Mr. Skipper dot Com

Research is just as important a skill as reading and writing.

 

This is the important thing: Your writing should not just be spitting out a bunch of facts. Remember your thesis is subject, OPINION, reasons.

 

My sample George Washington paper discusses his death. I don't simply record the events leading up to his death. That is not interesting. Instead, after reading about his death, I reach a conclusion, an opinion (that his death was the result of medical malpractice). Now that I've reached that opinion, I provide the evidence that led me to that conclusion.  

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When I write about his parents and education, I don't just deliver the facts. I reach an opinion about the influence his parents and his upbringing had on him; I explain how is formal education was limited, and that it was his brother's tutoring of him that shaped him into who he would become.

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These are the things that make your research paper interesting and worth reading.

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The yellow box on the left, gives LOTS of detailed information. The blue boxes above go to my individual pages.

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1. The Research Question

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The thing you have to develop is the research question. Often your teacher will give you the question:

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For Encounters 7, it's: Why is the person you're researching important? What impact did he make on the world? How did he change "the industry"?

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For Encounters 8, it's: Why is it important that we protect this animal? What impact would its loss have on the world?

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(Your answer to these questions becomes your thesis, but more on that later.)

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For example:

Henry Ford changed the automobile industry by making it easier to make cars which made them cost less and thus, they were more affordable.

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Louis Braille made it easier for visually impaired people to read.

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Bees are pollinators. If they die off, so will certain plants and the animals that eat those plants.

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Many endangered animals are crucial parts of the food chain. They keep the population of smaller animals and insects from getting too large, and they are food themselves for creatures above them in the chain.

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So first, you need to do some preliminary research to find the answers to those questions.

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2. The Outline

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 You can create your own outline, you can modify the outline on Wikipedia, or your teacher might give you an outline as I have done for the Encounters classes.

(Encounters 7 or Encounters 8)

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The outline tells you what information you are looking for in your research.

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3. Finding Sources and Taking Notes

All sources are not good sources, so you have to be able to tell the good from the bad. When you take notes, you can paraphrase, summarize, and quote. Regardless of what you do, you must record where you got your information.

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This is VERY important. Although the MLA handbook is quite specific with their guidelines, there are some areas where your teachers have some options.

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Way back in 1812, we used notecards for our research paper (and we used encyclopedias).

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Here's what a notecard looks like: http://www.crlsresearchguide.org/images/notecard.gif

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We also recorded our source information on source cards.

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But now that we're living in the space age, we're going to take notes on a Google Doc. 

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4. Documentation

You have to tell where your information came from, and it did not come from Google or Wikipedia. The source of your information was a person. You have to tell who that person was and where he wrote the information. There's a specific way to do this. (Click the link.)

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5. Format

The Modern Language Association (MLA) determines the format of a research paper in English classes. Besides my page, the best place to get all the information you need is Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL).

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Look at this sample paper to see what the first page

(and everything else)

should look like.

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