Research: In the Beginning

Welcome back! It’s me again, your resident IF student-blogger. I hope you all had an amazing spring break… and if not, no worries, only 36 more days until summer vacation. Last week I told you about my plan to write several posts on the common pitfalls of research and how to overcome them, so here’s my next entry. And as always, if I ever write something provoking enough to make you want to respond, just shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to accommodate.

This week I want to type a little about getting started. According to a friend of mine, the hardest part of any writing assignment is picking a topic. I know that once I get gong on a subject, I don’t usually have a problem coming up with what to write, but getting that momentum rolling is often frustratingly slow. I think this is because there are so many questions that need to be answers before you can get started. For example, if you’re writing for a composition class, you have to decide “what kind of paper should I write,” “how broad or narrow should my topic be,” and “what does the professor really want?”

I find that this is so irritating because most of these questions require that you already have an answer to the rest of them. “If I only knew my topic I’d know what style to use,” or “if I just knew what the professor wanted than I’d know what topic to choose.” So where do you begin? Well, here’s my advice:

First off, always try to find out what your professor wants from the assignment. This can sometimes be tricky, so here’s a little trick I like to use… ask them! More often that not, your professor will gladly give you some guidance (and usually some useful advice) on what they expect for the assignment. Just knowing how long it should be, or what students have done in the past can help dictate where your paper should go. If they absolutely refuse to guide you at all, than that should tell you something too - they want to see what you can do, so pick a style and topic you’re comfortable with (maybe something from high school) and use that as your jumping off point. This will eliminate about 90% of the guesswork from your assignment and answers one of your initial questions.

Next, pick a few narrow topics on a subject that interests you and try to come up with a single thesis that encompasses all of them. This way, if you end up writing a lot on any one topic, you can just tweak your thesis and cut out one of the others from your essay completely. Conversely, if you find yourself running out of things to say, you can always insert a new, related topic into your thesis and add another entire section to your paper. Just be careful to work each section so that the whole paper has a constant rhythm and flow, otherwise it will sound staccato and feel disjointed.

Finally, it sometimes pays to just start writing. If you can get the momentum rolling and the juices flowing, you will overcome the initial hurdle without even trying. And don’t worry if your thesis changes ten times in the first ten minutes of writing, each time you alter your paper you’re getting one step closer to the final product. Just keep going, and sooner or later you’ll find that you have several good ideas for the narrow topics that can make up your final thesis.

Ok-ok, here’s a quick summary on how to get started:

• To figure out what you’re being asked to do, try asking whoever assigned you the project. They know better than anyone else what it is they want.

• Choose several related ‘sub-topics’ to make up your thesis. This way, you can just add or subtract topics depending on where your paper (or research) leads you.

• When in doubt, simply start writing. After a while filter out the ‘bad stuff’ and you’ll end up with a page full of good ideas. Pick the best ones and run with ‘em. Before you know it, you’ll have the beginnings of an excellent paper.

• Don’t be afraid to go off on a tangent, some of the best ideas come from the merger of seemingly unrelated topics. Just be sure find the connection that makes it all work together in the end.

Jovially yours,

~R.S.

Research: Popular Reality

Wait a minute… this isn’t the usual upbeat banter of ‘Grad Student Christine’ that you have all grown to love (or hate, I don’t judge)!? Well, that fact might be true, but if you’ve gotten this far, either by way of the UCF IF website or through tireless searching of blogspot’s public editorials, then you might as well see if this new guy has anything worthwhile to say, right?

First off, a little bit about me:
They call me Robert Slade, and I’m a second year undergrad at the University of Central Florida in sunny Orlando. I only added the ‘sunny’ part because, though it’s currently the middle of winter, I’m still wearing shorts and a t-shirt to all of my classes. Now here’s my dirty little secret: I’m actually a civil engineering major *gasp*. Ok, so now you’re wondering why you should take the time to read the doubtlessly typo-riddled blog of an engineering student. Well, I get the opportunity to blog here today because I have worked with the UCF philosophy department for the last year or so doing lots of random IF stuff. Does this make me a qualified social commentator with provoking insight into life’s little issues? Probably not, but I do have a few meaningful ideas on the subject of research that you might just find useful and (hopefully) a little interesting.

So here’s the plan; I’m going to write several posts on the common pitfalls of research and how to overcome them. If I ever say something that you would like me to expound on, or if you just get tired of my harping on the same old issues all the time, just shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to accommodate.

To start with, I have to ask one more question: Where do you get your news? Don’t panic, the purpose of this particular entry is not to convince you to become a daily subscriber to the New York Times or to start listening to NPR on your morning commute (that’s for a latter issue). I only ask because even if the only news you get comes from the evening satires on Comedy Central than you’re still familiar with the controversies surrounding Wikipedia.org. For those of you who are not familiar with the website, Wikipedia is a free public encyclopedia where all of the articles are created, edited, and updated by the general public. If this is new information for anyone, I must commend you on your success in finding this blog as it appears that this is your first time using the internet. Now, for anyone out there who is an avid follower of this blog, you might be thinking to yourself that this sounds remarkable similar to a topic that Christine covered a few months back. Well, you’d be correct; but seeing as this is my first time posting I thought I’d take an already hot-topic and give it my own spin... and see how it goes over. I hope you enjoy it!

So, Wikipedia has been in the news as of late largely due to its growing popularity. The site itself boasts over “9.25 million articles in 253 languages” (Wikipedia). Although popularity is not the only reason that Wikipedia has maintained the spotlight. Content has also played an important role. The very nature of the site, open to input form everyone, allows for a dynamic assortment of articles covering a veritable gamut of topics, from sports and politics to pop-culture and cult-fantasy. This variety, along with the site’s ease of access, due mainly to its free and open nature, has helped propel the site into common usage.

Ironically, the very qualities that spurred Wikipedia’s mainstream appeal are also its major source of criticism. Because anyone can edit an entry, the reliability and accuracy of the content is in question, particularly by academic institutions who value authoritative credibility and peer-reviewed scrutiny. For this reason, most higher education facilities (Colleges, Universities, and even High Schools) are restricting the use of Wikipedia as a credible source of academic information. However, the use of Wikipedia as a general source of knowledge has not decreased along with this regulation. On the contrary, Wikipedia has only become more widely used over time.

How can this be? How can an unregulated, discredited, non-academic website continue to gain popular use and appeal? The answer is really rather simple. Wikipedia articles, though not technically credible, are often factually accurate. The BBC News reported a study by the (academically respected) journal Nature which concluded that “Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica” (BBC News).

OK, great - colleges won’t accept a Wikipedia citation even though it appears to be a fairly accurate source of information. Is this the stubbornness of an archaic institution unwilling to embrace modern technology, or is there something else? Well, the truth is that Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great place to start a search, but not a good place to end one. I think that James Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, put it best when he responded to a student upset over failing a paper because it cited Wikipedia; “For God's sake, you’re in college; don't cite the encyclopedia” (Wikipedia)!

At the top of this blog I promised solutions to some of the pitfalls of research, so here are a few pieces of advice for using Wikipedia in research:

• Don’t cite Wikipedia. Just like citing any other encyclopedia, it’s not acceptable for most scholarly purposes.
• Use Wikipedia as a place to get a broad overview of a subject before you begin researching, it is usually up-to-date and often fairly accurate.
• Wikipedia does a pretty good job of citing its own sources. If you have nowhere else to begin, you can use the links provided at the bottom of the articles to get started.
• Always double check the information. If you can’t find some fragment of information anywhere else but Wikipedia, it’s probably not reliable and not worth using anyway.
• Don’t forget about the real world. There is so much more information out there than just the internet. Try going to the library and looking at real books (bound paper with writing on it), you just might be surprised at what you find.

Congenially yours,
~R.S.