Initial Research: Project 1

One of the most important parts of researching any topic is deciding what exactly you'll research.  For this, you'll want to start with an open-ended approach, and then use your initial research to narrow-down your topic and your genre.

Outline Types: Bubble Maps, Roman Hierarchies, and Freewriting

Depending on what I'm writing, I use three different types of outlines to help me brainstorm ideas:

• Bubble Maps: these are the least formal, but I find them the most helpful for working out new ideas.  I typically write these using pencil on paper.  I like them because it's easy to add in new stuff and then draw lines linking back to other ideas.
• Roman Hierarchies: these are more formal, and I rarely use them.  If I do this approach, I'll use a computer because it allows me to move sections around and add in new lines where needed.
• Freewriting: These are longest "outlines," and they often look like drafts.  But they aren't drafts - you don't need to include full quotes and citations.  Instead, I'll often put something like (CITATION) or (AUTHOR _____) to mark places where I know I want to put a quote later.  If I don't remember something offhand, I just use underscores ____ or hashtags ###### to remind me to fill in those gaps later.

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Outline Fundamentals

One of the most important parts of writing involves planning.  After you've begun your reading and taken notes on your sources, you need to come up with a "plan of action" for how to start your writing.

For my purposes, there are only three basic things I look for in your outlines:

1. The broad topics and secondary topics are easy to see.
2. Each broad topic either has secondary topics or a connection statement.
3. You've noted which quote cards are related to each of your broad topics.

Just note that every writer follows different outlining practices - I myself use different types of outlines depending on the type of writing I'm doing.  So for this course, I don't require any specific style of outline - instead, I present three different outline approaches that I tend to use, and you can pick any of these choices.  Or you can use a different approach entirely - that's perfectly all right.  I encourage you to follow an approach that's comfortable for you.

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Go to Outline Approaches

Research Quotes: Organizing Information

One of the keys to good research is collecting large quantities of information, and then organizing that information into a coherent narrative that others can understand.
Requirements:

1. Direct quotes have quotation marks, indirect quotes (paraphrasing) won't.
2. Each quote must have the author's last name listed (following MLA in-text citation)
3. I encourage you to give a line or two of your personal thoughts about the quote, but this is not required.  (Something like "I like this quote because..." or "This indicates that..."
4. For each quote, include 1-3 keywords (think hashtags).  Something like "genre convention...." or "CHAT term..."

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Quick Note: If this feels like busy work, you’re doing it wrong. Seriously. Write down the weirdest / most interesting quotes you find. Don’t worry about how they’ll fit. That’s what the outline is for.

Avoiding Plagiarism through Good Research Practices

For today's discussion, our goal is to look at how effective research practices can help us avoid plagiarism and protect us from false accusations.

Topic 1: Research Practices
Here, we consider which research practices help avoid plagiarism. Think about how some of cases were accidental versus purposeful. And what about the case where no plagiarism occurred? How might an author defend his or her work against a false accusation? What documents would be needed to provide such a defense?

Topic 2: Why Plagiarism Hurts Scholarship
In this topic, we're going to look at how plagiarism hurts research as a whole. In what ways can plagiarized papers "cheapen" the work of others?

Topic 3: How Do We Identify Plagiarism?

This is a complex topic. I'm not looking for "right" or "final" answers here - instead, we're just bringing up the issues as a way to understand the difficult complexities here.

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Emperor's Soul as a Metaphor for Writing

Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul offers one of the best metaphors for the writing process that I've seen.  For today's discussion, we're going to consider how this metaphor works within our differing fields of interest, and then we'll follow-up with research approaches for Project 1.  By the end of this discussion, you should have four posts that provide potential research sources for your Project 1:

1. A Main Post, where you describe your field of interest, and then relate writing in this field to a quote from The Emperor's Soul.  This main post should also include an attached PDF of a scholarly article you found via Milner Library.  (see the next blog post for Videos on Finding Scholarly Sources via Milner.)
2. Three Response Posts.  As in past discussions, each response should refer to a specific point made by one of your classmates (or to my initial post), provide your own thoughts, and then an outside quote or example to support your point (see #3 below).
3. Three quotes for Outside Support.  For each response post, your outside support can be any one of the following: a new quote from Emperor's Soul, a link to a website that you find interesting, or a quote from your Milner article (see #1 above).

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Return to ENG 145 Week 2

Finding Scholarly Articles on Milner

Next week will largely focus on finding good sources for your Project 1 research.  One of the key components for the project is finding useful scholarly sources via Milner Library.  Here's a series of videos that use the example of Trayvon Martin and Twitter to provide tips for finding useful sources. Note that the videos also reveals some of the frustrations of research - not every search will bring up what you're looking for.  These videos are not required for the course, but hopefully the can be helpful as you start thinking about Project 1.

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Annotated Bibliography: Organizing Research

Research is a crucial component of many projects in your academic and professional lives.  For Project 2, you'll use annotated bibliographies to organize your writing research.

Unit 2 (WAC)

Fall 2011, Unit 1: Community, Style, and Syntax in Genre Studies

In Unit 1 of Fall 2011, students worked in groups to share "manufactured documents" on their blogs.  Through these blogs, they imagined stories of shark attacks and murder mysteries, September 11th and the Potato Famine, weddings and college admissions.  Their research focused on both the specific events surrounding these situations and the genre conventions used to report these situations.  From police reports to wedding vows, the students revealed a great deal of creativity in revealing just how we learn about the stories we "know."

Examples of Student Work - "How-To" Blog

Sharing Information Online with Blogger

Research isn't helpful unless we're able to effectively discuss and share our findings.  For today's project, you'll assemble a basic framework for sharing research using Blogger.

Multifaceted Research - Sharing Information Online
More About Assembling Your Blog

Conducting Multifaceted Research

As writers, one of our primary tasks is to bring together disparate types of information, analyze them, and then present them to our readers as a coherent (and complete) narrative.  To do this, we first need research our subjects from several different angles.

Multifaceted Research - Sharing Information Online

Milner Library Resources

Research is a critical component of writing.  Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or even poetry, you want your words to reflect reality - doing this effectively sometimes requires the kind of specialized knowledge best found through the library.

The Oral Tradition - Library Resources