Research Essays

What It Is and Why It's Useful

Research essays involve some degree of research and tend to draw on multiple sources, often including primary and secondary (and perhaps tertiary) ones. This can range from

  • an extension of the single-source analysis form, where students might be asked to start with an assigned primary source (say, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt) and then analyze the novel in terms of scholarly articles and/or reviews
  • to an extension of the comparative analysis form, where students start from a handful of theorists arguing about redistributive justice and are asked to find case studies in the news and 2–3 scholarly articles to arrive at a cost-benefit analysis of the three theorists' positions
  • to a much more open-ended research project that invites students to propose a research question that's tied to anything related to the topic of the course (or, in the case of a senior thesis, of their course of study).

Research essays often require students to locate, evaluate, and decide how to incorporate sources as they formulate and begin to answer a question (or test a hypothesis) of their own making, but that's not always the case. In more constrained research assignments, all of the sources might be assigned, from the novel or theories at the start to the sources used to make arguments about them. That is, students might be given a curated set of articles or interviews etc. to draw on and not be asked to find or evaluate them on their own. Were the timeline is tight or library resources are limited, this can be a great option, and it points to a whole spectrum of possible approaches: students might be asked to choose 2 out of 6 films from a course unit to work with, or to use at least 3 readings from the course but also 2 that they've found on their own; they might be required to spread their sources across types (op-ed pieces, interviews, surveys, quantitative data, etc.); they might be required to locate at least one source in 3 different databases. The goals of the assignment, in dialogue with the constraints of space-time and library access, will make these kinds of adjustments part of any real-life, intentionally designed research assignment.

Why It's Useful 

Research essays are the most complex genre of traditional academic writing assignment, and for many students they end up being the most rewarding. Research offers students the chance to pursue questions that are of their own making and that have their own intrinsic value, and it asks them to do so in conversation with the ideas of others. In that sense, it offers much greater freedom than other kinds of writing assignments (e.g., "Write a single-source analysis about Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance") while also bringing with that freedom much greater responsibility (viz., "Who's said what about Dance Dance Dance, and how do I find out and acknowledge the conversations about it that started before me?"). All of which, of course, can lead to the satisfaction of—at the very least—knowing where the conversation stands in terms of answering one's own question and—perhaps—adding one's own voice to that conversation.

Typical learning objectives for research essays: formulate research questions and a research proposal, find and evaluate sources using library resources, establish the stakes of an argument within an existing body of scholarly literature, choose and incorporate different kinds of evidence effectively, analyze evidence effectively, define key terms, organize arguments logically, acknowledge and respond to counterargument using existing scholarship, cite sources properly, signal the shifts between different thinkers' ideas, and present complex ideas in clear prose. 

How to Teach It: Framing + Practice

 

Framing
 

Framing multi-source writing assignments (comparative analysis, research essays, multi-modal projects) is likely to overlap a great deal with "Why It's Useful" (see above), because the range of reasons why we might use these kinds of writing in academic or non-academic settings is itself the reason why they so often appear later in courses. In many classes, they're the best vehicles for exploring the complex questions that arise once we've been introduced to the course's main themes, core content, leading protagonists, and central debates.

For research essays in particular, it's worth pointing out that moving toward research-based writing is the scholarly equivalent of going from rehearsal to live performance, or from scrimmage to "the game." This is the threshold beyond which the writer starts assigning themselves the readings and the prompt, so to speak, and doing the real thing. To be sure, scholars engage in many kinds of writing in their work, but the basic research essay is where students can begin honing the set of skills that are needed for independent inquiry—and that might lead to the advancement of knowledge in a particular field.

 

Practice

 

To a greater degree than less complex kinds of writing assignments, research essays are, at their heart, a process. That is, the skills they require move past reading assigned readings and using them to make written arguments. Beyond the skills outlined at the formative writing assignments page in this section, research projects often involve sub-assignments that might or might not themselves be graded. Each of these sub-assignments, e.g., annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, or research proposals, is its own genre that needs its own framing: what does it look like? what role does it play in the research process and/or as part of the research essay itself? In "Sample Exercises" here below (coming soon) you'll find examples of some of these sub-assignments, and under "Tips" and "Common Pitfalls" you can find practical advice about how these assignments fit into student research.

Tips

  • Try to steer students away from thinking of a proposed thesis as a commitment. Instead, help them see it as more of a hypothesis a) that has emerged out of readings and discussion and analytical questions, and b) that they'll now test through an experiment, namely, drafting. When students see drafting and revision as part of the process of inquiry—rather than as the before and after of inquiry—and are committed to acknowledging and adapting their claims to as much available evidence as possible, it makes writing assignments more scientific, more ethical, and more authentic. 
  • Make sure students have a sense of the kinds of evidence and analysis they should be engaging with in their essay. Should they be using certain kinds of evidence from the source or a certain number of examples?
  • As with other kinds of essays, be explicit about who the audience is. That is, should students assume the reader needs background summary and orientation of examples? Or should they dispense with that information because the imagined audience is presumed to be made up of "experts?"

Common Pitfalls

  • Research questions that are too broad. Term-time research projects are constrained by how many pages long they can realistically be, how many (and what kind of) sources students can actually get a hold of/on, and how much energy students can devote to them. Overly broad research questions can make those constraints a source of stress or make the research feel "incomplete" in ways that can make the experience less rewarding or feel "artificial." Making sure that students' research is emerging out of appropriately narrow research questions will help avoid these pitfalls.
  • Giving a mere tour of the sources. Writers will sometimes fall into generating more of a literature review than an argument, where they're displaying all of the fruits of their research but not actually using them to support their central claim. One way to prevent this is to make sure students are sketching out and workshopping outlines or smaller sections of their essay (e.g., a formative exercise on evidence and structure that helps students stress test thesis/argument alignment) before submitting anything final. It also helps, of course, to let students know in the prompt or in section that this is a normal pitfall that any writer working with a lot of sources needs to keep an eye on!
  • Using sources less effectively or improperly. Another normal pitfall—or set of pitfalls—that stems from using a number of articles, books, data, etc. is source use. Three areas to keep an eye on are:
    • Only including sources that agree with one's thesis
    • Falling into bad habits with paraphrase and/or improper citation
    • Allowing one's own argument to starting parroting or end up blurring into the argument a source.

Advice on Timing

As we discussed in "Advice on Timing" at the page on single-source analysis, the timeline for that foundational set of steps roughly follows the "Sample Sequence of Formative Assignments for a 'Typical' Essay" outlined under "Formative Writing Assignments." Those 5–6 steps will typically span 2–4 weeks. 

While research assignments start from the same foundation as single-source essays, they almost certainly bring more reading into play (e.g., asking students to engage in much more complicated acts of analysis and synthesis during sub-assignments and the drafting stages). With that in mind, longer than 4 weeks is probably a good baseline for any research essay, and in some cases the early stages of research will begin as early as the first weeks of the term.

What It Can Build Up To

While research essays are, in many cases, the form of academic writing that other genres are themselves building up to, there are a number academic and non-academic kinds of writing that research assignments can build toward (whether within a class or pointing beyond it), including:

  • Public-facing writing such as op-eds or information pieces
  • More distilled versions of research writing such as white papers or policy memos
  • Creative capstones
  • Academic forms of writing such as conference talks, poster presentations, or research and grant proposals