My research process is typically somewhat of a mess, but, to be fair, it used to be much worse…
I used to find and ultimately choose certain quotes or examples that were short and sounded like they summed up the source completely. Often times, though, the quotes didn’t really represent the greater reading because I often didn’t read the source completely.
From Giphy
Terrible strategy, trust me, I know.
However, after so many mediocre grades on research based essays and projects, I decided to switch up my strategy once and for all. It’s not perfect now, I’m fully aware of that and the fact that there’s always a lot of progress to be made, but, this is what I’ve learned so far, what I know for certain:
- Read through the sources available or read through summaries of the sources to find out which ones would be relevant.
- These sources are often very surface level and won’t be the ones you will use in the actual essay
- Compile all sources and start reading through them. Begin to pull quotes and write summaries for each of the sources.
- I typically look for primary sources, but as the BEAM article states, this term encompasses something much broader than I previously knew.
- Find an order to place my sources in and then use them to write the essay.
- This isn’t a genius strategy, but more of a lazy one where I often don’t know what order things should be in so I make one up.
This is my basic research strategy, and after learning about BEAM, I’ve come to realize different types of research/articles flesh out different types of arguments.
I never had really put much time or effort into how the different articles and pieces of research I discovered would fit into different categories. I think that it’s something that could really deepen my research and arguments that I make in research essays.
Cohesiveness and how an essay flows is extremely important and I think my lack of attention to this tool has hurt my writing in the past. Often I throw things down on the page and that’s never a good strategy for crafting a good essay.