Research Essay

There’s quite a range of research-based writing as you have discovered throughout the semester. Readings, observations, interviews and questions are all part of research and inquiry projects. The research essay does have a few distinctive features:

Academic research is driven by questions not answers. Although researchers may hypothesize, they are always prepared to be proven wrong. Framing the question is a crucial and often difficult part of the process.

The question is put in the context of what has already been said on the subject. After you determine your research question you want to discover what others have already said about your topic. How might your research contribute to the ongoing conversation about your topic? This means you will need to be familiar with the published conversation about your topic.

Source material is used in the service of what writers are trying to say about their topics. Research essays are not like encyclopedia entries. They do not merely present information gathered from source material. Instead they actively use the information to explore questions or test the truth of an idea or thesis.

Sources that contributed to a writer’s thinking are formally given credit. The larger purpose of academic inquiry is to make new knowledge, to contribute in some way to what people understand about how the world works. This involves building on others who have already said something about your topic and this is something you acknowledge explicitly through citation. While citation has its own conventions and yes, it can be time consuming, the acknowledgment of who helped you make your point is both a gracious gesture and a source of authority for you. It indicates that you’re party to the on-going conversation about your topic. Accurately acknowledging your sources is also an ethical obligation that all good researchers take seriously.

Most research essays have a clearly stated thesis. One way to stay on track throughout your research essay is to clearly organize the information you gather around an explicit focusing question. This question should lead readers to some answers, give them something to thinking about. While some formal papers state the thesis in the introduction, research essays typically have a delayed thesis that may be stated somewhere near the end.

Research essays typically use multiple sources of information. For example, memory, experience, observation, interviews, reading and research may be sources you may rely on in your project. Writers cast as wide net as possible to discover the answers to their questions.

Develop your own research essay based on one of the research questions you’ve been working on all semester. The essay should be organized around your own questions or ideas about your topic in pop culture. It should be an essay not a report. The research question should be focused and something you can cover in ten pages. Don’t look at the entire landscape of your topic but focus on a specific feature in that landscape. Your essay should