Dr. Robert Kelly had me join his class recently to talk to his students about writing long research papers (20-25 pages). While such an assignment may seem pretty demanding for a 10 week class, Dr. Kelly deserves credit for recognizing that upper level students need the opportunity to practice the intensive research and writing skills they will need in graduate school and in their professional lives.

I began my presentation by pointing out how writing longer research papers are much different than writing shorter term papers. When writing term papers, students have a very limited amount of space to discuss a topic, and really can only deal with a small number of sources and secondary literature. However, in a longer research paper, students are expected to engage in the scholarly conversation on a topic in a much more thorough way. While this requires a significantly greater amount of research, one’s audience is quite a bit clearer–rather than having to negotiate a vague general audience as in shorter papers, students can imagine a much clearer audience of scholars who are experts on a particular topic.

I then went on to talk about how professional academics work through the writing process–that for them it was indeed a process: of consulting peers, getting feedback, presenting work in various preliminary forms (at conferences, for example), or submitting work to journals. I used the peer review process as an example–experts in the field are asked by journals to approve scholarship for publication, and often provide feedback to writers for publication. This feedback is sometimes negative–occasionally brutally so. Students should keep this peer review process in mind as they work on longer projects. The readers of their work might very well be prominent experts in the topics they are exploring, even whose work they may be writing about.

I then proceeded to discuss a handout, which included advice on how to brainstorm and outline a longer research project. I’ll include the main points of the handout below:

1. Find one or two recent (past five years) articles that relate to your research question. Scour the bibliography—what further books or articles does this bibliography point to? Lather, rinse, repeat. Which books, reports, or articles get repeatedly cited? These are the ones you need to pay particular attention to. Write brief summaries of the main theses and methods of these works.
2. Which articles or books relating to your research question strike you most, are particularly memorable, or challenge what you have thought about an issue?
3. Is there a set of issues that these articles seem to focus on? Which issues seem to be in dispute? Is there an issue these articles don’t seem to address? What are your own ideas about one of these disputes? Write a 1-3 sentence summary of your position as a preliminary thesis.
4. When you’ve settled on an issue, look back through the books, reports and articles. What would the authors of these books, reports, and articles have to say about your ideas? What counter-arguments might these authors make to your ideas? How would you try to persuade these authors to your point of view, or how might you refute these ideas convincingly to an audience that is more inclined to agree with them and not you?
5. Make a list of the important points you need to make, the relevant background information you need to give to readers, and, most importantly, write a concise explanation of each point’s connection to your overall theme/thesis.
6. Now that you’ve outlined your points, think carefully about how you will arrange them in your draft. Dr. Kelly has given you a basic outline for an extended research paper in political science. Which of your points are most relevant to each part of this outline? How might you best arrange points within each section to make your point most strongly and clearly? How can you make connections between each point? Try out different ways of organizing your points, and decide which method would work best with your theme/thesis.

We also talked about “bad theses,” which make no claim, are obviously true or are a simple statement of fact or conventional wisdom, provide only personal conviction for evidence, or make an overly broad claim. Such theses are boring to read, but they are also boring to write about. They can be improved by making creating more specific categories, by challenging or complicating conventional wisdom, and by imagining that one’s readers hold antithetical ideas and must be persuaded. Dr. Kelly jumped in to talk about the importance of demonstrating “causal mechanisms” in social scientific hypotheses–that researchers need to prove that one phenomenon correllates with or demonstrates an effect on another phenomenon. He also talked about the importance of challenging conventional wisdom–that compelling theses complicate received wisdom and synthesize old ideas with new data.

Dr. Kelly’s contribution to the presentation reminded me to what extent writing instruction can be tied up in content instruction. A discipline’s methodologies and distinctive use of language are central to the sort of writing students will have to do in disciplinary classes. Disciplinary instructors are thus in a very important position to teach students what kind of arguments they can make in a class and how to write as experts in a discipline.

Chris Manion

Here’s the handout we used for the presentation: Political Science Presentation, Kelly sp06