Today I want to focus attention on how to arrange your research papers. I’ll be working through some notes from my Expository Writing class that focus on writing introductions.
Looking at the three articles to which I link, you can tease out a basic semantics to a thesis and to organizing a paper. There’s the argument and the road map. The argument can take a number of forms:
- This paper uses X to reassess Y. In short, X differs from typical understandings of Y because of Z1, Z2, and Z3.
Also, when writing a research paper, I generally think of 4-5 needs (not necessarily areas or parts–but things a paper has to do) of the paper:
- [Problem] What is the problem? What is at stake? Why is this important?
- [Lit Review] What is the dominant way of thinking about your object of study? Who introduced that way of thinking? Who else still thinks that way? How does the general audience (which can be popular culture, which can be the news media, which can even be other scholars and the scholarly community) think about your object?
- [Theory] What new way of thinking/seeing/doing are you introducing? How did you discover this new way? Who else has talked about this new way?
- [Application] Show me how to use the new way. Show me what it does/reveal differently. Use it. Deploy it. Make it count.
Homework
I need you to bring two print copies of your paper or script to class next Tuesday. We will peer review in class.
