Wait What?
It doesn’t intuitively make sense, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that everyone’s done it. At some point in your life, probably recently, you decided that you didn’t need to do exactly what you were told. You “understood” what the final product was supposed to be like and figured out a “genius” way to kind of accomplish the task, with little effort. What we fail to recognize, however, is that we end up spending almost as much time being “lazy” and doing the task the “easy way” as we would if we did it the way we know it should be done. A very prevalent example of this in my life are homework assignments, specifically research papers.
The first step to writing a good research paper is getting background information about the topic so you can formulate a position that you are going to write from. While your teacher may have specifically asked you to go to the library and find magazines articles and books to do this, you decide that what she really wants is for you to just understand the topic. Thankfully, the internet is here to help. You quickly Google your topic of choice and without fail, the first hit is Wikipedia. Is there anything wrong with using wikipedia for background information? Not really. But are you following directions and doing what your teacher asked? Definitely not.
However, you move on to the next part of your research because you decide that you’ve gathered all the background information that you need. It’s only taken 15 minutes so far! Not bad.
The Library of Google
Your assignment says that you need to use both books and journal articles in your paper and your teacher has “strongly recommended” that you go to the library to find these resources. However, thanks to the advances of technology, you instead choose to just search through “Google Books” and “Google Scholar” to find resources. In his Essay “The Great Research Disaster,” William Badke, A professor at Trinity Western University, describes these exact steps that Liw Ekdab did when writing a sophomore research paper. After numerous searches and a lot of looking through different book lists, Ekdab finally found a snippet that was good enough to use. However, he had to put in a lot of effort just so he could avoid going to an actual library.
His whole research process revolved around his decision not to go to a library, even saying
“I bet I could put together a paper from pieces of Google and never come near a library or even a library website. I bet I could write a paper good enough to get at least a B+”
Not only did he immediately decided that by using google to find his resources he was saving himself time, which isn’t necessarily true, he also shut himself off from a whole collection of good resources.
What’s Good Enough?
His decision to ignore libraries and get a B+ by doing the assignment in what he thought was an “easy way” is common one among college students. I’m guilty of doing it at times in my academic career, however, I’ve begun realizing that it is a mistake. Had Ekdab decided to go to a library and get as many sources as possible, he would have done better on his assignment and also spent less time than he anticipated. Much of the time that college students save by taking shortcuts on our assignments is spent skimming many different books to try to get a summary of what we are “researching”. Also, much of our “saved” time is used making sure that what we wrote sounds “real” and not like we just gathered two quotes from the couple sentences we just skimmed.
Ultimately, if we focused on doing quality research it wouldn’t take much longer than we are already spending on our assignments and we would do even better than “good enough” which is never as good as we ultimately want.
Image Credit
http://giphy.com/gifs/lazy-scott-pilgrim-complaining-VMtTNzgBjvlHG
https://tattoosales.wordpress.com/tag/scrooge-mcduck/
http://hamonlibraryblog.org/2015/11/10/simple-web-tools-for-creating-graphics/