8.5 Using Research
After conducting research and gathering a collection of ideas and information from various sources, it will be time to put that research to use. But this is not as straightforward as novice writers often think.
Such beginning writers sometimes attempt to transform a pile of notes into a formal research essay without any intermediary step. This approach presents problems. The writer’s original question and thesis can get buried in a flood of disconnected details taken from research sources. The draft can present redundant or contradictory information. Worst of all, the writer’s own thoughts can be diminished, marginalized, or lost altogether.
An effective research essay focuses on the writer’s ideas—from the question that sparked the research process, to how the writer answers that question based on the research findings. Before beginning a draft, or even an outline, good writers pause and reflect. They ask themselves questions such as the following:
- How has my thinking changed based on my research? What have I learned?
- Was my working thesis on target? Do I need to revise my thesis based on what I have learned?
- How do the ideas or information in my sources mesh with my research questions and help me answer those questions? Have any additional important questions or additional subjects come up that I will need to address in my essay?
- How do my sources complement each other? Which ideas or facts recur in multiple sources?
- Where do my sources disagree with each other, and why?
Select Useful Information
When you conduct research, you keep an open mind and seek out many promising sources. You take notes on any information that looks like it might help you answer your research questions. Often, new ideas and terms come up in your reading, and these, too, find their way into your notes. You may record facts or quotations that catch your attention even if they did not seem immediately relevant to your research question. The result, typically, is a large and detailed collection of notes.
But you will not use all of your notes in your paper. That is because research writing involves two different mindsets: that of the researcher, and that of the writer.
Researchers should be thorough. While in the researcher mindset, you should look at multiple perspectives, facts, and ideas related to the subject, and you should gather a great deal of information.
But writers should be selective. While in the writer mindset, you should determine which information is most relevant and appropriate for your purpose. You should include details that develop or explain your ideas—and you must leave out details that do not. A good writer never lets the abundance of research take over what is discussed or how it is discussed in the essay. Instead, a good writer controls the discussion, selects the ideas, arranges the information, and shapes every part of the essay with intention.
So after the process of conducting research, you should engage in the process of using research, which is essentially the process of selecting from the gathered research and connecting it to your ideas to further illuminate and explore the discussion your essay engages in.
Identify Information That Supports Your Thesis
At this stage, you should identify the ideas and information in your research that clearly support your thesis. Mark or group these, whether digitally in various word processing or spreadsheet programs or even physically as notecards or printed pages. As you identify the crucial details that support your thesis, make sure you analyze them critically. Ask the following questions to focus your thinking:
- Is this detail from a reliable, high-quality source? Is it appropriate for me to cite this source in an academic paper? Are my types of sources effective for my paper? The bulk of the support for your thesis should come from legitimate and reliable sources. If most of the details that support your thesis are from less reliable sources or sources weak in legitimacy or authority, you may need to do additional research or modify your thesis.
- Is the link between this information and my thesis direct—or will I need further research to make the connection? Some of the important or useful information you find will connect to your thesis only through assumed or unstated facts, which will need to be shown through additional research. In other words, critically thinking through the research you’ve collected can show you what other research you need to find to fill in the logical gaps.
- What personal biases or experiences might affect the way I interpret this information? No researcher is 100 percent objective. We all have personal opinions and experiences that influence our reactions to what we read and learn. Good researchers are aware of this human tendency. They keep an open mind when they read opinions or facts that contradict their beliefs. It can be tempting to ignore information that does not support your thesis or that contradicts it outright.
Revise Your Working Thesis
A careful analysis of your notes will help you reevaluate your working thesis and determine whether you need to revise it. Remember that your working thesis was the starting point—not necessarily the end point—of your research. You should revise your working thesis if your ideas changed based on what you read. Even if your sources generally confirmed your preliminary thinking on the topic, it is still a good idea to tweak the wording of your thesis to incorporate the specific details you learned from the research.
After revising your thesis, you should return to the process of identifying information that supports your thesis. Often you will find that the ideas and information you have gathered in your research work will stack up differently when parts of the thesis change. For instance, in the example above, the revised thesis removed the “media” aspect from the original working thesis, so such a writer would need to look again at the information identified as support and remove the sources focused on the media.
Find Connections Between Your Sources
As you find connections between your ideas and information in your sources, also look for information that connects your sources. Do most sources seem to agree on a particular idea? Are some facts mentioned repeatedly in many different sources? What key terms or major concepts come up in most of your sources regardless of whether the sources agree on the finer points? Identifying these connections will help you identify important ideas to discuss in your paper.
Be aware of any redundancies in your sources. If you have amassed solid support from a reputable source, such as a scholarly journal, there is no need to cite the same facts from an online encyclopedia article which is many steps removed from any primary research. If a given source adds nothing new to your discussion and you can cite a stronger source for the same information, use the stronger source.
Determine how you will address any contradictions found among different sources. For instance, if one source cites a startling fact that you cannot confirm anywhere else, it is safe to dismiss the information as unreliable. However, if you find significant disagreements among reliable sources, you will need to review them and evaluate each source. Which source presents a sounder argument or more solid evidence? It is up to you to determine which source is the most credible and why.
Finally, do not ignore any information simply because it does not support your thesis. Carefully consider how that information fits into the big picture of your research. You may decide that the source is unreliable or the information is not relevant, or you may decide that it is an important point you need to bring up. What matters is that you give it careful consideration.
Synthesize and Organize Information
After identifying information that supports your thesis, reevaluating your thesis, and finding connections between sources, you will begin (or will have already begun) synthesizing information, which means putting the pieces together into a coherent whole. It is normal to find this part of the process a little difficult. Some questions or concepts may still be unclear to you. You may not yet know how you will tie all of your research together. Synthesizing information is a complex, demanding mental task, and even experienced researchers struggle with it at times. But a little uncertainty is often a good sign. It means you are challenging yourself to work thoughtfully with your subject instead of simply restating the same information.
The process of synthesizing your research involves analyzing how your notes relate to your major research question and the sub-questions you identified. Organize your notes with headings that correspond to those questions. As you proceed, you might identify some important subtopics that were not part of your original plan, or you might decide that some questions are not relevant to your paper. Categorize information carefully and continue to think critically about the material.
Remember, your ideas and conclusions will shape the paper. They are the glue that holds the rest of the content together. As you work, begin jotting down the big ideas you will use to connect the dots for your reader. (If you are not sure where to begin, try answering your major research question and sub-questions. Add and answer new questions as appropriate.) You might record these big ideas on sticky notes or type and highlight them within an electronic document.
Some paragraphs in your paper will consist mostly of details from your research. That is fine, as long as you explain what those details mean or how they are linked. You should also include sentences and transitions that show the relationship between different facts from your research by grouping related ideas or pointing out connections or contrasts. The result is that you are not simply presenting information; you are synthesizing, analyzing, and interpreting it.
Turn Research into Evidence
The above stages should help you arrange the ideas and information in such a way that you are ready to write the essay and/or incorporate that research into your essay (through drafting, revising, and/or editing). In theory, drafting this research essay consists of writing out your claims, supporting them through your explanations, examples, or related rhetorical strategies, and then showing the research that supports the claims by summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting your sources.
But it is not enough to simply show the research, even if you place it immediately after your claim. That is because research rarely supports a thesis or claim until you provide an explanation showing how the information or ideas are connected. Remember that you have likely spent more time thinking and reading about your particular subject than your audience, so many of the connections that might seem obvious to you will not appear obvious in your essay. This difficulty is made worse by the common tendency among student writers to avoid critical analysis of their assumptions, and instead label their assumptions as obvious. Faulty notions and irrelevant information can emerge in the essay as a result.
A useful idea here is to consider the difference between research and evidence. Research is merely the ideas and information you have found. Evidence, on the other hand, is research that directly supports your claims. It’s not enough that you know your research supports your claims and works as evidence. You must show it.
Again, the solution is writing out the explanations, assumptions, and analyses. In some cases, this move can be handled in only a sentence or two, but in other cases, such as this example, it can be more difficult. That is because numerous assumptions are involved in connecting the information to the claim.
So in addition to explaining what the research has to do with the claim, another skill of vital importance is to understand the reality behind the abstractions. Every time you see a number or statistic, you are looking at abstract data that does not reveal the real story behind the information being reported. Critically thinking through reality can help guide your explanations and analyses, and help you sort through your assumptions.
Attributions
The Writing Textbook by Josh Woods, editor and contributor, as well as an unnamed author (by request from the original publisher), and other authors named separately is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
This chapter has additions, edits, and organization by James Charles Devlin.
