“Our next project is a research paper.” As a student, you can feel the heavy weight of despair settling in the classroom after these words have been spoken. Research? Bring on the hours of googling all sorts of phrases related to the topic at hand, desperately trying to piece together information from various online sources including articles, videos and research papers published by others, just to name a few.
Having done various sorts of research projects, ranging from subjects like art history to biology to English, I am no stranger to the overwhelming and vigorous process that research entails. Personally, I begin with a google search. I continue to broaden my horizons as new information is unearthed, especially when coming across contradictions and opposing viewpoints circling my topic. I look up definitions for clarity, and to ensure I use terms in their proper setting. It is then up to me to decide which claims are relevant and which are not, and I usually judge this by pulling from sources that are well-known and respected by the public to give the audience a sense of familiarity which, in turn, causes my readers to view me as a credible author. I ask myself, Is your research complete? Have you unearthed the social, ethical, religious, personal, political, etc. issues involving this topic? Are you going to include these counterpoints even though they contradict a large portion of your research? And thus begins more of the googling.
See anything wrong here? You could ask me why every step in my research process revolves around the internet, or why I don’t take a trip to the library to collect books for my research. Why no surveys, no interviews… upon which I would answer: because those things are so, well, inconvenient.
Don’t get me wrong, I am an avid lover of books. But when it comes to research, books are online (for the most part), along with their other originally paper siblings- magazines, encyclopedias, biographies, journals, reports, etc. Everything is on the world-wide web. So why get up and take a field trip to the library when I have all that I need to compose my report on my computer and still have it be strong and complete in content?
I’ll tell you why, or rather the article “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary,” will. BEAM stands for background, exhibits, arguments, and methods. In using this outline for the research process, the writer can achieve a critically strong understanding of the subject of interest, even if only one physical source of information gathering is used. The article states, “Writing handbooks often urge students to consult as many sources, and as many kinds of sources as possible…[leading] students astray if we lead them to believe that the mere number or variety of their sources is more important than how well they use them in their texts.”
However, the article also points out that the “danger is that students will perform intricate and perhaps brilliant analyses of particular exhibits but fail to bring these analyses to bear on any larger questions or problems” which can be avoided “by positioning their analyses as contributions to specific, ongoing intellectual problems” or by “[bringing] something ‘new’ to the table by introducing into a debate an analysis of some yet-to-be-considered exhibit “. I found this advice intriguing, as I would have never thought to include this aspect in research examples, but would like to challenge myself in utilizing this move in my writing in addition to following the BEAM protocol.
-FH