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On Research Writing. Professor Sanjoy Bandopadhyay Ustad Alauddin Khan Professor of Instrumental Music Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Begin writing before you're ready to write a draft.
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On Research Writing Professor Sanjoy Bandopadhyay UstadAlauddin Khan Professor of Instrumental Music RabindraBharati University, Kolkata
Begin writing before you're ready to write a draft • Even students who know about the importance of revising still sometimes wait to write until they have the text planned out in their heads. Instead, use writing throughout the process of working on a text to discover and deepen your ideas. • For instance, as soon as you get the assignment: jot down notes about what interests you and what concerns you have. • Write while you're doing the reading and initial research: how does this reading differ from others you've looked at? • Let yourself write about your beginning ideas without trying to make it sound like an introduction or a real paper. • All of these practices harness the power of writing to discover and will allow you to develop richer, more complex ideas.
Feedback • Try obtaining feedback on your writing from your supervisor/s and scholars in the field.
Make sure your thesis has news in it • A thesis should not be confused with a topic, which represents only the subject area of an essay. • Inexperienced writers often make claims that represent superficial interpretations of the relevant evidence. • As a result, they use their sources only to illustrate ideas that most informed readers would find uncontroversial. • Experienced writers, by contrast, develop what are known as arguable claims - ideas that an intelligent person, looking at the same evidence, might disagree with. • One effective way to ensure that your thesis is arguable is to address the counterargument briefly in your essay.
Add analysis and reflection to your sources • If it's worth quoting, it's worth discussing. Never assume that your evidence can speak for itself - if it can, why would we read your essay rather than just go to the original source? • Always add commentary to ensure that we know which parts of the evidence are most important and how it fits into your larger argument. • When working with written evidence, it's good to observe the rule of two: the writer should supply at least two words of analysis for every word of a citation, and usually more.
Emulate good writing • With your advisor's help, identify texts that exemplify the best writing in your field. • Read these texts to understand how they work, what techniques the writers use for analyzing evidence, paraphrasing theory , representing counter-arguments, even sentence-level techniques like introducing a quotation with a leading term. • Then try to incorporate these strategies into your writing. You can extend this emulation to any text you admire, remembering that some techniques may seem out of place in a particular writing context.
Cite and become a Mature Thinker • When writing chapters in a thesis, it can sometimes feel as if you’re including quotations (1) to back up your argument (2) fulfill a requirement to use a certain number of sources. Each of these motives can lead you to drop sources into a pre-set argument with little real interplay between the sources’ ideas and your own. • Instead, use sources because your own thinking will be enhanced when you consult the ideas of previous writers on a topic. Seen in this light, sources can help you develop and deepen your ideas as early as the brainstorming and drafting stages.
Impact of Citations on Thought Building • Think of yourself as having a conversation with the sources—when you move back and forth between your own thinking and what sources have to say, you push your ideas further than you would by going it alone. The resulting essay should give your reader the sense that you’re joining an ongoing conversation, that you respect other thinkers, and that you’re adding something new to the conversation.
Get rid of misunderstanding • A prevalent misunderstanding is that many student writers have about acknowledging sources, it’s that doing so lessens the impact of the writer’s own contribution. In nearly every case. • In reality the effect will be the opposite: it’s when you most clearly signal your debt to sources that your own thinking becomes most visible. Academic scholarship, at its heart, is about the interplay of ideas.
Good Academic Research • The best research is not, in that sense, wholly original, but rather develops from previous discoveries.
When you MUST cite - 1 • ALWAYS CITE, in the following cases: • When you quote two or more words verbatim, or even one word if it is used in a way that is unique to the source. • When you introduce facts that you have found in a source. • When you paraphrase or summarize ideas, interpretations, or conclusions that you find in a source. • When you introduce information that is not common knowledge or that may be considered common knowledge in your field, but the reader may not know it. • When you borrow the plan or structure of a larger section of a source’s argument. • using a theory from a source and analyzing the same three case studies that the source uses).
When you MUST cite - 2 • When you build on another’s method found either in a source or from collaborative work in a lab. • When you collaborate with others in producing knowledge.
Fair Paraphrase • One of the decisions you need to make when engaging with a source is whether to quote the source’s language directly or to paraphrase it in your own words. • Restating a source’s idea in your own words may not seem too difficult, but offering a paraphrase that distinguishes your voice from the source’s voice and furthers your own argument is actually rather challenging.
Common knowledge does NOT require citation - 1 • Common Knowledge • If you are familiar with the notion of “common knowledge” from earlier writing experiences, you may have noticed that its definition is easy to state, but can be hard to apply in a particular case. The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it out quite easily.
Common knowledge does NOT require citation - 2 • The term “common knowledge” carries the sense of “communal” knowledge—it is community information that no particular individual can fairly claim to own. • One sign that something is community knowledge is that it is stated in 5 or more sources. • So, if it’s known to educated people, or can be easily looked up, or appears in many sources, it is likely to be “common knowledge” and so does not need to be cited.
