"How long does it have to be?"
Helping our students understand research writing

by Driek Zirinsky
BSU English Department

For faculty and student alike, the research paper can inspire dread and loathing. Faculty who are deeply engaged in their own research are disappointed when student research papers come across as disengaged and ineffectual reports on dry research topics. Students who are inexperienced in researching and writing a long paper fall back on familiar research strategies which short-circuit the process of inquiry.

Often, term papers have been assigned to teach students how to use the library, not how to do research. Many students understand research papers to be reports -- even summaries -- of published research. So when students are expected to engage in a research project, even in an original research project, their strategies fail them. How, then, can faculty in various fields help students to design and write good, research-based inquiry typical of their disciplines?

Boise State students tend to encounter long papers for the first time in upper division courses in their majors, many not until their senior year. My own experience in teaching a senior seminar in the English department was that many of the students were writing a long researched paper for the first time in college. This is not surprising. The "term paper" is disappearing as a staple of academic performance and in many courses is being legitimately replaced by a series of shorter papers. The shorter assignments allow students opportunities to research more than one topic in a course, they defuse the pressure students feel when they have only one shot at showing their stuff, and they support spreading the course workload more evenly across the term rather than letting it bunch up around one assignment. Several short researched papers can happily replace the term paper in many courses.

Still, for many faculty, the term paper or long research paper fills a legitimate purpose in our courses, especially at the upper division level. It allows us to engage students with the significant questions of our disciplines, and to involve them deeply in the investigation. It introduces them to research with library sources, and to the literature of their major fields. Especially for advanced students, it is a step towards working like scholars in their chosen disciplines.

Despite its value, students struggle with the term or research paper assignment. Finding a subject, finding the right sources, collecting notes or data, juggling large volumes of information which is often contradictory, planning the overall shape and the parts of the essay, and doing the research and writing over an extended period of time are all huge stumbling blocks for the inexperienced - and the experienced - writer of long papers.

How long does it have to be? That's the inevitable - and often annoying - student question when a research paper assignment is first made. Although annoying, it is legitimate. For many writers, conceptualizing what is to be written involves thinking about the overall shape of the piece, including the length. In fact, the question about length is a good question. It reveals a student who is thinking about the shape of the writing to come, a common first step for many writers.

Before I started this piece, I wanted to know how long it had to be. The length I anticipate dictates many things: the scope I can include, how narrow my focus needs to be, how much time to plan in my schedule to draft and revise my essay, and how much research I will need to do to flesh out the argument.

However, in our classrooms the question of length tends to come from writers who are experienced only in writing short pieces up to 5 pages in length. The thought of a long paper, anything between 10 and 20 pages or more, fills them with dread and panic. They ask the question about length to find out exactly how panicked to be at the hard task ahead.

The question for professors who assign long researched papers is how to help students with the challenging aspects of researching and writing them. By intervening in the research process at several steps along the way timed to coincide with what we expect students to be doing in their research process, we can help students learn about doing research and writing in their major fields. And they will write papers which come closer to fulfilling the expectations we have for their work.

1. Researching Questions, Not Topics

Asking a good research question is a key to writing a good paper. The irony is that a writer needs to be fairly well versed in a field before knowing what a good question is. Term papers tend to get assigned early in the semester, and students are expected to work on them over the space of 8 to 10 weeks, or more. Early in the semester, when topics must be selected, they don't yet know what questions to ask.

Topics often are expressed as noun statements: the flood plain of the Snake River, imagery in Romeo and Juliet, the history of the Holocaust, Freud's theories of sexuality. Writers need to turn topics into research questions: first a big, main question which guides the entire research process, then a series of smaller sub-questions. These questions suggest focus for the research to come. When arranged in some order, the questions can form a tentative outline for the paper itself. They can provide guidance to the entire research process.

Faculty can profitably spend some time in class discussing the research questions of their field, and showing students how we turn broad topics into research questions which are more narrow and focussed. For instance, a student wanting to investigate the imagery in Romeo and Juliet might first ask: What are the patterns of imagery in the play? Then ask: What do the patterns contribute to theme, mood, or meaning? In addition, when faculty demonstrate how their own research questions have evolved, students can understand how the person comes into the process. Like us, students select a major field for reasons of personal interest. When they are developing their own research questions, they should be encouraged to shape topics and the questions out of their personal interest in the field. Such connections to research will help to overcome the disengaged and bored research and writing we dread to see at the end of the term.

Furthermore, this process of turning topics into research questions in various fields often implies the research method to be used. Some questions direct students towards observational research, or research conducted by ethnographic methods including interview. Other questions require strictly library research. Still others require close and detailed study and analysis of a text. Faculty can help make connections between research questions and research methods, especially those connections that are special to each of our disciplines.

The major questions provide a focus for conducting the research, a process of finding answers. For library research, the questions provide a framework for note-taking. They can serve as categories for notes. Regardless of the research methodology, students can pursue information specifically addressed at answering the questions.

2. Making It Personal

The first task of a successful research writer is to make the work one's own. Students have to take assignments hostage and use them to pursue their own ends. Dull and boring research papers often are reflections of students' lack of engagement with the subject. I don't know how to make students take this step, but I talk to them about the need to do so, and I show how some of my own work reflects the way I reshape an editor's call to fit my own questions. Occasionally I take a few minutes in class to ask students to talk about how they are making the work their own.

In the past, the use of the first person was banished from research writing. Conventions of discourse in many fields called for an impartial, distant and anonymous tone in researched writing. Today, many journals allow, even welcome, research which is presented in a livelier fashion including the first person and the use of narrative methods. In other fields a specific formal voice is still the norm. Professors should help students consider the written conventions of their fields several weeks before the papers are due.

In some fields, process research reports prevail: authors recount the process of inquiry they followed, instead of simply presenting findings or results. In such research, "I" can be the appropriate speaker. Ken Macrorie has pioneered an approach to writing researched papers, called the "I-search," which asks students to recount the process by which they formulated their research questions, to explain their research process, and to present their findings. Reports on the process of research, as well as its results, will have an appropriate place in many disciplines.

3. Stating a Thesis

The inexperienced writer can be derailed by the task of stating a thesis or a guiding focus, a strong point to be made or the argument the piece of writing is sustaining. In an effort to be helpful, faculty sometimes ask students to state a thesis at the beginning of the research process. Although this practice may assist some writers, for most writers the demand to state a thesis early on shortcuts the inquiry process the research is supposed to foster. Theses emerge during research. Writers don't know what their thesis or focus will be when they start. Furthermore, a thesis is a response to an implied question. It is the research questions which come first: the major question or questions, and the smaller questions which are subsumed under the major ones.

When a significant chunk of the research is done, students are ready to answer their major research question with a thesis which reflects their position or argument. At this point, several weeks into the research process, it is helpful to ask students to write emerging thesis statements in class. I ask students to draft, quickly in class, 4 or 5 versions of the thesis they might use before they settle on a working thesis. Some faculty collect these and respond to the statements before more research or writing takes place as a productive and time- effective way of intervening in the research process.

Furthermore, faculty can profitably spend a short time in class demonstrating how they have developed a thesis from their own research in progress. Although students may have had some experience in developing a thesis in other courses, they may not have done so within the conventions of their major field. Consequently, this is a helpful point at which to look at published research in your field, research similar in nature to what you are asking your students to write, to see how thesis statements are framed in your discipline. In courses where students form study groups, I follow up by asking them to critique and help each other revise thesis statements.

4. Using Specialized Sources

Students who have not before written papers in their majors will not be familiar with the sources in their disciplines. They will tend to start with general sources not addressed to specialists within the field, the kinds of general sources they used in high school. Bruce Ballenger has developed the idea of the research source inverted pyramid. At the top of the inverted pyramid are general sources like encyclopedias, articles listed in the Reader's Guide, or general-interest magazines. Ballenger stresses the need for students to get into more specialized sources such as government documents, academic journals in their fields and scholarly books. Such sources present more specialized and more scholarly information for students. However, students in your field need help in identifying what those sources might be, and how to find them.

Furthermore, in using more specialized sources, students might again encounter difficulty with the conventions of publishing in your field. Faculty can productively take steps to renew students' acquaintance with the library and teach them how to gain access to the right sources. As we help students read and use unfamiliar sources, we can also introduce them to writing conventions that are unique to our disciplines, ones that we want them to follow in writing their papers. For instance, Monte Wilson of the BSU Geology Department expects students to write an abstract for their geology research papers like those published in his field. He shows the students sample published abstracts, talks to students about how he writes them for his own research, and helps them with writing the abstracts for their papers.

5. Planning and Writing

The ideas I have suggested so far are ideas intended to bring aspects of the process of writing research papers out into the open and into the classroom. Research writing need not be the private, solitary act of conquering a mountain of data it has been in the past for many writers. Still, the time comes when writers with good and sequenced research questions, a well- crafted thesis, and appropriate sources and data to answer their questions, need to get the writing done.

It helps research writers to write as they go, not to wait until all the research is completed or the deadline looms. Having a sequence of questions to address can give focus to preliminary writing as the relevant research data is collected. For research which is not driven by a series of questions, it helps writers to imagine the topics or sections their final paper will have, and to start writing parts of that larger envisioned paper as they go. Some faculty take short 10 to 15 minute bursts of time in class during the research process to ask students to draft tentative plans for their work. These quickly drafted plans, always open to further revision, seem to help direct writing during research in more productive ways than a formal outline developed at the beginning of research.

Fostering collaborative work among students on research projects can also improve the eventual writing. In the senior seminar, I asked students to form groups of three to work as writing groups on the seminar papers. They worked together on all the steps I have outlined. Assisting each other seemed to make them aware of aspects of their own work in need of attention. Furthermore, when the papers were presented, members of the group served as leaders for the ensuing discussion. They wrote formal critiques of each other's research papers which the writers used in making one final revision for me to grade. In this way the students worked together to duplicate the way papers are typically developed and presented in my field.

The value of researching and writing long papers in students' major fields remains constant, despite the difficulties they present to students and the effort it takes us as faculty to sponsor the work. However, teaching and assisting the process of research in our disciplines can give our students the life-long ability to ask significant questions and to know how to find the answers to them. Perhaps knowing how to make that process work for ourselves is what it means to be an educated person.

Works Cited

Ballenger, Bruce. "Teaching the Research Paper," in Nuts & Bolts. Ed. Thomas Newkirk. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.

Macrorie, Ken. Searching Writing. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1980.