Reflecting back on my first archival research experience, I can fully agree with a lot of the points made in Michael Klein’s “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One–and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?” One of the first points he makes about the research procedure is that it is not a linear process, meaning that it is not realistic to assume that “planning and inventing guides a writer through subsequent acts of text production and revision” (Klein 24). The process is much more complicated than that, especially when doing archival research, where you don’t always quite know what you will end up finding.
I experienced this a lot during the first stage of the archival research process. I had no idea what I wanted my research question to be, so in a sense, no planning could be done. In a way, the information-gathering step came before planning in the sense that I was scanning the different artifacts to try and decide what my topic of choice would be. In this way, my research procedure was almost the opposite of what the linear diagram would predict.
Another point that I agreed with was the fact that writers can develop a sense of rhetorical purpose as the process is ongoing, as opposed to knowing beforehand. This refers to the importance of writers staying open-minded about unexpected data and insights that they may discover during the process.
As I experienced during my research process, once your findings come together into a more organized form, and as you continue to gather other bits of relevant information, a sudden “so-what” or insightful point could hit you. This occurred for me during the writing portion of my process. As I re-read my work over and over, I noticed the ways in which my points connected to one another, and thought about how these points contributed to the same bigger-picture or larger discussion.
In summary, I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Klein, as I could draw so many parallels to my own research process experience.
Images Cited:
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