Research. The one word that all students dread because it implies sorting through articles upon articles, synthesizing, and creating a bibliography to show that you didn’t completely make this stuff up. During the process of research it seems never-ending, but once you finish the last sentence of your paper, a burden is lifted from your shoulders after the intensive work to get there.
We can’t become expert researchers over night. It takes some practice. Michael Kleine, author of “What is it We do When we Write Articles like this One,” explains the difference between a professor’s research and a student’s research.
When talking about the way students research he says, “I detected no searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc.” When I first read this, I was kind of offended. I’ve been taught to search for reliable sources, analyze them, evaluate to see if they fit in with your thesis, and so on. Was I doing this all wrong?
The answer is no. I was not completely wrong, I just did not have the experience and thoroughness of a professor.
“professional writers develop a sense of rhetorical purpose as the process unfolds, not strictly before the acts of researching and writing”
In other words, professors take what Kleine likes to refer to as the hunting and gathering approach. Hunting is the act of basic searching for things using strategies and tools given to them. Essentially looking for facts that are in line with the point of your research.
hunting for resources
On the other hand, gathering is when you think about how information will be utilized in the most efficient way possible when writing your paper. It goes hand in hand with hunting because first you determine what you need and then you evaluate what would be the best way to use it once you obtain it.
Here are Kleine’s steps of the process:
- collect data
- sift through data rhetorically
- seek patterns in the data to make or confirm hypotheses
- translate findings into writing
It slowly refines what you have discovered to neatly fit into a question of interest.
Research is more than just finding articles that fulfill the requirement. It is about learning throughout the process in order to learn something more about a question on your mind.