BTH740 Research Essay 20113
How To Write a Research Essay
Five Stages of Research
- Survey and Critique
- Thesis Statement
- Research
- Writing
- Presentation
Survey and Critique
This is the abductive stage of forming a hypothesis.
There is no single logical procedure to implement here. We identify points of interest and guess at what might be the case for the observations that we are making.
Try
- Open-ended searches by the team members
- Selections of interest to the team members
- Discussion amongst team members to identify conditions that might be sufficient and economical in explaining an observation or a set of similar observations
Thesis Statement
Requirements For the Final Essay
set by the instructor - what you need to know before starting to prepare the thesis statement
- number of sources
- primary >= 2
- secondary >= 4
- tertiary - summarize
- length 1600-2400 words
- late penalties 20%
- timeline:
- thesis statement - due November 1
- preliminary research - due November 8
- recording details - due November 15
- writing - due November 29
- publication - due December 6
Narrowing the Focus
select the topic
- sources
- encyclopedias
- textbooks
- dictionaries
- videos
- process
- jot down ideas
- discuss ideas
- circle one that are of interest
- select one from a short-list
- select another as the alternative
Searching for Sources
create working bibliography
- questions to answer
- are there sufficient sources
- is each one relevant to the focus
- are the sources diverse
- are the sources quality sources
- are there twice as many sources as required
- process
- read
- abstracts
- conclusions
- reviews
- balance
- books
- articles
- electronic
- audio-visual
- old
- new
- list publication details accurately
- read
Defining the Purpose
- single sentence plus keywords
- discuss the thesis
- discuss with two peers
- refine the focus
- define the scope
- pose the research question
- sufficient sources
- narrow enough topic
- avoid
- bibliographical
- narrative
- descriptive
- unfounded assumptions
- how successful not why successful
- formulate one precise sentence
- task is to answer the question <- sole purpose
- make short list of sub-tasks
- identify keywords
Submission
- thesis statement
- keywords
- bibliography
Research
Writing
Presentation/Publication
Resources
- General
- Writing Labs
- Stylesheets
- Classification