Research Question

ENGL 1302 Online-Spring 2019

Week 5: April 15-19

Hello, all. This is going to be a slightly longer podcast than usual—around 20 minutes or so, so get somewhere that you can be comfortable and take some notes. We’re moving into the second half of our 8-week term, and it’s time to write our research project. We will move through the process together step-by-step, so don’t rush too far ahead. For this week, you need to work on coming up with your research question and finding some secondary sources so that you can write an annotated bibliography. Your research question, if it is well-designed, may become the thesis of your research paper.

There are multiple strategies for coming up with a research question, and you have plenty of resources to be able to do it. I’m going to make some recommendations here, but remember that you need to get this done this week.

Here’s the process that’s in Little Seagull. To get to your research question, follow these steps:

1. Narrow your topic. Think about the play you read, the short story, the poems. Which of those three was the most interesting for you to read and then to write about? Choose one: drama, fiction, or poetry. Go to that essay and pull out the thesis statement. If I were you, I would go back to my first essays and extract the thesis statements. Examine those thesis statements for any threads that you would like to pull on, taking those threads or ideas into spaces where you can think and write about them in expanded ways.

2. Start asking “little questions” around the thread you decide to pull. Use the journalistic questions to help you. If your thesis was about symbolism, for example:

a. Ask, “Who?” Who was the author, who was the protagonist, etc. Why would that matter in determining which symbols to use and how?

b. Ask, “What?” What were the symbols used? Why is that particularly interesting?

c. Ask, “When?” When was this written? When is it set/time of day?

d. Ask, “Where?” Where was this set? Where was the author from?

e. Ask, “Why?” Why were these kinds of symbols used?

f. Ask, “How?” How is the reader supposed to react? How am I to interpret the author’s intention?

3. From those journalistic questions, other questions will emerge. See what ideas reveal themselves that you can then turn into one final critical research question.

For example, one thesis statement from a student essay was, “Although the underlying

conflict between the couple is never truly revealed, the third person narration and the point of view of the characters reveals their struggle.”

Some “little” questions that come up for me are, “What, possibly, was the unrevealed underlying conflict?” “Why doesn’t the author reveal the specific conflict?” “When was this story written, and was the conflict something that people didn’t talk about during that time?” “How does the author achieve understanding without revealing such an important aspect of the couple’s struggle?”

My big research question would probably be something like, “How does the author tell the reader exactly what the nature of the couple’s conflict is without naming it specifically, and why is subtlety the more impactful literary technique than coming right out with it?”

This then sends me to the library databases where I can start to do some research to see whether other scholars have addressed my research question. If so, then I can begin pulling sources that will support any claim I decide to make.

For example, I might claim that in the short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway powerfully evokes the problem of abortion without coming right out and using that specific language, because through symbolism, the reader has a more complete sense of the woman’s emotional struggle. If that is my claim, then I need to be able to find some support for my claim in other sources by literary scholars. I weave their claims into my own in order to lend credibility to my analysis.

I would like for you to have a research question written (not your thesis statement, but your preliminary research question) by this Friday, and I would like you to find and save 5-6 secondary source articles from the library databases. Only 3 sources are required for the research paper, but you need to find more than 3 in case one or two of your sources ends up being bogus.

If you need help using the library databases, you can let me know, you can ask a librarian, or you can Google it. I’m creating a separate little screencast to show you how to start drilling down to find sources; check it out in the Podcasts folder.

You need to find your sources this week, because next week you’ll write an annotated bibliography. You do not want to fall behind here, so please let me know if you are having any difficulties writing your research question. I’d like you to post your research question in the discussion boards by Friday night, please.

Talk to you guys next week! Happy researching!