begin to see how different subjects have different requirements for what counts as authoritative, relevant, and appropriate. A newspaper article that might be perfectly appropriate in an entry-level writing course might not be deep or complex enough for a research assignment in an upper-division history course. A newspaper account might demonstrate a “snap-shot” in time of a historic event, but it wouldn’t have the deeper, long-view analysis necessary for truly understanding an event.

Using Information in New Ways

In college, you will be asked to do more than simply report on or recycle information. Instead of simply arranging what others have said, you’ll be asked to enter the conversation. As in any conversation, it’s not enough to repeat what others are saying. Instead, you must create something new: an argument of your own about the topic.

In the book Research Strategies for a Digital Age, Bonnie L. Tenson makes a useful analogy to describe the differences between high school research reports and college research using the music industry. She equates a report as a “mashup” and an essay as a “remix.” A musical mashup is made by blending two different songs into one, where a remix requires the creation of something new.

“Unlike the mashup, which is simply a merger of preexisting songs, remixing creates an original composition, reinterpreting and recontextualizing the original recordings into something quite different and new” (Tenson 3).

The evidence you select, the way you organize and arrange that evidence, and the way that you insert your own words, ideas, and voice into a text will transform a series of facts (mashup) into a new product (remix).

The Research Essay

Unlike a report, the college-level research essay requires that students make a clear argument. As we saw in previous chapters, getting to an argument requires that you first figure out where agreement about a topic ends.

Let’s think back to our earlier example of the Burkean Parlor, where groups of people are discussing the topic of the greatest musical artist of all time.

A report-style essay would be the equivalent of walking around the room and reporting on what various people said about the topic. Maybe the writer entered the room already believing that a certain artist should be considered the best. Because the writer already knows what they want to say, they immediately head toward the conversations that already agreed with their opinion.

In a report-style essay, the writer wouldn’t necessarily address counter arguments. They may not look into other arguments or perspectives about the criteria for deciding greatness. Instead, they would mainly report on other experts or authoritative voices who already agree with their opinion.

In a report-style essay, the writer would still cite the individual voices responsibly, the writer probably wouldn’t bother to give context to those sources. They wouldn’t necessarily recognize that a professional music critic might be more authoritative than a Wikipedia article or blog post.

A report-style essay is a good first step toward research-based writing. Because students are asked to cite sources and provide quotes as evidence, they learn that opinions need to be supported. This is an essential feature of all research-based writing. College level research-based writing, however, demands more.

College-level academic writing requires writers understand the larger conversation and then enter that conversation.

A college-level research essay requires that writers acknowledge the other voices and perspectives in the room. Student writers must approach their research topic with questions, rather than certainty. Through the process of inquiry, college writers continue to ask questions to increase their understanding and level of knowledge.

The Research Process

In high school or previous courses, your research process might have entailed the following steps:

1. Teacher assigns a general topic or a specific question to be answered
2. Student picks their specific topic or decides on the answer to the question
3. Student finds sources that support their opinion using internet sources

For college courses, the research process starts with questions rather than answers. A good starting place is to establish the baseline facts that all parties agree with.

Step 1: Decide on/Be assigned a general research topic:

Whether the topic is assigned or you get to select your own, try to pick a topic that interests you. Think about what you would actually be interested to learn about or what you might enjoy reading about. Few people want to do research projects, but they can be less difficult and stressful if you can find an approach to the topic that relates to your own interests in some way.

Step 2: Gather general information and determine the facts:

Put your argument and opinion away. The next step for any research essay is to make sure that you understand the basic facts of the topic. Often, basic facts will come from the content of the course you are in, but you will always want to make sure you have the basic background.

Use reference sources or overview essays, like the ones found in Opposing Viewpoints in Context database or CQ Researcher to learn about the background information. Your goal in this step is to figure out the larger conversation.

• • Identify emergent themes: Your goal in this step is to identify the various subtopics and conversations within the larger parlor. Which conversations are you most interested in? Which are most important?
  • Ask questions as you read: As you do your initial inquiry, start to ask questions. If you don’t have any questions or there are not things you still don’t quite understand, you aren’t doing enough work to dig deep in your research. Be sure you can answer the following questions:
    • Did something happen? How did it begin? What are its causes? What are its effects?
    • What is at stake? What is the nature of the issue? Who are the stakeholders? How serious is the issue?
    • What is the current status of the issue? Does action need to be taken? Is action already being taken? Where do people agree or disagree?

***Students will often stop at this step, thinking that once they understand the basic facts of a topic, they have enough. That might have worked for a report-style essay, but it isn’t enough for college-level research***

Step 3: Decide on your specific research question:

Once you have a basic level of background information you can finally pick your own research question. Your research question should be a question that is not easily answerable from the reference research you’ve already done. The question should be one that you will propose an answer to in the essay. The answer should not be an established fact.

Step 4: Decide what information you need to answer your question:

Research works best when its done in a conscious, measured manner. Researchers don’t usually start by throwing keywords into search bars. Instead, they think carefully about what information could help them make their argument or which evidence their readers might want.

Step 5: Find Your Answers and Organize Your Sources

Only once you know what you’re looking for can you start the in-depth research needed for college level writing. You may be asked to write an annotated bibliography (like in this course) or to complete a literature review to help you organize your ideas.

Be sure to keep careful notes and records of your sources. Having a system or using an app like Evernote can help you keep track of your work.

Step 6: Propose a Working Thesis

As you work, you’ll likely start forming an idea of what you will eventually write about. This is called a working thesis. Notice that you didn’t start the research process with this. By starting with a question, you can avoid missing information that might not align with your initial knowledge or beliefs. Once you have a working thesis, you can think about the information you need to prove that argument–and the information that might disprove your argument.

Step 6 and Onward: Research and Revise

Unlike a report, which asks you to find and report back on information, a research essay requires argument–and argument requires careful support. As you research, you’ll need to think about counter arguments and the other voices or stakeholders who might disagree with you. A strong research essay will not ignore these other voices. Instead, college-level research writing requires that you acknowledge and work with those voices.

Research is a trial and error process. Experienced scholars and writers know that it is a recursive process, one that requires time and flexibility. If you find the “correct” answer immediately, it’s a good indication that you’re writing a report and not undertaking a true research essay for college-level work.