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How Not to Stress About Writing
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Documentation styles
How to Avoid Plagiarism
Twenty Questions for Research Writing
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Writing Handbook
Twenty Questions for Research Writing
Taking fifteen minutes to answer one of the following questions
every day in the process of writing a research paper can help you
come up with ideas, organize them, and construct your paper (even
if you procrastinate and have to answer more than one in a day).
Research writing can be described as follows:
1.) What topic have you chosen for your research and why?
2.) What do you know about the topic?
3.) What do you want to find out?
4.) Are you aware of any controversies regarding this topic? If
so, what are they,
and what is your current stand on the issue?
5.) Have you noticed any areas of disagreement among your sources?
6.) Which of the viewpoints seems the most valid to you? Why?
7.) Do you have any unanswered questions at this point?
8.) Did anything surprise you as you gathered information?
9.) What has been the most interesting aspect of the material you’ve
gathered so far?
10.) After reviewing your data or sources, what do you see as the
latest problems in the field of your topic?
11.) What do you think are the important facts of the matter?
12.) Are there better ways of interpreting the reported information
that previous
authors have ignored?
13.) How can you relate these previous studies into a general picture?
14.) What new insight can you contribute?
15.) Considering all of the above, how would you sum up your current
attitude
toward your topic in a sentence or two?
16.) If you decide to use the answer to Question 15 as a working
thesis for
your paper, what information will you have to give your readers
to convince
them that your stand is a valid one? What questions of theirs will
you have to
answer? (The answers to these questions will suggest major points
for your
outline.)
17.) What one real question will your paper answer?
18.) What is your current answer to this question?
19.) What information do you have to support this?
20.) What information do you still need to gather?
Not all of these questions will work for all topics, of course,
so use them to deal with whatever information and topics have been
chosen. Go back to questions at different points in the process
and see how their answers change as more information is gathered
and the topic is re-examined.
Dossin, Mary Mortimore. “Using Others’ Words: Quoting,
Summarizing, and Documenting Sources.” In Ben Rafoth, ed.,
A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 131-2.
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