I’m writing this one late at night after a long day, so you’ll have to forgive me for rambling (and any grammar errors, as usual).
What I want to talk about for this post is a step of the research process that can be pretty tricky, but which I see few people actually talking about how to do: namely, moving from a research topic towards a research question.
You’ve probably heard something about what makes for a good research question: not so broad that it would require hundreds of pages to answer, and not so small that you won’t be able to find enough sources or meet your word count. In other words, you want to ask a question that’s just the right size for whatever length of paper you’re doing. If it’s an eight-page paper, you want a question that needs eight pages to investigate and answer thoroughly.
Okay, so that’s what a research question should look like. But how do you get there? How do you actually go about developing a question like that?
The short answer is “messily.” You go about it messily. As it turns out, that’s the short answer to a lot of questions about how the writing process works.
The longer answer is…well, longer—long enough that it needs a blog post to tease out, I guess.
I phoned a friend from undergrad on this one (1). He was a history major (and a good one), which I figured meant he was a bit more used to the research process than an English major (or at least more used to it than me). I asked him this question:
“What would be your advice to a first-year student who has chosen a topic for his research paper, and now has to start narrowing down to a real research question?”
This was his answer:
“Two things:
“First, stay flexible. Your understanding of your topic is alive, and you should be open to it changing in front of you as you work.
“Second, one sentence. Don’t worry about writing a whole paper, don’t worry about researching a whole paper. Work on the question in the same way you would work on a thesis statement. Heck, half the time the question ends up becoming the thesis statement.”
So, everyone please give a big thank you to [NAME REDACTED] for that advice. I think it’s quite helpful.
The second bit is especially interesting, I think. The first bit, I could have told you. Really, it’s what I have been telling you in various posts (cf. Writing Honestly). But the idea of keeping your attention on just a single sentence is quite an interesting one.
I don’t know if I endorse it universally—but then, I doubt my friend would endorse it universally, either—but I like the idea of keeping your eye on the prize, so to speak. It seems to me that just figuring out the one big thing you want to say will focus your research efforts. And what’s more, I expect that once you figured out a sentence you were really satisfied with, all the work you had done up to that point to figure that sentence out would become the rest of the paper.
In other words, the sentence (the research question, the thesis, whatever) becomes the focal point of your research. It doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about anything else. It doesn’t even mean that you’re not doing any more writing. What it means is that all the thinking and writing you’re doing is centered on that one thing, on answering that one question, on writing and rewriting that one statement of something you think is complicated but true.
It also gives you concrete things to do, not just abstract goals to achieve. Whenever you’re stuck, go back to that sentence. Figure out what more you need to do to it. What parts aren’t you satisfied with? What more do you want to say? When you can look at it and be honestly satisfied with it as something to put up as the centerpiece of your paper, you’ve probably arrived at something worth writing a paper about.
Of course, all of that is speculation on my part. I don’t usually use this particular method of research or writing. Knowing my friend, however, and having traded these sorts of ideas around with him before, I think I’m on the right track in picking apart what he means by working on one sentence.
…
Alright, a day has passed in between this paragraph and the one before it. I sent everything above this point to my friend to see if he liked my assessment of his one-sentence advice. He said it looked good, and he added one other thing, which I’ll end with:
“Basically the one sentence rule is a scaffolding exercise I picked up from screenwriting, where themes are often a lot muddier than in an essay. The concept of the exercise centers around the fact that all writing is fundamentally about ideas, and that human beings have a very short attention span for those ideas. So if you want to communicate, whether on an emotional or intellectual level, you have to simplify your ideas to the point where someone else could read a single sentence and know exactly what you wanted to talk about. Like a thesis statement, but without the answer. So, like you said, it’s about focusing on what’s important, on why you’re writing.” (2)
In other words, I was apparently getting a screenwriter’s opinion, when I was looking for a historian’s. Oh, well. It’s actually worth noting how well the screenwriting advice applies to academic writing. There’s a lot to think about in that. Someone should probably write a blog post on it or something.
Footnotes
(1) I actually asked two friends, but in hindsight, really shouldn’t have asked the other one. This is what he said, which I told him I’d include in this post for comic relief:
“On the night before it’s due, flip through any sources that mention your topic, pull out any quotes that you can twist to somehow fit your preexisting thesis, and maintain a steady caffeine intake by any means necessary. Guaranteed B/B-.
“Also, listen to [other friend] and NOT ME.”
(2) Right here, he’s actually getting at a point that I make in one of my other posts, where I talk a bit about the difference between what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. (Cf. One of the hardest things about learning to write: separating out your ideas). Namely, you’ve got to know not just what you’re saying, but why you’re saying it—because the why is just as much a real part of your argument as the what. Your argument is composed of both kinds of things: the raw content information, or the what, and also the rhetorical purposes you have for bringing up that content, the why.
Thoughts on Essay Writing 