research based inquiry essay examples

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Research Inquiry

Through the research inquiry assignment, students will:.

• Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts
• Use strategies – such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign – to compose texts that integrate their ideas with those from appropriate sources
• Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources

Things to keep in mind about research inquiry:

How Much Longer will African Americans be Disenfranchised? (2023-2024)

Pierce Burm

In this research inquiry, Burm synthesizes many legal and legislative sources to demonstrate the disenfranchisement and systemic racism against African Americans attempting to exercise their right to vote. In particular, Burm presents specific examples from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. However, Burm concludes the essay with the reminder that unless we are vigilant and strict bills are passed to counteract voter suppression, this is an issue that will continue and become even more prevalent. The outcome is that African American voters will have the impact of their votes even further diminished.

Camp in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (2023-2024)

Anthony Cawley

In this research inquiry, Cawley examines the film, Rocky Horror Picture Show , as an example of a “perfect camp film.” He arrives at this conclusion based on his interpretation of the film itself as the main source and by synthesizing other sources on film theory, film analysis, and theories of camp, such as Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp .

Rocky IV as a Groundbreaking Film (2023-2024)

Matthew Croote

In this research inquiry example, Croote analyzes a later film in the Rocky franchise in order to argue for its understanding as a groundbreaking film. His argument takes up three major points—that Rocky IV is an effective reflection of Cold War events of the time, that Rocky IV deftly uses sport as a vehicle for its narrative, and that Rocky IV maintains its main message and cohesion within the franchise by entertaining audiences. Within the research and sources cited in this piece, Croote unpacks visual representations of characters, stereotypes and possible propaganda, and the metaphors of training to explore Cold War tensions. Ultimately, Croote also acknowledges but argues against the idea of the film as purely propaganda, but instead a popular film exerting its influence in delivering a slightly different message ahead of Cold War de-escalation.

Examining Conspiracy Theories: Reevaluating the Assumption that Their Supporters are Paranoid (2023-2024)

Soren C. Jung

In this research inquiry, Jung examines the definition and history of conspiracy theories in order to explore new reasons why they may remain so popular, while so commonly being denounced. In his essay, Jung reviews past histories of corporations acting only in favor of maximizing profits, such as the notorious Big Tobacco companies’ “Operation Berkshire.” Jung then juxtaposes knowledge of that history with various contemporary conspiracy theories related to the dangers, risk, or surveillance-related intent of Covid-19 vaccines. Jung concludes his piece with a reminder about the very real consequences of immediate infection and long-term health consequences of Covid-19, and that these are not speculative. However, he cautions that it does a disservice to dismiss believers in vaccine conspiracy theories as “simply paranoid” or uneducated when this belief most likely stems from anxiety of the unknown and fear of past corporate corruption.

Sanctioned Violence (2021-2022)

Jordanne Greenidge

In this research inquiry Greenidge uses Claudia Rankine’s work and a reading of the Rodney King video to question and argue against the sharing of viral videos (such as that of George Floyd or Eric Garner) that depict suffering, brutality, and the murder of Black people. Greenidge’s claim is that while some may share these images in the hopes of supporting movements, such as Black Lives Matter, or creating justice through awareness, the actual sharing of these videos creates desensitization and normalizes acts of violence toward Black victims. Instead of focusing on Black suffering, Greenidge calls for media and the public to focus more on countering white supremacy and the perpetrators of these violent acts.

Tragic Hero (2021-2022)

Nicholas Lardaro

In this research inquiry essay Lardaro uses the literary trope of the tragic hero to make a case for why Revenge of the Sith is an especially compelling film. Lardaro presents sources that help him to analyze how the downfall of Anakin Skywalker becomes an example of a tragic hero. His argument maintains that the treatment of Anakin Skywalker as a tragic hero is what allows the Star Wars prequels to offer emotional complexity and the potential for misinterpretation to the audience. This is in turn what makes these films compelling.

The Effects of Misrepresentation (2020-2021)

Miranda R. Cobo

This example of a research inquiry investigates issues of representation in the comic, Black Panther. Cobo writes: “In the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced T’Challa, famously known as the Black Panther. He was the first black superhero to be introduced in the Marvel Universe and into popular American comics. The world that Black Panther lived in is very advanced and breaks the stereotype of the view that many Americans have on Africa. However, that is only one stereotype that it has worked against. There have been many other stereotypes that writers use in T’Challa’s storyline that can be detrimental to making progress against racism. When creating black characters, many times they were not able to amount to the status that white characters have because of the lack of representation. Many authors have written about this topic trying to analyze why misrepresentation keeps happening and how it can be fixed. Through analysis and research, it is clear that there is still a long way to go in order for minorities to be properly portrayed in the media.”

Illegitimate Control: An Acknowledgement of False White Supremacy (2020-2021)

Whitman Ives

This research inquiry introduces a timely conversation on racism, cultural appropriation, and white supremacy. Ives’ argument is that the root cause of cultural appropriation and racism can be traced to a negative and false history of white supremacy. In other words, white culture has been founded and perpetuated based on power-seeking behavior, of which racism is more a symptom. Ives asserts that it is important to acknowledge that white culture is based on false assumptions of supremacy and to address that more systematically rather than addressing only individual events or instances of racism.

Child Protection Services: The Developmental Consequences of Arbitrary Removal (2020-2021)

John Jackson

This research inquiry example details the developmental consequences for children removed from their biological homes by Children’s Services. Jackson uses sources to discuss physical, mental, and emotional implications for removing children from their homes or parents in their future development as both children and adults. Not only does Jackson present an alternative perspective thinking about negative consequences and how the process of removal puts parents at odds with regaining custody, but he also proposes an alternative solution in the conclusion.

The Doppelganger Effect (2020-2021)

Jessica Jean-Baptiste

In this example of a research inquiry, Jean-Baptiste focuses on the use of cameras and mirrors to create doubles, or “doppelgangers” for the character of Nina in the film, Black Swan. In thinking about the “doppelganger effect,” Jean-Baptiste moves through an argument for how doubling fulfills not only one purpose or message within the film, but three. Her claim in synthesizing multiple sources of film analysis is that the doppelganger allows Aronofsky to comment on mental disorders, sexism within the community of ballet, and the overall mood for the film as a thriller as opposed to only a drama.

The Medical Ethics of HeLa Cells (2020-2021)

Elizabeth Pratt

Pratt’s research inquiry essay focuses on the medical ethics issues involved in the case of Henrietta Lacks and her cancer cells (known as HeLa,) which have been used and reused in medical research without hers or her family’s consent. Throughout this essay, Pratt moves between several areas for concern including medical agency and patients’ rights to their own bodies, financial implications, legal definitions, and issues for privacy. Pratt concludes with a call for future regulations and focus on medical ethics.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent (2019-2020)

Jacob Anderson

In this student example, Robinson addresses wrongful convictions, falsified evidence, and other major problems in the American justice system. Relying heavily on source material, Robinson confronts systemic problems by detailing the work of a particular nonprofit organization and highlighting the evidence for the necessity of that organization.

No One to Blame but Ourselves (2019-2020)

Shelby Soule

This example of a research inquiry involves moving through various historical developments and statistics related to climate change (such as rising global temperatures, sea levels, ice sheets, and carbon dioxide emissions) in order to then contextualize global efforts to reduce climate change damage, such as the Paris Agreement. Throughout the research inquiry Soule uses an objective stance in presenting findings and developments ranging from the 1700s to present times, and supporting a conclusion that global devastation may be as close as 2100.

Are Vaccines the Key to Alzheimer’s Treatment? (2019-2020)

In this research inquiry, Tyler uses a metacognitive style of reflection walking the reader through her personal connections to topic selection and research process before presenting what she discovered in medical journal articles on the topic of using vaccines for Alzheimer’s treatment and prevention. In closely reviewing journal articles and their findings, Tyler is able to make comments about the challenges of developing a vaccine appropriate to humans (as opposed to the mice trials she reads about,) and the complexity of high failure rates in the past. Finally, Tyler comments on the financial issues involved in this treatment plan and her own growth as a researcher.

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4 Research Essay

Jeffrey Kessler

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

• Construct a thesis based upon your research
• Use critical reading strategies to analyze your research
• Defend a position in relation to the range of ideas surrounding a topic
• Organize your research essay in order to logically support your thesis

I. Introduction

The goal of this book has been to help demystify research and inquiry through a series of genres that are part of the research process. Each of these writing projects—the annotated bibliography, proposal, literature review, and research essay—builds on each other. Research is an ongoing and evolving process, and each of these projects help you build towards the next.

In your annotated bibliography, you started your inquiry into a topic, reading widely to define the breadth of your inquiry. You recorded this by summarizing and/or evaluating  the first sources you examined. In your proposal, you organized a plan and developed pointed questions to pursue and ideas to research. This provided a good sense of where you might continue to explore. In your literature review, you developed a sense of the larger conversations around your topic and assessed the state of existing research. During each of these writing projects, your knowledge of your topic grew, and you became much more informed about its key issues.

You’ve established a topic and assembled sources in conversation with one another. It’s now time to contribute to that conversation with your own voice. With so much of your research complete, you can now turn your focus to crafting a strong research essay with a clear thesis. Having the extensive knowledge that you have developed across the first three writing projects will allow you to think more about putting the pieces of your research together, rather than trying to do research at the same time that you are writing.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t need to do a little more research. Instead, you might need to focus strategically on one or two key pieces of information to advance your argument, rather than trying to learn about the basics of your topic.

But what about a thesis or argument? You may have developed a clear idea early in the process, or you might have slowly come across an important claim you want to defend or a critique you want to make as you read more into your topic. You might still not be sure what you want to argue. No matter where you are, this chapter will help you navigate the genre of the research essay. We’ll examine the basics of a good thesis and argument, different ways to use sources, and strategies to organize your essay.

While this chapter will focus on the kind of research essay you would write in the college classroom, the skills are broadly applicable. Research takes many different forms in the academic, professional, and public worlds. Depending on the course or discipline, research can mean a semester-long project for a class or a few years’ worth of research for an advanced degree. As you’ll see in the examples below, research can consist of a brief, two-page conclusion or a government report that spans hundreds of pages with an overwhelming amount of original data.

Above all else, good research is engaged with its audience to bring new ideas to light based on existing conversations. A good research essay uses the research of others to advance the conversation around the topic based on relevant facts, analysis, and ideas.

II. Rhetorical Considerations: Contributing to the Conversation

The word “essay” comes from the French word essayer , or “attempt.” In other words, an essay is an attempt—to prove or know or illustrate something. Through writing an essay, your ideas will evolve as you attempt to explore and think through complicated ideas. Some essays are more exploratory or creative, while some are straightforward reports about the kind of original research that happens in laboratories.

Most research essays attempt to argue a point about the material, information, and data that you have collected. That research can come from fieldwork, laboratories, archives, interviews, data mining, or just a lot of reading. No matter the sources you use, the thesis of a research essay is grounded in evidence that is compelling to the reader.

Where you described the conversation in your literature review, in your research essay you are contributing to that conversation with your own argument. Your argument doesn’t have to be an argument in the cable-news-social-media-shouting sense of the word. It doesn’t have to be something that immediately polarizes individuals or divides an issue into black or white. Instead, an argument for a research essay should be a claim, or, more specifically, a claim that requires evidence and analysis to support. This can take many different forms.

Example 4.1: Here are some different types of arguments you might see in a research essay:

• Critiquing a specific idea within a field
• Interrogating an assumption many people hold about an issue
• Examining the cause of an existing problem
• Identifying the effects of a proposed program, law, or concept
• Assessing a historical event in a new way
• Using a new method to evaluate a text or phenomenon
• Proposing a new solution to an existing problem
• Evaluating an existing solution and suggesting improvements

These are only a few examples of the kinds of approaches your argument might take. As you look at the research you have gathered throughout your projects, your ideas will have evolved. This is a natural part of the research process. If you had a fully formed argument before you did any research, then you probably didn’t have an argument based on strong evidence. Your research now informs your position and understanding, allowing you to form a stronger evidence-based argument.

Having a good idea about your thesis and your approach is an important step, but getting the general idea into specific words can be a challenge on its own. This is one of the most common challenges in writing: “I know what I want to say; I just don’t know how to say it.”

Example 4.2: Here are some sample thesis statements. Examine them and think about their arguments.

Whether you agree, disagree, or are just plain unsure about them, you can imagine that these statements require their authors to present evidence, offer context, and explain key details in order to argue their point.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to greatly expand the methods and content of higher education, and though there are some transient shortcomings, faculty in STEM should embrace AI as a positive change to the system of student learning. In particular, AI can prove to close the achievement gap often found in larger lecture settings by providing more custom student support.
• I argue that while the current situation for undocumented college students remains tumultuous, there are multiple routes—through financial and social support programs like the Fearless Undocumented Alliance—that both universities and colleges can utilize to support students affected by the reality of DACA’s shortcomings.

While it can be argued that massive reform of the NCAA’s bylaws is needed in the long run, one possible immediate improvement exists in the form of student-athlete name, image, and likeness rights. The NCAA should amend their long-standing definition of amateurism and allow student athletes to pursue financial gains from the use of their names, images, and likenesses, as is the case with amateur Olympic athletes.

Each of these thesis statements identifies a critical conversation around a topic and establishes a position that needs evidence for further support. They each offer a lot to consider, and, as sentences, are constructed in different ways.

Some writing textbooks, like They Say, I Say (2017), offer convenient templates in which to fit your thesis. For example, it suggests a list of sentence constructions like “Although some critics argue X, I will argue Y” and “If we are right to assume X, then we must consider the consequences of Y.”

More Resources 4.1: Templates

Templates can be a productive start for your ideas, but depending on the writing situation (and depending on your audience), you may want to expand your thesis beyond a single sentence (like the examples above) or template. According to Amy Guptill in her book Writing in Col lege (2016) , a good thesis has four main elements (pp. 21-22). A good thesis:

• Makes a non-obvious claim
• Poses something arguable
• Provides well-specified details
• Includes broader implications

Consider the sample thesis statements above. Each one provides a claim that is both non-obvious and arguable. In other words, they present something that needs further evidence to support—that’s where all your research is going to come in. In addition, each thesis identifies specifics, whether these are teaching methods, support programs, or policies. As you will see, when you include those specifics in a thesis statement, they help project a starting point towards organizing your essay.

Finally, according to Guptill, a good thesis includes broader implications. A good thesis not only engages the specific details of its argument, but also leaves room for further consideration. As we have discussed before, research takes place in an ongoing conversation. Your well-developed essay and hard work won’t be the final word on this topic, but one of many contributions among other scholars and writers. It would be impossible to solve every single issue surrounding your topic, but a strong thesis helps us think about the larger picture. Here’s Guptill:

Putting your claims in their broader context makes them more interesting to your reader and more impressive to your professors who, after all, assign topics that they think have enduring significance. Finding that significance for yourself makes the most of both your paper and your learning. (p. 23)

Thinking about the broader implications will also help you write a conclusion that is better than just repeating your thesis (we’ll discuss this more below).

Example 4.3: Let’s look at an example from above:

This thesis makes a key claim about the rights of student athletes (in fact, shortly after this paper was written, NCAA athletes became eligible to profit from their own name, image, and likeness). It provides specific details, rather than just suggesting that student athletes should be able to make money. Furthermore, it provides broader context, even giving a possible model—Olympic athletes—to build an arguable case.

Remember, that just like your entire research project, your thesis will evolve as you write. Don’t be afraid to change some key terms or move some phrases and clauses around to play with the emphasis in your thesis. In fact, doing so implies that you have allowed the research to inform your position.

Example 4.4: Consider these examples about the same topic and general idea. How does playing around with organization shade the argument differently?

• Although William Dowling’s amateur college sports model reminds us that the real stakeholders are the student athletes themselves, he highlights that the true power over student athletes comes from the athletic directors, TV networks, and coaches who care more about profits than people.
• While William Dowling’s amateur college sports model reminds us that the real stakeholders in college athletics are not the athletic directors, TV networks, and coaches, but the students themselves, his plan does not seem feasible because it eliminates the reason many people care about student athletes in the first place: highly lucrative bowl games and March Madness.
• Although William Dowling’s amateur college sports model has student athletes’ best interests in mind, his proposal remains unfeasible because financial stakeholders in college athletics, like athletic directors, TV networks, and coaches, refuse to let go of their power.

When you look at the different versions of the thesis statements above, the general ideas remain the same, but you can imagine how they might unfold differently in a paper, and even  how those papers might be structured differently. Even after you have a good version of your thesis, consider how it might evolve by moving ideas around or changing emphasis as you outline and draft your paper.

More Resources 4.2: Thesis Statements

Looking for some additional help on thesis statements? Try these resources:

• How to Write a Thesis Statement
• Writing Effective Thesis Statements. 

Library Referral: Your Voice Matters!

(by Annie R. Armstrong)

If you’re embarking on your first major college research paper, you might be concerned about “getting it right.” How can you possibly jump into a conversation with the authors of books, articles, and more, who are seasoned experts in their topics and disciplines? The way they write might seem advanced, confusing, academic, irritating, and even alienating. Try not to get discouraged. There are techniques for working with scholarly sources to break them down and make them easier to work with (see How to Read a Scholarly Article ). A librarian can work with you to help you find a variety of source types that address your topic in a meaningful way, or that one specific source you may still be trying to track down.

Furthermore, scholarly experts are not the only voices welcome at the research table! This research paper and others to come are an invitation to you to join the conversation; your voice and lived experience give you one-of-a-kind expertise equipping you to make new inquiries and insights into your topic. Sure, you’ll need to wrestle how to interpret difficult academic texts and how to piece them together. That said, your voice is an integral and essential part of the puzzle. All of those scholarly experts started closer to where you are than you might think.

III. The Research Essay Across the Disciplines

Example 4.5: Academic and Professional Examples

These examples are meant to show you how this genre looks in other disciplines and professions. Make sure to follow the requirements for your own class or to seek out specific examples from your instructor in order to address the needs of your own assignment.

As you will see, different disciplines use language very differently, including citation practices, use of footnotes and endnotes, and in-text references. (Review Chapter 3 for citation practices as disciplinary conventions.) You may find some STEM research to be almost unreadable, unless you are already an expert in that field and have a highly developed knowledge of the key terms and ideas in that field. STEM fields often rely on highly technical language and assume a high level of knowledge in the field. Similarly, humanities research can be hard to navigate if you don’t have a significant background in the topic or material.

As we’ve discussed, highly specialized research assumes its readers are other highly specialized researchers. Unless you read something like The Journ al of American Medicine on a regular basis, you usually learn about scientific or medical breakthroughs when they are reported by another news outlet, where a reporter makes the highly technical language of a scientific discovery more accessible for non-specialists.

Even if you are not an expert in multiple disciplines of study, you will find that research essays contain a lot of similarities in their structure and organization. Most research essays have an abstract that summarizes the entire article at the beginning. Introductions provide the necessary setup for the article. Body sections can vary. Some essays include a literature review section that describes the state of research about the topic. Others might provide background or a brief history. Many essays in the sciences will have a methodology section that explains how the research was conducted, including details such as lab procedures, sample sizes, control populations, conditions, and survey questions. Others include long analyses of primary sources, sets of data, or archival documents. Most essays end with conclusions about what further research needs to be completed or what their research further implies.

As you examine some of the different examples, look at the variations in arguments and structures. Just as in reading research about your own topic, you don’t need to read each essay from start to finish. Browse through different sections and see the different uses of language and organization that are possible.

IV. Research Strategies: When is Enough?

At this point, you know a lot about your topic. You’ve done a lot of research to complete your first three writing projects, but when do you have enough sources and information to start writing? Really, it depends.

If you’re writing a dissertation, you may have spent months or years doing research and still feel like you need to do more or to wait a few months until that next new study is published. If you’re writing a research essay for a class, you probably have a schedule of due dates for drafts and workshops. Either way, it’s better to start drafting sooner rather than later. Part of doing research is trying on ideas and discovering things throughout the drafting process.

That’s why you’ve written the other projects along the way instead of just starting with a research essay. You’ve built a foundation of strong research to read about your topic in the annotated bibliography, planned your research in the proposal, and understood the conversations around your topic in the literature review. Now that you are working on your research essay, you are far enough along in the research process where you might need a few more sources, but you will most likely discover this as you are drafting your essay. In other words, get writing and trust that you’ll discover what you need along the way.

V. Reading Strategies: Forwarding and Countering

Using sources is necessary to a research essay, and it is essential to think about how you use them. At this point in your research, you have read, summarized, analyzed, and made connections across many sources. Think back to the literature review. In that genre, you used your sources to illustrate the major issues, topics, and/or concerns among your research. You used those sources to describe and make connections between them.

For your research essay, you are putting those sources to work in a different way: using them in service of supporting your own contribution to the conversation. According to Joseph Harris in his book Rewriting (2017), we read texts in order to respond to them: “drawing from, commenting on, adding to […] the works of others” (p. 2). The act of writing, according to Harris, takes place among the different texts we read and the ways we use them for our own projects. Whether a source provides factual information or complicated concepts, we use sources in different ways. Two key ways to do so for Harris are forwarding and countering .

Forwarding a text means taking the original concept or idea and applying it to a new context. Harris writes: “In forwarding a text you test the strength of its insights and the range and flexibility of its phrasings. You rewrite it through reusing some of its key concepts and phrasings” (pp. 38-39). This is common in a lot of research essays. In fact, Harris identifies different types of forwarding:

• Illustrating: using a source to explain a larger point
• Authorizing: appealing to another source for credibility
• Borrowing: taking a term or concept from one context or discipline and using it in a new one
• Extending: expanding upon a source or its implications

It’s not enough in a research essay to include just sources with which you agree. Countering a text means more than just disagreeing with it, but it allows you to do more with a text that might not initially support your argument. This can include for Harris:

• Arguing the other side: oftentimes called “including a naysayer” or addressing objections
• Uncovering values: examining assumptions within the text that might prove problematic or reveal interesting insights
• Dissenting: finding the problems in or the limits of an argument (p. 58)

While the categories above are merely suggestions, it is worth taking a moment to think a little more about sources with which you might disagree. The whole point of an argument is to offer a claim that needs to be proved and/or defended. Essential to this is addressing possible objections. What might be some of the doubts your reader may have? What questions might a reasonable person have about your argument? You will never convince every single person, but by addressing and acknowledging possible objections, you help build the credibility of your argument by showing how your own voice fits into the larger conversation—if other members of that conversation may disagree.

VI. Writing Strategies: Organizing and Outlining

At this point you likely have a draft of a thesis (or the beginnings of one) and a lot of research, notes, and three writing projects about your topic. How do you get from all of this material to a coherent research essay? The following section will offer a few different ideas about organizing your essay. Depending on your topic, discipline, or assignment, you might need to make some necessary adjustments along the way, depending on your audience. Consider these more as suggestions and prompts to help in the writing and drafting of your research essay.

Sometimes, we tend to turn our research essay into an enthusiastic book report: “Here are all the cool things I read about my topic this semester!” When you’ve spent a long time reading and thinking about a topic, you may feel compelled to include every piece of information you’ve found. This can quickly overwhelm your audience. Other times, we as writers may feel so overwhelmed with all of the things we want to say that we don’t know where to start.

Writers don’t all follow the same processes or strategies. What works for one person may not always work for another, and what worked in one writing situation (or class) may not be as successful in another. Regardless, it’s important to have a plan and to follow a few strategies to get writing. The suggestions below can help get you organized and writing quickly. If you’ve never tried some of these strategies before, it’s worth seeing how they will work for you.

Think in Sections, Not Paragraphs

For smaller papers, you might think about what you want to say in each of the five to seven paragraphs that paper might require. Sometimes writing instructors even tell students what each paragraph should include. For longer essays, it’s much easier to think about a research essay in sections, or as a few connected short papers. In a short essay, you might need a paragraph to provide background information about your topic, but in longer essays—like the ones you have read for your project—you will likely find that you need more than a single paragraph, sometimes a few pages.

You might think about the different types of sections you have encountered in the research you have already gathered. Those types of sections might include: introduction, background, the history of an issue, literature review, causes, effects, solutions, analysis, limits, etc. When you consider possible sections for your paper, ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this section?” Then you can start to think about the best way to organize that information into paragraphs for each section.

Build an Outline

After you have developed what you want to argue with your thesis (or at least a general sense of it), consider how you want to argue it. You know that you need to begin with an introduction (more on that momentarily). Then you’ll likely need a few sections that help lead your reader through your argument.

Your outline can start simple. In what order are you going to divide up your main points? You can slowly build a larger outline to include where you will discuss key sources, as well as what are the main claims or ideas you want to present in each section. It’s much easier to move ideas and sources around when you have a larger structure in place.

Example 4.6: A Sample Outline for a Research Paper

• College athletics is a central part of American culture
• Few of its viewers fully understand the extent to which players are mistreated
• Thesis: While William Dowling’s amateur col lege sports model does not seem feasible to implement in the twenty-first century, his proposal reminds us that the real stakeholders in college athletics are not the athletic directors, TV networks, and coaches, but the students themselves, who deserve th e chance to earn a quality education even more than the chance to play ball.
• While many student athletes are strong students, many D-1 sports programs focus more on elite sports recruits than academic achievement
• Quotes from coaches and athletic directors about revenue and building fan bases (ESPN)
• Lowered admissions standards and fake classes (Sperber)
• Scandals in academic dishonesty (Sperber and Dowling)
• Some elite D-1 athletes are left in a worse place than where they began
• Study about athletes who go pro (Knight Commission, Dowling, Cantral)
• Few studies on after-effects (Knight Commission)
• Dowling imagines an amateur sports program without recruitment, athletic scholarships, or TV contracts
• Without the presence of big money contracts and recruitment, athletics programs would have less temptation to cheat in regards to academic dishonesty
• Knight Commission Report
• Is there any incentive for large-scale reform?
• Is paying student athletes a real possibility?

Some writers don’t think in as linear a fashion as others, and starting with an outline might not be the first strategy to employ. Other writers rely on different organizational strategies, like mind mapping, word clouds, or a reverse outline.

More Resources 4.3: Organizing Strategies

At this point, it’s best to get some writing done, even if writing is just taking more notes and then organizing those notes. Here are a few more links to get your thoughts down in some fun and engaging ways:

• Concept Mapping
• The Mad Lib from Hell: Three Alternatives to Traditional Outlining
• Thinking Outside the Formal Outline
• Mind Mapping in Research
• Reverse Outlining

Start Drafting in the Middle

This may sound odd to some people, but it’s much easier to get started by drafting sections from the middle of your paper instead of starting with the introduction. Sections that provide background or more factual information tend to be more straightforward to write. Sections like these can even be written as you are still finalizing your argument and organizational structure.

If you’ve completed the three previous writing projects, you will likely also funnel some of your work from those projects into the final essay. Don’t just cut and paste entire chunks of those other assignments. That’s called self-plagiarism, and since those assignments serve different purposes in different genres, they won’t fit naturally into your research essay. You’ll want to think about how you are using the sources and ideas from those assignments to serve the needs of your argument. For example, you may have found an interesting source for your literature review paper, but that source may not help advance your final paper.

Draft your Introduction and Conclusion towards the End

Your introduction and conclusion are the bookends of your research essay. They prepare your reader for what’s to come and help your reader process what they have just read. The introduction leads your reader into your paper’s research, and the conclusion helps them look outward towards its implications and significance.

Many students think you should write your introduction at the beginning of the drafting stage because that is where the paper starts. This is not always the best idea. An introduction provides a lot of essential information, including the paper’s method, context, organization, and main argument. You might not have all of these details figured out when you first start drafting your paper. If you wait until much later in the drafting stage, the introduction will be much easier to write. In fact, most academic writers and researchers wait until the rest of their project—a paper, dissertation, or book—is completed before they write the introduction.

A good introduction does not need to be long. In fact, short introductions can impressively communicate a lot of information about a paper when the reader is most receptive to new information. You don’t need to have a long hook or anecdote to catch the reader’s attention, and in many disciplines, big, broad openings are discouraged. Instead, a good introduction to a research essay usually does the following:

• defines the scope of the paper
• indicates its method or approach
• gives some brief context (although more significant background may be saved for a separate section)
• offers a road map

If we think about research as an ongoing conversation, you don’t need to think of your conclusion as the end—or just a repetition of your argument. No matter the topic, you won’t have the final word, and you’re not going to tie up a complicated issue neatly with a bow. As you reach the end of your project, your conclusion can be a good place to reflect about how your research contributes to the larger conversations around your issue.

Think of your conclusion as a place to consider big questions. How does your project address some of the larger issues related to your topic? How might the conversation continue? How might it have changed? You might also address limits to existing research. What else might your readers want to find out? What do we need to research or explore in the future?

You need not answer every question. You’ve contributed to the conversation around your topic, and this is your opportunity to reflect a little about that. Still looking for some additional strategies for introductions and conclusions? Try this additional resource:

More Resources 4.4: Introductions and Conclusions

If you’re a bit stuck on introductions and conclusions, check out these helpful links:

• Introductions & Writing Effective Introductions
• Guide to Writing Introductions and Conclusions
• Conclusions & Writing Effective Conclusions

Putting It All Together

This chapter is meant to help you get all the pieces together. You have a strong foundation with your research and lots of strategies at your disposal. That doesn’t mean you might not still feel overwhelmed. Two useful strategies are making a schedule and writing out a checklist.

You likely have a due date for your final draft, and maybe some additional dates for submitting rough drafts or completing peer review workshops. Consider expanding this schedule for yourself. You might have specific days set aside for writing or for drafting a certain number of words or pages. You can also schedule times to visit office hours, the library, or the writing center (especially if your writing center takes appointments—they fill up quickly at the end of the semester!). The more you fill in specific dates and smaller goals, the more likely you will be to complete them. Even if you miss a day that you set aside to write four hundred words, it’s easier to make that up than saying you’ll write an entire draft over a weekend and not getting much done.

Another useful strategy is assembling a checklist, as you put together all the pieces from your research, citations, key quotes, data, and different sections. This allows you to track what you have done and what you still need to accomplish. You might review your assignment’s requirements and list them out so you know when you’ve hit the things like required sources or minimum length. It also helps remind you towards the end to review things like your works cited and any other key grammar and style issues you might want to revisit.

You’re much closer to completing everything than you think. You have all the research, you have all the pieces, and you have a good foundation. You’ve developed a level of understanding of the many sources you have gathered, along with the writing projects you have written. Time to put it all together and join the conversation.

Key Takeaways

• Your research essay adds to the conversation surrounding your topic.
• Begin drafting your essay and trust that your ideas will continue to develop and evolve.
• As you assemble your essay, rely on what works for you, whether that is outlining, mindmapping, checklists, or anything else.
• You have come far. The end is in sight.

Clemson Libaries. (2016). “Joining the (Scholarly) Conversation.”  YouTube . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79WmzNQvAZY

Fosslien, L. Remember how much progress you’ve made [Image].

Graff, G. & Birkenstein, C. (2017). They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing . W. W. Norton and Co.

Guptill, A. (2016). Constructing the Thesis and Argument—From the Ground Up : Writing in College . Open SUNY Textbooks.

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts . Second Edition. Utah State University Press, 2017.

Writing for Inquiry and Research Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Kessler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Writing for Inquiry and Research

Jeffrey Kessler, University of Illinois Chicago

Mark Bennett, University of Illinois Chicago

Sarah Primeau, University of Illinois Chicago

Charitianne Williams, University of Illinois Chicago

Virginia Costello, University of Illinois Chicago

Annie R. Armstrong, University of Illinois Chicago

Copyright Year: 2023

ISBN 13: 9781946011213

Publisher: University of Illinois Library - Urbana

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Angelica Rivera, Director, Northeastern Illinois University on 4/16/24

This book consists of a Preface, Introduction, Chapters I thru Chapter IV. and it also has an Appendix I to Appendix III. Chapter I covers the Annotated Bibliography, Chapter II covers the Proposal, Chapter III covers the Literature Review and... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This book consists of a Preface, Introduction, Chapters I thru Chapter IV. and it also has an Appendix I to Appendix III. Chapter I covers the Annotated Bibliography, Chapter II covers the Proposal, Chapter III covers the Literature Review and Chapter IV covers the Research Essay. Each section is broken down into smaller sections to break down each topic. The book is written by 3 different authors who are experts in their field and who write about different writing genres. The authors are interdisciplinary in their approach which means students in various disciplines can use the manual to begin their inquiry process and continue with their research process. This book also has short videos that provide explanations, and references after every chapter to provide additional learning resources. Appendix I covers Reading Strategies, Appendix II covers Writing Strategies and Appendix III covers Research Strategies. Appendix I and Appendix II also have additional resources for reading and writing strategies. This book will help most first year students who are transitioning from high school to college.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

This book is accessible for first year students who are in English, Composition or First year experience courses. However, the authors note that there are some limits to the topics addressed as the text does not cover research methods, databases, plagiarism and emerging writing technologies. The authors believe that writing is a human based process regardless of the tools and technologies that one uses when writing.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This book is well researched and will survive the test of time as it is accessible and will serve as a reference tool for a student who is looking to develop their writing question and develop their research approach.

Clarity rating: 5

This book is well researched, well organized and well written.

Consistency rating: 5

There was consistency throughout the text as all of the authors had experience with working with first year students and/or with the writing process.

Modularity rating: 5

The first 3 chapters can be assigned in any order but the fourth chapter should be the 4th step as that part consists of writing the actual research essay. This book is not meant to be used by itself and thus provides additional bibliographic sources and topics to further develop one’s knowledge of the writing process.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

This book is written in the logical process of developing a research question and then conducting the research. An instructor can easily assign these chapters in chronological order and it will help the student to brainstorm to create their question and then follow the steps to conduct their research.

Interface rating: 5

There were no issues with the books interface.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I found this manuscript to be well written and it contained no visible grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I found this book to be neutral and accessible to all students irrespective of their various backgrounds.

I give this book 5 stars because it helps students and instructors break down the research process into smaller steps which can be completed in a semester-long course in research writing.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Annotated Bibliography
• Chapter 2: Proposal
• Chapter 3: Literature Review
• Chapter 4: Research Essay
• Appendix I: Writing Strategies
• Appendix II: Reading Strategies
• Appendix III: Research Strategies

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Writing for Inquiry and Research guides students through the composition process of writing a research paper. The book divides this process into four chapters that each focus on a genre connected to research writing: the annotated bibliography, proposal, literature review, and research essay. Each chapter provides significant guidance with reading, writing, and research strategies, along with significant examples and links to external resources. This book serves to help students and instructors with a writing-project-based approach, transforming the research process into an accessible series of smaller, more attainable steps for a semester-long course in research writing. Additional resources throughout the book, as well as in three appendices, allow for students and instructors to explore the many facets of the writing process together.

About the Contributors

Jeffrey C. Kessler is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research and teaching interrogate the intersections of writing, fiction, and critical university studies. He has published about the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater. He earned his PhD from Indiana University.

Mark Bennett has served as director of the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) First-Year Writing Program since 2012. He earned his PhD in English from UIC in 2013. His primary research interests are in composition studies and rhetoric, with a focus on writing program administration, course placement, outcomes assessment, international student education, and AI writing.

Sarah Primeau serves as the associate director of the First-Year Writing Program and teaches first-year writing classes at University of Illinois Chicago. Sarah has presented her work at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference, and the Cultural Rhetorics Conference. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Wayne State University, where she focused on composition pedagogy, cultural rhetorics, writing assessment, and writing program administration.

Charitianne Williams is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago focused on teaching first-year composition and writing center studies. When she’s not teaching or thinking about teaching, she’s thinking about writing.

For more than twenty years, Virginia Costello has been teaching a variety of English composition, literature, and gender studies courses. She received her Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 2010 and is presently Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University of Illinois Chicago. Early in her career, she studied anarcho-catholicism through the work of Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker Movement. She completed research at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and has published articles on T.S. Eliot, Emma Goldman, and Bernard Shaw. More recently, she presented her work at the Modern Studies Association conference (Portland, OR, 2022), Conference on College Composition and Communication (Chicago, Il, 2023) and Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle (Tallinn, Estonia, 2022 and Bogotá, Columbia, 2023). Her research interests include prison reform/abolition, archē in anarchism, and Zen Buddhism.

Annie Armstrong has been a reference and instruction librarian at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois Chicago since 2000 and has served as the Coordinator of Teaching & Learning Services since 2007. She serves as the library’s liaison to the College of Education and the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on enhancing and streamlining the research experience of academic library users through in-person and online information literacy instruction.

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13.10: Student Inquiry Essay Examples

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COMMUNITY DESTRUCTION IN NORTH DAKOTA OIL BOOMTOWNS Katharine Berry

Jonnie Cassens is a truck driver who hoped that her move to a North Dakota oil boomtown would help her recover from her previous life in California. In the documentary “Running on Fumes in North Dakota,” she explains how the lifestyle emerging from North Dakota’s rapid oil boom isn’t as glamorous as it is often portrayed; in fact, it is a dirty and unpleasant life. Jonnie’s move from California has left her isolated and lonely with no one to turn to for support or companionship. She expresses her longing for a female friend to “gossip with” or someone she can “get a pedicure with,” but the oil boom has created a society dominated by men and a fractured community (Christenson). Jonnie may be physically alone, but she is not alone in her feeling that the oil boom has resulted in isolation and loneliness. Life-long residents and brand new residents of boomtowns fear the crime, prostitution, and influx of drugs that oil has drawn to North Dakota, and workers often face brutal conditions (Stewart). The unreliable and temporary nature of the North Dakota oil boom has disrupted the existing communities in this region and created deep divisions, preventing new communities from forming. Ultimately, the oil boom undermines community in all forms.

The cohesive rural communities that existed near oil reserves in North Dakota have disintegrated and been destroyed by the nature of the oil boom in the region (Brown). The rapid population flood has created problems of supply and demand in many aspects, especially in relation to housing. There is a great need for housing in the oil boomtowns but little availability, which drives up rent to prices approaching those in urban San Francisco (Warren). These extreme rent increases have made it difficult for many long-time residents to continue to afford their homes and many families are forced to find new housing outside of the region (Stewart). In New Town, North Dakota, a large trailer park, Prairie Winds, which has been home to several Native American tribes for decades, epitomizes this problem. The trailer parks’ new owner raised rents and evicted the long-term residents in order to provide housing for oil workers (Mufson). The original residents were left without roofs over their heads, and unfortunately this type of community destruction is not uncommon. As the oil boom drives housing prices up, families and loved ones are split up. Due to the limited availability of housing in the region, many people leave the area completely. These drastic rent increases have not only taken residents’ housing but their sense of home as well. To make matters worse, the history of oil booms in the region—which features promises of great success followed by sudden failures that leave the state in debt—has left many people skeptical, including construction developers. Since the construction industry anticipates that the region’s oil supply will eventually run out, no new housing is being built to ameliorate the housing crisis. Therefore, the high demand for housing will continue and long-term residents will be driven further from their communities.

Additionally, among residents who try to take advantage of the conditions the boom has created, there is a general consensus that the profit is not worth the trouble (Mufson). Some residents have leased out their land and minerals in exchange for a profit from the oil companies; however, the oil companies have caused physical destruction to residents’ property, leaving them disappointed and angry (Stone). In an interview with a North Dakota native published by The Washington Post , Donnie Nelson reflects on the two oil rigs on his property: “‘I don’t like what it’s done for our communities and lifestyle,’ he said. ‘We had a good life, and now it’s gone forever, or at least for my lifetime’” (Mufsan). He also reports that he would “‘give it all back for the trouble it’s been’” (Mufsan). Bert Hauge, another long-time resident, has large trenches on his property and cows with serious health problems as a result of the boom (Stone). These residents are left disapproving and discontented with the oil boom. North Dakotans remain skeptical that the promises of twenty years of success from this boom will become a reality, and instead believe that this boom will follow the limited course of previous booms (Lindholm). This bitterness has turned existing communities into a group of isolated individuals. No matter what their situation, all long-time North Dakotans share one commonality: they miss the time, before the oil boom, when communities “didn’t lock their doors and knew all their neighbors” (Mufson). While long-term residents in North Dakota have felt their communities disintegrate, employers in the oil industry have simultaneously prevented new communities from forming. This has resulted in deep divisions between employers and employees and further divisions among employees themselves. The “suits” (as the oil industry employers are called) have dehumanized workers and created an animal kingdom of men. They have mistreated men by implementing long hours and challenging and dirty work (Gale). Employees of the oil industry are on a schedule of approximately twelve-hour workdays for two weeks straight followed by two weeks of no work, but there is some degree of scheduling uncertainty, and sudden decisions often change schedules at the last minute (Chaudhry). These conditions create the sense of a temporary and easily replaceable environment, implying that the employees are inferior to the “suits.” With uncaring employers, there is a certain degree of animosity that allows workers to be deindividualized and take on the role of “rough and tumble oil worker” (Gale). Most workers are away from their homes and families and remain free of ties to any community in the region; occasionally workers act without being held accountable. This misbehavior has resulted in rising crime and drug use, problems that continue to grow (Healy).

There might be potential for workers to bond over their dehumanization, loneliness and desire for success, but because of the limited resources in the region, workers must compete, making the formation of community impossible. The housing scarcity has created massive competition between workers over housing (Chaudhry). Temporary man-camps of workers are now abundant, along with RV neighborhoods and thousands of vehicles that have been transformed into homes (Sulzberger). This competition is a free-for-all, and men who cannot find anything substantial have resorted to anything that will be sufficient for a temporary residence. With the harsh winters, some workers are finding it difficult to even stay alive. The inflation in the region also makes eating at restaurants practically impossible (Chaudhry). In a society with so many workers in the same situation, new communities could practically fall into place, but these workers face such a range of harsh conditions and obtaining basic requirements like housing and food take precedence over forming new communities.

The undermining of community caused by the oil industry in North Dakota isn’t the state or nation’s primary concern, and it is obvious that the economic benefits resulting from the boom are overwhelming. This oil boom could bring energy independence to the United States, which some might argue is sufficient reason to overlook community destruction. However, the oil boom has also brought health risks and environmental disturbances. Do the economic benefits outweigh the environmental, health and community drawbacks of oil boomtowns? Workers begin to wonder if leaving their families and homes for an uncertain amount of time, facing hard and lonely conditions, and performing dangerous work is really worth the extra income they will make. Others may wonder if the extreme yet temporary success of the oil industry in the region should be unthinkingly prioritized, especially given the destruction to the family land of native North Dakotans.

Is the temporary success of these modern boomtowns worth the potential long-term consequences they bring? As long as the boom benefits the nation as a whole, it is unlikely that there will be any changes to the industry, which leaves the residents of these North Dakota boomtowns more lonely and isolated than ever with no definite end in sight. This leaves residents like Jonnie Cassens in her trailer, which has no running water or toilet—and instead of confiding and bonding with a friend, the only relationship she has is with her dog.

Works Cited

Brown, Chip. “North Dakota Went Boom.” The New York Times. 31 Jan. 2013. Web. 29 Mar. 2014.

Chaudhry, Mat. Northern Utopia: Rebirth of American Dream: North Dakota Oil Employment. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Kindle.

Christenson, James, Eliot Popko, Jonah Sargent, and Lewis Wilcox. “Running on Fumes in North Dakota.” The New York Times. 13 Jan 2014. Web. 13 Apr 2014. Video.

Cohen, Sharon. “Trying to Combat Growing Drug Trade in Oil Patch.” The Washington Post. 14 Apr 2014. Web. 24 Apr 2014.

Sweet Crude Man Camp. Dir. Gale, Isaac. Prod. Alec Soth. From: Life Inside an Oil Boom. The New York Times. 8 Feb 2013. Web. 13 Apr 2014. Documentary.

Greenwald, Judy. “Rail Risks Expand As Oil Shipments Boom.” Business Insurance 48.5 (2014): 0013. Business Source Complete . Web. 31 Mar. 2014.

Healy, Jack. “As Oil Floods Plains Towns, Crime Pours In.” The New York Times. 30 Nov 2013. Web. 13 Apr 2014.

Lindholm, Meg. “Flock to North Dakota Oil Town Leads to Housing Crisis.” All Things Considered. National Public Radio. 28 May 2010. Web. 6 Apr 2014. Transcript.

Mufson, Steven. “In North Dakota, The Gritty Side of an Oil Boom.”

The Washington Post. 18 July 2012. Web. 24 Apr 2014.

Oldham, Jennifer. “North Dakota Oil Boom Brings Blight With Growth as Cost Soar.” Bloomberg. 24 Jan. 2012. Web. 29 Mar. 2014.

Schultz, E J. “Williston: The Town the Recession Forgot.” Advertising Age, 82.39, 31 Oct. 2011: 1. Web. 5 April 2014.

Stewart, Dan. “North Dakota: Trouble in Boomtown.” The Week. 19 Sept. 2013. Web. 29 Mar 2014.

Stone, Andrea. “Oil Boom Creates Millionaires and Animosity in North Dakota.” USA Today. N.d. Web. 24 Apr 2014.

Sulzberger, A.G. “Oil Rigs Bring Camps of Men to the Prairie”. The New York Times. 25 Nov 2011. Web. 28 Mar 2014.

Warren, Michael. “Highest Rents Found in Oil Boom Towns of North Dakota.” The Weekly Standard. 14 Feb 2014. Web. 28 Mar 2014.

Instructor’s Memo Kate’s essay is a testament to how individual stories can make large-scale geopolitical debates feel real and emotionally relevant. Over the past year, the news cycle has featured stories of the Keystone XL pipeline bill, global warming, and peak oil, but Kate leaves us with the image of a woman living alone in a trailer near the North Dakota oil fields. As Kate notes, this woman is surviving without running water or a toilet, her only significant relationship with her dog. Reading Kate’s paper, I am reminded that arguments—even critical and scholarly ones—are sometimes more effective when conveyed through images as opposed to direct statements. Kate did a tremendous amount of research for this project. Her sources range from newspaper articles to videos to radio transcripts to full-length books. This research allowed her to situate her argument within the larger historical context of boomtowns while also quoting contemporary residents of North Dakota oil communities. Kate’s research also allowed her to consider her argument from multiple perspectives: if existing communities in North Dakota are undermined by the sudden economic influx of an oil boom, then the people who arrive to work in the oil fields also report feeling dislocated and lonely. In this sense, Kate’s writing helps us understand how there are always multiple perspectives on disaster. — Sarah Dimick Writer’s Memo The skills I learned in English 100 have helped me to become a much better writer because I learned the basics of how to compose a good paper, not just how to write to meet the requirements for a specific paper. When told that we would write the last paper of the semester about a contested place, I had no idea what I would write about. In class, we read several pieces from various sources that gave us an idea of what a contested place could look like. I asked my parents for some examples and one of them mentioned hydrolytic fracking in North Dakota. I didn’t know much about the topic but I liked that it was a contested place in the U.S. Determining a topic to write about was one of the hardest parts of the paper for me, but I took the idea and looked at a specific aspect within the place — the communities. I knew very little about what was happening in the oil boomtowns in North Dakota, and even less about the communities within them. In class, we learned how to: gather information and utilize library resources, integrate quotations, write a thesis, and structure an essay and the paragraphs in it; all of which made writing the paper less intimidating. I met with my teacher periodically throughout the writing process, which in turn helped me stay on top of the paper and do the necessary work to write a great paper. I have never enjoyed writing and have instead dreaded it, generally finding it to be intimidating and overwhelming. However, after learning skills to write a good paper, meeting consistently with my teacher, and working at a steady pace, I began to enjoy writing and I eventually produced a paper I am truly proud of. Different from many of the papers I had written before, I also enjoyed researching about the community destruction in North Dakota oil boomtowns. I found the topic fascinating, so much so that I wanted to share what I had learned with others, and get involved in some way to help address the problems in the oil boomtowns. The most challenging part of the paper was identifying what I wanted the paper to be about, and narrowing a broad idea into a specific focus that I could form into a thesis statement. I identified the main points I wanted to use, compared them and looked at what they had in common; then, my teacher helped me narrow down and look at the big picture and I determined the specific focus of the paper. After developing a thesis, the rest of the paper was easy. I realized that sometimes the thesis statement comes later on in the process, and it may change several times before it is right. The process of writing this paper has turned me into a much better writer, and I continue to use the skills I learned in English 100 for all my papers. — Katharine Berry Student Writing Award: Critical/Analytical Essay This essay was previously published in the 9th edition of CCC.

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LICENSE Community Destruction in North Dakota Oil Boomtowns by Katharine Berry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted. UNDERSTANDING MASS INCARCERATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN Ruthie Sherman

You open your eyes to concrete walls, three roommates, a couple square feet of space, and a toilet about a foot from your bed. You sit up, only to slam your head on the body of your bunkmate, resulting in a large red mark. You slowly stand up because you really have to go to the bathroom and 3:45 a.m. is the only time the guards are too tired to stare at you while you go. This hypothetical situation might seem terrifying, but it is like the common experience of millions of prisoners every day in the U.S. While most Americans are unaware of and desensitized from the consequences of being in prison, incarcerated Americans have to deal with overcrowding, lack of privacy, and isolation on a daily basis. How did this become the norm? How have so many Americans become so unjustifiably desensitized? How is this situation affecting different groups of people in the United States? To begin with, how did we decide that the punishment for crime should be incarceration?

Today, the concept of incarceration is normal. Most people would not think twice when a person is sentenced to time in jail or prison. However, this was not always the case. In The Historical Origin of the Prison System in America, Harry Elmer Barnes chronicles the evolution of criminal justice in the United States. Starting with the Colonial period, Barnes attributes the origin of the modern penal system to two institutions: jails and prisons, which he considers one institution, and workhouses. During the Colonial period, jails and prisons were locations meant only to hold prisoners until a punishment was decided after their trial, creating the practice of placing criminals in separate spaces from the majority of society. Workhouses were designed to repress people of lower class, especially poor people, and were not meant to punish criminals. However, the practice of forcing labor on lower class citizens originated with workhouses. For a long time, these two institutions existed in isolation from each other, containing the group they were constructed to manage.

American Quakers are credited with combining the practices of each institution. According to Barnes, “they originated both the idea of imprisonment as the typical mode of punishing crime, and the doctrine that this imprisonment should not be in idleness but at hard labor” (36). Without knowing it, Quakers transformed the perception and implementation of prison systems in the United States. They took the premise of prisons, isolation of criminals as punishment, and the premise of workhouses, making active use of unproductive members of society, to produce the modern practices of imprisonment and incarceration (Barnes, 36). However, the Quakers had no means of predicting how these principles and practices would become the platform for a dehumanized perspective on criminals.

When prisons were established on the belief that criminals should be isolated based on deviance, the perception of criminality and punishment shifted. Instead of a societal responsibility, there was an invisible solution. Criminals were put out of sight, barricading issues of criminal justice and punishment from the daily concerns of the majority of Americans. This enabled a dependency on criminal justice policies that absolved the larger society of responsibility or of being conscious of actively pursuing social reform for people who had committed crimes. As this dependency grew and became more institutionalized, criminals became viewed as mere shells strictly defined by crime instead of complex human beings with backgrounds and identities that could contextualize their criminal activity (Meares, 8).

According to Christina Meares, some of the invisible dynamics that could contextualize the experiences of incarcerated individuals include, “homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy and dependency on welfare.” She continues, “These are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages” (8). When people perceive criminals, not only are such dynamics generally unacknowledged, but the multifaceted ways they impact each person depending on their identities are ignored as well. As a consequence, society’s dependence on prisons to reform members of society has ignored the dynamics that were enabling and reinforcing crime among certain groups of people (Meares, 8). An unfair practice of criminal justice was established. Prisons were expected to change and reform criminals, even while society remained silent about the contexts maintaining and reinforcing criminal behavior. The silence surrounding these dynamics, which allowed individuals to be strictly defined by their crime, along with the concentration of criminals into prisons became the foundation for a dehumanized perception of the incarcerated population. And this perception of criminals fed the rise of mass incarceration, the extreme rates of imprisonment, and the manifestation of a dehumanized and racialized perception of criminals that ignores the contexts of institutional issues of poverty and race (Stevenson, 15).

While the perception of criminals has evolved since the Colonial period, mass incarceration emerged relatively recently. During the 1980s, the dynamics that society surrounded with silence, most noticeably drug use, became the defining factors that would directly lead to the rise in incarceration. Although crime was decreasing at the beginning of that decade, President Reagan started his “War on Drugs” against the use of crack cocaine (Alexander, 3). In the introduction to her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander describes how this war was not necessarily founded on an actual widespread drug problem. She writes, “[T]here is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods” (3).

Subsequently, the Reagan administration even hired staff to produce a media campaign demonizing crack cocaine, which succeeded almost immediately in gaining support from both the public and the government. Unsurprisingly, many of the images used in this campaign displayed men of color wearing stereotypical inner city clothing, implying they were the villains of the crack cocaine story. Since the public had been conditioned for nearly the entire history of the United States to depend on prisons to act as social reformers, Reagan’s so-called War on Drugs could then easily and swiftly mass incarcerate the poor people of color in the United States (Alexander, 3).

The current debate surrounding mass incarceration is dominated by discussions of how this issue impacts men of color or poor white men. But it is important to see that American patriarchal society has empowered another destructive force within the emergence of mass incarceration, namely, ignoring how this phenomenon has affected women. In Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption , the twelfth chapter, entitled “Mother, Mother,” grapples with the mass incarceration of women in the United States. Stevenson writes, “In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, a rate 1.5 times higher than the rate of men” (235-36). Stevenson credits two key components in the high rate for the mass incarceration of women: the criminalization of infant mortality and the enactment of the “Three Strikes” law, which increased sentences to life in prison for a crime when an offender had committed two or more serious crimes in the past (236). While the attitude towards criminals generally is defined purely by their crime, the attitude toward gender for female prisoners also shows that these prisoners are being subjected to strict and decontextualized definitions using the crime of the prisoner. Rather than just being criminals, drug users, thieves, or murderers, the attitude is that women prisoners are also sluts, horrible mothers, abusive mothers, and undeserving of help from society.

Stevenson notes, “[W]e’ve created a new class of ‘untouchables’ in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children” (237). Rather than consider the circumstances that may have put these women in the position of committing crimes, society defined these women as despicable and abominable (Codd, 8). Once again, society is depending on prisons to deal with the larger social issues that remain out of sight, reinforcing a dehumanized and decontextualized perception of female prisoners. While defining these women as “untouchable” because of one set of actions is entirely unjustified, this perception has been particularly destructive for women of color, especially African American women.

The intersectionality of African American women’s identities and experiences reveal how they are subjected to the worst consequences of mass incarceration. Intersectionality, the inseparable nature of one’s multiple identities and how those identities simultaneously filter one’s experience, acknowledges historical influences on stereotypes and discrimination that construct these women’s experiences. In Disappearing Acts: The Mass Incarceration of African American Women, Christina Meares described her research on white and black women’s experiences in the Georgia prisons, which aimed to quantitatively assess intersectionality as it pertains to African American women. According to Meares “The sentence inequality of black women is the result of the cumulative effects of being members of a disadvantaged race, class and gender” (2). The mass incarceration of African American women cannot be credited or understood through just one of the identities they can claim, but must be understood through a careful examination of how their identities intersect to craft their experiences. These intersecting “disadvantaged” identities reveal the unique devastating consequences of mass incarceration for African American women.

African American women experience potentially the worst consequences of mass incarceration, directly and indirectly. While the culture of incarceration in the United States has conditioned society to define prisoners strictly by their crimes, mass incarceration has embedded stereotypes and perceptions of African American women that reinforce institutions of oppression and domination. In “Black Women’s Prison Narratives and the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in US Prisons,” Breea Willingham describes how black women use writing to try to escape experiences of sexual abuse, silenced self-identity, and ostracism. Willingham quotes the writing of black female prisoners that describe sexual abuse from prison guards, a lack of support from family and friends, and a sense of isolation that extends beyond the physical prison. All three of these kinds of experiences reinforce the stereotypes that contextualized how these women arrived in prison. They support the misperception of black women as sexual objects and as less significant than other women (Willingham, 63). While examining why these black women use writing to escape their experiences, Willingham highlights the larger issue that is a relatively unique consequence for African American women: silence. She writes, “…what is different about the incarcerated black woman’s story is that it allows some of these women to express themselves and define their existence—to tell us that they still matter despite their absence” (64).

African American women’s relative absence from mainstream society in combination with their almost non-existent social power eliminates any potential for this group to be defined by its members. Rather, the conditioned perception of incarceration, the stereotypes of African American women, and the combination of these two socially embedded perceptions allows the dominant members of society the power to define African American women. This reinforces systemic oppression and domination of African American women, resulting in a group that exists in society without the capacity to present their own definition of their identity. The inability to construct a definition of oneself because of the intersecting membership between two disadvantaged groups is an unprecedented and unjustified consequence that uniquely impacts African American women due to mass incarceration. This complex understanding of the issue lacks the magnification received largely by African American men in mass media, further silencing African American women and distancing them from control over how they are perceived. While these issues cannot be solved merely by media attention, extending the conversation of this issue to its impact on African American women could create more opportunities for collaboration between groups to fight against discrimination and oppression. However, the mass incarceration of African American women requires a critical examination of the history of this group in the United States in order to attempt to dismantle oppressive institutional structures.

Works Cited Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2010. Print. Barnes, Harry E. “The Historical Origin of the Prison System in America.” J ournal of Criminal Law and Criminology 12.1. (1921): 35-60. Print. Codd, Val. “Women and the Prison Industrial Complex”. Off Our Backs 31.2 (2001): 8–8. Web. Meares, Christina Faye, Disappearing Acts: The Mass Incarceration of African American Women. Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011. Print. Mustakeem, Sowande. “Suffering at the Margins: (Re)Centering Black Women in Discourses on Violence and Crime.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42.3 (2014): 323-7. ProQuest. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. Stevenson, Bryan. “Mother, Mother.” Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014. 227-41. Print. Willingham, Breea C. “Black Women’s Prison Narratives and the Intersection of Race, Gender, And Sexuality In US Prisons.” Critical Survey 23.3 (2011): 55-66. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. Instructor’s Memo As the final major writing assignment for our English 100 class, part of a First-Year Interest Group whose theme was the Immigrant Experience in Education, students were asked to write an argumentative paper addressing an issue of social or cultural importance to a marginalized group. As an extra wrinkle, students were required to choose a group to which they did not belong, so that the task of advocating for the issue necessitated cultural empathy, or imagining the lived experience of people with whom one might have very little in common. The class, a diverse cohort of students who had spent the semester discussing issues of discrimination and appropriation in all of their FIG classes, including English 100, worked together to develop the theme and requirements of the final paper, which included a companion presentation/multimedia project. Ruthie’s essay, “Understanding Mass Incarceration of African American Women,” is an excellent example of a writer framing, analyzing and making a forceful argument about an issue concerning a very specific social group. One of the most powerful moments in the piece comes in its very first paragraph. “You open your eyes to concrete walls,” she writes, immediately placing the reader within the lived experience of an incarcerated person through vivid, concrete imagery and the deft use of second-person point of view. Throughout the process of drafting and revising, Ruthie took note of the fact that she had learned to be unafraid to use such techniques, normally associated with more “creative” or narrative forms of writing, in an argumentative, academic piece of writing. Doing so here allows the author to ease the reader into the more analytical, idea-driven parts of the paper by touching on an often- overlooked truth: abstract issues have a significant impact on real human lives. Ruthie structures this paper in a simple and powerful way. She begins by tracing the history of the more problematic trends in the American prison system, then advances her argument by narrowing her focus, first to the ways in which mass incarceration disproportionately harms African-Americans, then to the fact that black women in particular, because of the intersectionality of their race, class and gender, “experience the worst consequences of mass incarceration, directly and indirectly.” Perhaps the most impressive thing about Ruthie’s essay is that she was able to use sources and data that did not directly pertain to her topic to make a highly persuasive argument. Early in the process, she expressed frustration with the fact that though many of the sources she was reading dealt with issues of mass incarceration, racism and dehumanization, hardly any spoke to the world of the marginalized group she had chosen to write about, incarcerated African American women. She discovered that she wasn’t researching poorly or in the wrong places. The sad fact was that hardly any scholar before her had addressed the incarceration of black women in a substantive way. Instead of taking the easy way out and broadening her topic, Ruthie decided that she would fill the missing research space—with her own paper. In the essay’s second half, she quite effectively uses the concept of intersectionality to tie the broader issues to those of her group. The result, I believe, is a powerful example of what can happen when a writer-researcher trusts her own voice in telling the story she intends to tell. — Walter B. Thompson Writer’s Memo From the outset of my final assignment of my English 100 course, I was pretty excited about the endeavor because the professor gave the class some freedom in terms of the subject. There were only two real requirements when it came to the topic: it had to be about a marginalized group in American society and you could not be a member of that group. I chose to focus on the impact of mass incarceration of African American women because the discourse surrounding mass incarceration almost solely focuses on African American men. I already knew I was very passionate about criminal justice and wanted to use that passion as my momentum for working through this assignment. Since I chose a subject that I knew was so interesting to me, the actual project of researching and writing was incredibly fluid. The larger challenge occurred in outlining how I wanted to present my research. As the details and context for my subject was so vast, I found it very difficult to eliminate information and narrow my focus. However, a meeting with two of my peers during an English 100 class proved very useful in this dilemma. During our discussion of my paper, we talked through distinguishing between information that is important because it isn’t well known and information that is important to the argument I was making in the paper. Although my excitement about my subject definitely made the writing process easier, my excitement at times overwhelmed my ability to outline the paper and differentiate the key points that supported my argument from the points that I felt were important. This final assignment for English 100 was one of my first major research papers as an undergraduate. As such, the experience taught a few important lessons about researching and writing. First, if you have the option, pick a topic that fascinates you. I have found that if I am hungry to learn about something, the excitement and passion about a topic can fuel the process of a project. Second, research projects need and take time. DO NOT try to do this stuff overnight. Not only does that hurt your assignment, but it hurts your ability to absorb the information and grow from what you learn. Third, use your peers to help you. Peer reviews can seem tedious at first, but hearing another point of view about your work can help you see it in a different light to change the work for the better; also, the ability to give and receive construct criticism is a priceless skill. Doing this assignment also reaffirmed something I have learned a lot throughout my life: the more you put into something, the more you get out of it. Throwing yourself into your work can really change your work ethic as well as your perspective, so try to take advantage of these opportunities for growth. — Ruthie Sherman Student Writing Award: Informative Essay

License english 100 course readings by ruthie sherman is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license , except where otherwise noted. recognizing ptsd’s effects on health care professionals sarah lutz.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an “anxiety disorder that occurs as a result of experiencing, witnessing, or being confronted with an emotionally traumatic event. A traumatic event is defined as a situation so extreme, so severe and so powerful that it threatens to overwhelm a person’s ability to cope” (Adriaenssens, 2016, p. 1411).

When PTSD is discussed, it is almost always accompanied by a veteran’s horrific story from war or the mental struggles one is facing after being involved in a personal and traumatic event. Seldom do people associate the risk of developing PTSD with normal, everyday jobs such as being a doctor or a nurse, yet individuals in these professions experience PTSD as well. A study conducted in 2007 by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that “24 percent of ICU nurses and 14 percent of general nurses tested positive for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder” (Yu, 2016). Even so, PTSD within the healthcare profession is rarely talked about. PTSD is a serious consequence of having a high stress job that encounters trauma and suffering daily, and it can take on many forms. Yet the reasons why many health care professionals suffer from this condition and the toll this is having on their mental health and job satisfaction is rarely acknowledged.

Health care professionals, specifically nurses, are routinely confronted with stressful conditions and traumatic events. According to a review of research by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “nursing has long been considered one of the most stressful professions” (Yu, 2016). Additionally, according to Jef Adriaenssens, a researcher on stress and healthcare at Leiden University, “almost one out of three nurses met sub-clinical levels of anxiety, depression and somatic complaints and 8.5% met clinical levels of PTSD” (1411). This is due to obvious reasons such as long work hours, high patient demand, and, potentially, understaffing in some hospitals. Another aspect of the profession that causes high amounts of stress is the types of traumatic events nurses are routinely faced with.

All nurses, at some point, have to deal with potentially traumatizing situations. Specifically, emergency room nurses — who, according to Adriaenssens, have the highest incidence of PTSD symptoms compared to other nursing specialties — are especially vulnerable to post-traumatic stress reactions. This can be attributed to repeated exposure to work-related traumatic events, such as witnessing the survivors of horrific accidents or “death or serious injury of a child/adolescent” which was “perceived as the most traumatizing event.” Emergency room nurses are “routinely confronted with severe injuries, death, suicide and suffering” due mainly to the fact that they are often the first to respond to situations and are often confronted with the worst injuries and the most hectic work environments (Adriaenssens, 2012, p. 1411). By working in such conditions and witnessing horrific injuries at such a rapid pace, emergency room nurses are prone to experiencing symptoms associated with PTSD brought on merely by witnessing the results of tragic events.

High rates of PTSD among military veterans occur for more obvious reasons. They are under extreme amounts of stress and are especially prone to experiencing trauma firsthand. However, PTSD in health care professionals is usually a little different. More often than not, doctors and nurses are witnessing the results of horrific and tragic events instead of having the event happen directly to them. “The natural consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other – the stress resulting from helping or wanting to help a traumatized or suffering person” is known as secondary traumatic stress. In simpler terms, secondary traumatic stress occurs when PTSD symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, flashbacks, or nightmares, occur in caregivers as a response to seeing individuals who have been involved in traumatic events (Collins and Long, 2003, p. 418). Individuals, such as doctors and nurses, can become so empathetic to the suffering of others that they begin to experience classic PTSD symptoms, almost as if the traumatic event happened directly to them.

While secondary traumatic stress is the most common form of PTSD in health care providers, vicarious trauma can also occur. Vicarious traumatization is “the cumulative effect of working with survivors of traumatic life events. Anyone who engages empathetically with victims or survivors is vulnerable” (Collins and Long, 2003, p. 417). Vicarious traumatization is extremely similar to secondary traumatic stress because empathizing with the victim can cause the care provider to experience symptoms of PTSD, as if the event happened to them directly. Vicarious traumatization is different from secondary traumatic stress because of the way individuals cope after. After a potentially disruptive event occurs, the beliefs and assumptions of an individual are challenged and they begin to perceive their world differently, a phenomenon known as posttraumatic growth. The metaphor of an earthquake has been utilized to illustrate posttraumatic growth: “The traumatic experience needs to be seismic, such as an earthquake, to severely shake an individual’s comprehension of the world. These shaken assumptions may be the person’s understanding of the meaning of life; belief that things that happen are fair…” (Beck, 2016). After caring for an individual who has been through a particularly traumatic event, the health care provider begins to make new assumptions about the world and reassess their beliefs as a way of coping with the extreme amounts of trauma and stress. “Posttraumatic growth is viewed as a positive illusion that is an adaptive function to help a person cope with trauma. A positive illusion is a positively distorted belief a person creates when faced with a traumatic experience” (Beck, 2016).

As an example, vicarious posttraumatic growth can be observed in labor and delivery nurses. The Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses sent out a survey to members who were labor and delivery nurses and asked them to describe any positive changes in their ways of thinking about the world or their beliefs as a result of caring for women who had undergone very traumatic births. The study concluded that labor and delivery nurses who took care of women during traumatic births “reported a moderate amount of vicarious posttraumatic growth…Appreciation of Life was the dimension of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory that reflected the highest growth, followed by Relating to Others, Personal Strength, Spiritual Change, and New Possibilities” (Beck, 2016). After experiencing a traumatic birth, these labor and delivery nurses were beginning to alter their ideas about life as a way of coping with the stress they endured.

Even though these nurses were altering their ideas about life in seemingly positive ways, there is little evidence that vicarious posttraumatic growth is actually a healthy and long-term, effective way to cope. One explanation is that posttraumatic growth really isn’t growth at all. Anthony Mancini, an associate professor of psychology at Pace University, explains posttraumatic growth as a “motivated positive illusion, whose purpose is to protect us from the possibility that we may have been damaged.” He further goes on to explain an experimental study that found “when an event threatens our sense of self, we are more likely to believe that the event made us better in some way” (Mancini, 2016). Posttraumatic growth can be viewed as a positive way to temporarily cope with an especially disturbing event, however, it often proves to only act temporarily and rarely actually alters the individuals’ thoughts and perceptions for the long-term.

While posttraumatic growth is a way that nurses cope with the extreme stress they endure, there is very little attention on PTSD within healthcare professionals. Yet, job dissatisfaction and burn-out are becoming prevalent, especially within the nursing profession. According to mental health researchers Collins and Long, burnout can be described as “a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations” (Collins and Long, 2003, p. 420). This makes sense when discussing post-traumatic stress disorder. As nurses are exposed to potentially upsetting and very traumatic events over a long period of time, it is going to start taking a toll on them both physically and emotionally. As Laurie Barkin, a registered nurse, described, “nursing school does not prepare nurses for the experience of witnessing pain and suffering.” She goes on to discuss her story of beginning to experience symptoms such as nightmares, anxiety, and palpitations. She later learned that “my symptoms had a name: vicarious trauma… Unfortunately, appeals that I had made to the director of our consult service to allow staff process time were dismissed” (Barkin, 2014). Laurie Barkin’s symptoms began to control her life, and she eventually resigned from her job after the director of her consult service failed to give staff adequate time to process their emotions in a healthy way. This is a perfect example of how hospitals often dismiss symptoms of post-traumatic stress and vicarious trauma, and this dismissal could be leading to high levels of burnout and nurses being unsatisfied with their jobs.

PTSD is a serious, and often life altering condition, that health care professionals are faced with. The fact that PTSD is rarely acknowledged and discussed during nursing school and beyond is having adverse effects on nurses who find themselves faced with this disorder. With the prevalence of PTSD, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious trauma soaring, new policies and practices must be put in place both in nursing schools and hospitals in order to aid the nurses affected. By acknowledging that PTSD is real in nurses and their feelings are valid, burnout and job dissatisfaction could be addressed, and nurses could find themselves more satisfied in their profession and living happier lives.

Works Cited Adriaenssens, J. (2012). The impact of traumatic events on emergency room nurses: Findings from a questionnaire survey. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 49(11), 1411-1422. Barkin, L. (2014, July 16). Nurses and compassion fatigue. Gift From Within. Beck, C., & Eaton, C., & Gable, R. (2016). Vicarious posttraumatic growth in labor and delivery nurses. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing, 45(6), 801-812. Collins, S., & Long, A. (2003). Working with the psychological effects of trauma: Consequences for mental health-care workers. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 10, 417-424. Mancini, A. (2016, June 1). The trouble with post-traumatic growth. Psychology Today. Yu, A. (2016, April 15). Nurses say stress interferes with caring for their patients. National Public Radio. Instructor’s Memo Sarah’s research paper was submitted for a section of English 100 linked to a First-Year Interest Group for students interested in a possible nursing career. For earlier assignments, students had researched and read what could be termed “professional testimonial” writing about the working life of nurses––narratives from social media sites and from an excellent anthology of personal essays titled, I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse (L. Gutkind, ed., 2013). These narratives provide vivid and sometimes disconcerting testimony about the singular stresses that nurses may face, especially witnessing the aftermath of traumas suffered by their patients, either before they seek medical care or during treatment. One author (Schwarz) recounts a harrowing anecdote from the early days of his training, his memory of wheeling a patient with an apparently minor complaint down the hall, and looking on helplessly as the man suddenly coughs violently, vomits “a wave of blood,” and dies within moments, sitting in his wheelchair. From the beginning of the semester, then, we were having conversations about the possibility that some nurses might very well suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as a simple condition of their daily work lives. These early readings also allowed students to critically examine some of the lasting clichés attached to the nursing profession, including expectations that nurses will be exceptionally compassionate and selfless, quietly shouldering the daily psychological burden of caring for those experiencing severe pain and suffering. Later in the semester we read articles about the national nursing shortage and the challenges that many medical facilities face because of the regular burnout of their nursing staff. Sarah’s choice of research topic for her final research paper was thus an ingenious way of drawing together several important threads of learning generated from our semester of research and writing. For the final paper assignment, students who are interested in a similar topic work collaboratively in small research groups to gather a range of sources about that topic––including peer-reviewed studies, articles from trade publications (targeted to those in the nursing profession), and news sources for the general public, such as national magazines or public radio. Students are able to pool their resources and learn research techniques from one another through this process. They also discuss the articles they have found in order to identify ways of narrowing down that broad topic to find a research focus appropriate for a short paper. Sarah selected the challenge of synthesizing several peer-reviewed studies, specifically those that explain the intricate breakdown of post-traumatic symptoms for those ministering to patients in the context of trauma. In this essay she is able to integrate those more advanced scholarly studies with insights provided by mainstream journalists and the author of a professional website. It’s not an easy matter to make all these different voices “speak” to one another in an analytical paper. But Sarah draws evidence from all of these sources to offer a compelling critique about the lack of attention to PTSD within the nursing profession. Hopefully by the time she begins her own training in the field, there will be greater awareness about the mental health needs of nurses themselves. –Julia Garrett Writer’s Memo As a pre-nursing student, I found myself fascinated with researching different aspects of the nursing profession, from the different fields of nursing to the daily duties and responsibilities to the attributes of a good nurse. As I began my critical analysis on the more cliché and positive side to nursing, I began to receive feedback and suggestions from my peers and instructor on delving into the more unspoken side of nursing, the hardships that accompany the demanding job. I decided to follow this suggestion and focus my research on a dimension of nursing that is seldom discussed: PTSD. Nursing is usually not associated with this disorder, and for that reason I at first found it hard to find credible research that covered the topic. In the end I was very glad I stuck with the very specific topic of PTSD, because through my research I gained valuable insight into the profession. As far as revisions go, I found it most helpful to have as many people as possible read the entire paper, or even just certain sections I was stuck on, and then leave their feedback and revisions. I then would go back and read their revision suggestions multiple times and on different days, which allowed me to formulate additional thoughts and interpret their comments in new ways, ultimately adding to my paper in ways I had not originally thought of. Additionally, with a complex and very specific topic like this, I found it very easy to want to incorporate every small detail I learned about PTSD in healthcare, regardless of whether it was relevant, and lose sight of where the main focus of the paper was going. So I made sure I created a very strict and specific outline and only gathered information relevant to the topics outlined. This helped the paper maintain a nice flow between topics and remain coherent. Before going through this process and writing this paper, I was not a huge fan of writing critical analysis research papers. After gaining the tools, knowledge, and appreciation for gathering dependable research, utilizing the research in a way that best benefits the argument of the paper, and choosing best how to articulate and present the research in a coherent way, I learned how enjoyable it can be to pick a topic you’re passionate about and want to share with others. –Sarah Lutz Student Writing Award: Critical/Analytical Essay

License english 100 course readings by sarah lutz is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license , except where otherwise noted. genetic testing: a question of morality madeline longo.

What would you do if you could find out what your medical future has in store for you? Would you want to find out or would you rather wait until the time comes? What if finding out could possibly save your life or could at least enhance the quality of your life? What if you found out something that you did not want to know? What if you learned something detrimental and there was nothing you could do about it? These are questions people think about before undergoing genetic testing. There are no correct answers, but different responses could result in many different outcomes.

Since the early 1900s, scientists have recognized the connection between inherited diseases and chromosomes. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists started to develop tests for genetic conditions like Down syndrome (Trisomy 21), cystic fibrosis, and Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy (Dept. of Health & Human Services 1). Today, more than five hundred laboratories offer genetic testing for over two thousand rare and common conditions (1). By looking at the different perspectives of geneticists, patients, consumers, doctors, and ethicists, the many benefits of genetic testing can be shown as well as the lack of prevalence of negative outcomes associated with genetic testing.

There are two different categories of genetic testing: clinical genetic tests and research genetic tests. Diagnostic tests, pre- symptomatic tests, carrier tests, prenatal tests, newborn screening and pharmacogenomics tests all fall under the category of clinical genetic tests. These tests are ordered by a healthcare professional and are done in certified labs. Research genetic tests are volunteer based for exploratory studies. Both clinical genetic tests and research genetic tests look at DNA strands to find abnormalities that can put a person at greater risk to develop a disease. In the past, only one gene could be tested at a time, but today geneticists can screen thousands of genes simultaneously (Univ. of Iowa 2). Most people choose to have a genetic test performed to find the cause of a disease, to find out if they are a carrier of a disease, or to see if their children will develop the disease. Healthcare providers can use this information to find the best treatment and the most appropriate counseling to prepare a person for their future.

The genetic testing process can be broken down into six steps. As detailed by the University of Iowa, the first step is talking to a genetic counselor or a doctor to learn about insurance coverage and the possibility of insurance discrimination. In the office, the doctor will typically take a blood sample and send it to the lab. The next step is getting the DNA from the sample, which is followed by sequencing the DNA to look for abnormalities. The lab will then take the DNA and put it into a DNA sequencer which will collect data on the patients’ genetic makeup. The fourth and fifth steps include analyzing the DNA and then interpreting what it means. Finally, the lab will give back the results to the genetic counselor or doctor and they will share the information with the patient (3). The information provided from genetic testing can be very useful in planning for the future, but it can also be a burden to those who are not ready to accept what the future holds.

In order to evaluate the benefit of genetic testing relative to the possible burdens it could pose for a patient, it is important to look at the causes and the need for genetic testing. Genetic testing can be most useful for diagnosing prenatal abnormalities, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Prenatal genetic testing is a way for the parent to find out if the fetus has a genetic condition. Typically, most people who are participating in prenatal genetic testing are looking to see if the fetus has a chance of developing autism, Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, or sickle cell anemia (Chen 125). This information can help the parents of the fetus to make an informed decision about whether or not to continue the pregnancy and allow for early interventions with affected newborns. Predispositions to cancer can also be predicted using genetic testing, and with the prevalence of cancer in today’s society, early testing and treatment of cancer can save countless lives.

Genetic testing for cancer can have many outcomes. In the article “The Breast Cancer Gene and Me” published in the New York Times on September 25, 2015, Elizabeth Wurtzel shares her experience with genetic testing for breast cancer. Elizabeth Wurtzel is a descendent of the Ashkenazi Jews. Biologically, that means she has a one in forty chance of being breast cancer or BRCA-positive, which is ten times the rate of the rest of the population. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with breast cancer before these tests were available and had to go through eight rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy. All of these treatments might have been avoided if she had been tested for a genetic abnormality earlier because she could have chosen to have a mastectomy with reconstruction to keep the cancer from spreading. Wurtzel’s experience suggests how useful genetic testing can be because it would have clearly benefited her health as well as the quality of her life. She serves as an excellent example for why many who have a history of diseases in family or cultural lines from genetic abnormalities should get preemptive genetic testing.

Another predictive genetic test can be conducted for Alzheimer’s. By looking at the experience Jane Neilson had with predictive testing for Alzheimer’s disease, the benefits of genetic testing become even clearer. In the article, “A Patient’s Perspective on Genetic Counseling and Predictive Testing for Alzheimer’s Disease,” Neilson offers her opinions on genetic testing and shares her story. Neilson comes from a family with a history of Alzheimer’s disease and was concerned with her own susceptibility. This led her to request information about predictive genetic testing. She describes how she thought long and hard about the possible outcomes with her husband, and ultimately agreed to continue with the process because it would be better to know ahead of time if she will be affected by the disease so she could plan accordingly. Unfortunately, Neilson learned at her first appointment that she was not qualified for the specific DNA test because of her family history. In the article, she writes “after all my introspection on the subject, there were no clear answers, only fog. I went through agony and soul searching only to be cheated. No tests were available for me. I was also relieved. I didn’t have to go through with it.” Neilson continued to describe how she came to terms with temporarily not knowing her medical future, but she’s optimistic that a test will be available for her someday. Neilson’s case acts as an example of the negative side of genetic testing and its potential burden on a patient for future health problems. Neilson’s case also acts as an example of how genetic testing is not always an option for patients, despite a person’s interest in finding out their genetic predispositions and medical future.

Besides the patients who directly benefit from genetic testing, the families of people with genetic diseases can benefit as well. If a person has been established as at-risk to a disease, family members can also undergo the process of genetic testing. They can have the same benefit of knowing what their future holds and having a chance to prepare for what is to come. They will then also have the possibility of stopping or slowing the progression of the disease. Stephen Post and Peter Whitehouse write about the possibility of someone experiencing “relief from not carrying the familial variant” in “The Clinical Introduction of Genetic Testing for Alzheimer’s Disease.” A family member finding out they do not carry the variant could provide an even greater benefit to the patient and other family members. That is because it would determine the disease is not genetic and most likely stems from an environmental or lifestyle issue. In turn, this could give researchers and care providers more information on the progression of the specific disease.

The patients and families mentioned here so far all see the value in genetic testing, because of the benefit it promises in terms of planning for their futures and the possibility of controlling the full effects of a known disease before it can get worse. In addition, people without a specific disease concern have shown an interest in knowing about themselves and their genetic DNA makeup, and genetic testing can allow for this. Today, many people feel like they have a right to their DNA information and believe they have ownership of their genetic makeup. Now that the means for testing is available, it is more common for people to “seek such testing ‘out of curiosity,’ for the ‘fun factor,’ because they self-identify as early adopters of new technologies or because they want to contribute to genomics research” (Bunnik, Janssens, Schermer). This shift in attitudes towards the adoption of genetic testing shows that testing isn’t only for a patient’s use, but for an interested consumer to use as well. The consumer notion is that genetic testing has psychological, social, and emotional benefits.

Since there has been a tremendous consumer interest in genetic testing as a social and psychological trend, labs have started to offer direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. This at-home genetic test is a way for someone to find out their genetic information without a genetic counselor or a doctor involved. Typically, one who purchases the kit will either take a cotton swab sample from the inside of their cheek or collect their saliva in a test tube and send it to the lab. The consumer will be notified when their results are ready. The problem with this method is that the average consumer will not know how to read their results accurately. A person might, for example, assume they have a life threatening disease when they don’t. Also, at-home genetic testing does not look at environmental factors, lifestyle choices, or family medical history, all of which can play a large role in the probability of developing a disease. One study on DTC genetic testing has this to say: “the present findings suggest that general practitioners should have the ability to clarify for interested individuals the way in which different genetic mutations are characterized by different risk probabilities, and the meaning attributed to these risk probabilities” by showing the “inconsistencies in the extent and quality of information provided by DTC testing” (Sherman 712). What this means is that the DTC at- home genetic tests cannot provide information as accurate as lab performed tests, and thus it is important to contact a professional to go over the results if they are not clear.

In general, professionals who can evaluate genetic results value the life of the patient and want to provide them with the best healthcare possible. Doctors see value in genetic testing because it provides them with a greater understanding of an individual patient, and it can help them direct the patient down the appropriate path given the specific set of circumstances. In a study of 363 doctors, ninety-eight percent said they would refer their patients to a genetic counselor, and ninety-five percent believed that the doctor has the responsibility to counsel patients about genetic testing (Menasha, Schechter, Willned 144). This significant number shows the value healthcare providers see in genetic testing and how they want to support their patients throughout the genetic testing process. More specifically, Stephen Post and Peter Whitehouse argue that more government funding should be given to genetic testing research because it can be so beneficial for the patients (835). With more funding, geneticists would be able to do more research on other diseases which, in turn, could help more people detect such diseases, slow their progression, and possibly stop the disease completely.

Both patients and healthcare providers see value in genetic testing, but one of the main issues with genetic testing is the ethics surrounding it. In “Ethical Language and Themes in News Coverage of Genetic Testing,” David Craig breaks down the issues of genetic testing into four different categories: (1) whether you want to know your likely medical future, (2) what you would do with the information, (3) the complexity of the choices people face because of developments in genetic testing, and (4) the possibility of discrimination based on genetic information (165-166). It could be argued that whether or not you want to know your likely medical future is not related to ethics as closely as the other three categories. Whether or not a person wants to know what their medical future holds is a personal choice, and genetic testing is very black and white. It is what people choose to do with the information from genetic testing that brings ethics into question and causes genetic testing to enter a grey area.

As an example of the grey area of genetic testing, let’s look at a situation involving a pregnant woman. A pregnant woman can decide whether or not to find out if the fetus she is carrying has Down syndrome before a child is born. Ethics comes into play when a woman finds out that her fetus does have Down syndrome, and is deciding whether or not to terminate the pregnancy based on this new information. Another example of a genetic testing controversy would be undergoing genetic testing for a specific disease that does not have a cure. Knowing that you are a carrier of a disease and not being able to do anything about it except wait for it to worsen seems awful and could put the patient into a state of depression. A third ethical controversy surrounds genetic testing and stem cell research. Because of developments in genetic testing, scientists are able to alter embryonic stem cells, which can lead to the possibility that parents will someday be able to modify their children’s physical appearance and create what is called a “designer baby.” This example alone brings in a whole new level of ethics to the idea of genetic testing.

As for the ethics of non-patient choices regarding genetic screening, tests are added to one’s medical profile, and this can lead to the risk that genetic discrimination could increase dramatically. The National Human Genome Research Institute says that “Genetic discrimination occurs if people are treated unfairly because of differences in their DNA that increase their chances of getting a certain disease.” This includes a health insurer refusing to give coverage to a woman who has a DNA difference that raises her odds of getting breast cancer. Another example provided by The National Human Genome Research Institute is that employers could use DNA information to decide whether to hire or fire employees. In fact, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) was passed to protect Americans from being treated unfairly. This law aims to prevent discrimination from both health insurers and employers. It was put in place to ease concerns about discrimination that might keep some people from getting genetic testing. It also enables people to take part in genetic research studies without fear that the information could later be used against them.

By looking at the many perspectives from geneticists, patients, consumers, doctors, and ethicists, I believe the major benefits of genetic testing outweigh the possible negatives. I’m especially persuaded by the fact that genetic testing is very important for those who have a family history of disease because the detection of predisposed diseases can help slow or prevent disease progression. In a beautiful conclusion to her article, Jane Neilson writes “genetic testing is more than genes. It tests personal beliefs about life, disease and healing. Use your gifts of knowledge, professionalism, and caring with patience.”

Essentially Neilson is saying that there is so much to be considered with genetic testing, and that genetic testing can lead a person to question their own personal beliefs. It also leads people to think about their finances and about how they want to spend the rest of their life. Knowing this information, do you think you would undergo genetic testing? In reality, there is no correct answer to the question, but I know that I would want to know what my medical future has in store for me. It wouldn’t matter whether or not it’s something detrimental. I believe the possibility of knowing ahead of time would only enhance the quality of my life.

Works Cited Bunnik, Eline M, A Cecile J W Janssens, and Maartje H N Schermer. “Personal Utility In Genomic Testing: Is There Such A Thing?.” Journal of Medical Ethics 41.4 (2015): 322-326. Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition. Web. 19 Oct. 2015. Chen, L.S., et al. “Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Qualitative Study of Attitudes toward Prenatal Genetic Testing and Termination Decisions Of Affected Pregnancies.” Clinical Genetics 88.2 (2015): 122-128. Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition. Web. 12 Oct. 2015. Craig, David A. “Ethical Language and Themes in News Coverage of Genetic Testing.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77.1 (2000): 160-174. Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 19 Oct. 2015. Department of Health & Human Services 2010, Fact Sheet 1— Genetic Testing: How it is used for Health Care, viewed 2 Nov. 2015, http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/...ticTesting-How ItIsUsedForHealthcare(NHGRI).pdf “Genetic Discrimination Fact Sheet.” Genetic Discrimination Fact Sheet. National Human Genome Research Institute. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. “How Does Genetic Testing Work?” Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2013. Print. Menasha, Joshua, Clyde Schechter, and Judith Willned. “Genetic Testing: A Physician’s Perspective.” Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine 67.2 (2000): 144-51. Bioethics Research Library. Georgetown University. Web. 2 Nov. 2015. Neilson, Jane. “A Patient’s Perspective on Genetic Counseling and Predictive Testing for Alzheimer’s Disease.” Journal of Genetic Counseling 8.1 (1999): 37-46. Springer Link. Web. 13 Oct. 2015. http://link.springer.com/article/10....:1022882503673 . Instructor’s Memo This paper is Maddy’s response to a “contextual analysis” assignment—a longer paper requiring students to unpack a culturally relevant topic from different perspectives. Students contextualized the topic of their choice through the lenses provided by various stakeholders. Maddy wanted to tackle a controversial issue in order to understand more fully why it sparks such fiery debate. While she eventually changed her topic from reproductive health to genetic testing, she maintained her attention on a controversial topic that she wanted to understand better. I like the way that Maddy uses this paper to weave together an opening background on genetic testing in general with a more substantial consideration of multiple different perspectives on this issue. She writes about genetic testing’s influence on patients and patients’ families, the manner in which it’s approached by the consumer genetic testing market, some doctors’ opinion on this issue, and what ethicists have said about it as well. There is a lot of ground to cover across all these perspectives, and Maddy’s careful organization makes it all clear. One of my favorite parts is when she dives into the ethical considerations of genetic testing and uses the David Craig piece to divide these arguments into different categories that she then connects with specific examples. In so doing, she provides an excellent example of merging outside sources with original content in order to make sense of a very complex issue. — Matthew Fledderjohann Writer’s Memo This paper is a response to a contextual analysis assignment. We were asked to pick a culturally relevant theme and evaluate the topic through at least three different perspectives. Originally, I planned to write about Planned Parenthood and reproductive health. I wanted to work with a topic that was controversial and would challenge me to learn about multiple sides of the debate. After completing some preliminary research, my interests evolved from reproductive rights to learning more about genetic testing. I had very little knowledge on the subject prior to this project, but I liked that it was a relatively new field of medicine. Before looking into scholarly sources, I spent time reading relevant opinion editorial articles published on the New York Times website. I was able to learn about what genetic testing specifically entails from the perspective of patients and patients’ families, doctors, ethicists, and the consumer genetic testing market. My next step was finding scholarly articles to support the opinions through the specified UW- Madison databases. Although genetic testing is a relatively new science there was a lot of helpful information from a variety of perspectives. After completing my research and crafting a thesis statement that would allow me to incorporate multiple perspectives, I created an outline for the paper and started writing and then rewriting based on the feedback I received from my peers and instructor to create my final piece. I’ve had time to revisit my work on this project and have not identified any significant changes, although I will continue to monitor new research on this very interesting topic. — Madeline Long o Student Writing Award: Critical/Analytical Essay

License genetic testing: a question of morality by madeline longo is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license , except where otherwise noted..

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93 The Inquiry Process in Academic Research Writing

Teaching & Learning and University Libraries

Introduction

Research assignments—resulting in final products such as term papers, essays, posters, multimedia projects, blog posts, 3-D models, etc.—are a common requirement in college courses, but they can also be a source of stress when you aren’t sure what to do. This guide is intended to decrease your stress and increase your comfort with such assignments.

Tip: Decoding Writing Assignments

Professors steeped only in the research traditions of their own discipline may be unaware of how different conducting research can be in other disciplines. They may assume you already know what they expect for the research assignment they just gave you. But that may not be true at all: you may only know about how to conduct research in another discipline or, especially if you’ve been taking courses in multiple disciplines, be utterly confused because the expectations seem to change from course to course. This handout from the Ohio State University Writing Center can help you figure out what you need to do for your assignment.

Both professional researchers and successful student researchers develop research questions. That’s because research questions are more than handy tools; they are essential to the research process.

The process of inquiry starts with developing a research question. By defining exactly what the researcher is trying to find out, these questions influence most of the rest of the steps taken to conduct the research. That’s true even if the research is not for academic purposes but for other areas of our lives.

For instance, if you’re seeking information about a health problem in order to learn whether you have anything to worry about, research questions will make it possible for you to more effectively decide whether to seek medical help–and how quickly.

Or, if you’re researching a potential employer, having developed and used research questions will mean you’re able to more confidently decide whether to apply for an internship or job there.

The confidence you’ll have when making such decisions will come from knowing that the information they’re based on was gathered by conscious thought rather than serendipity and whim.

Narrowing a Topic

For many students, having to start with a research question is the biggest difference between how they did research in high school and how they are required to carry out their college research projects. It’s a process of working from the outside in: you start with the world of all possible topics (or your assigned topic) and narrow down until you’ve focused your interest enough to be able to tell precisely what you want to find out, instead of only what you want to “write about.”

Process of Narrowing a Topic

All Possible Topics –  You’ll need to narrow your topic in order to do research effectively. Without specific areas of focus, it will be hard to even know where to begin.

Assigned Topics –  Ideas about a narrower topic can come from anywhere. Often, a narrower topic boils down to deciding what’s interesting to you. One way to get ideas is to read background information in a source like Wikipedia.

Topic Narrowed by Initial Exploration –  It’s wise to do some more reading about that narrower topic to a) learn more about it and b) learn specialized terms used by professionals and scholars who study it.

Topic Narrowed to Research Question(s) –  A research question defines exactly what you are trying to find out. It will influence most of the steps you take to conduct the research.

ACTIVITY: Which Topic Is Narrower?

Open activity in a web browser.

Why Narrow a Topic?

Once you have a need for research—say, an assignment—you may need to prowl around a bit online to explore the topic and figure out what you actually want to find out and write about.

For instance, maybe your assignment is to develop a poster about “spring” for an introductory horticulture course. The instructor expects you to narrow that topic to something you are interested in and that is related to your class.

Ideas about a narrower topic can come from anywhere. In this case, a narrower topic boils down to deciding what’s interesting to you about “spring” that is related to what you’re learning in your horticulture class and small enough to manage in the time you have.

One way to get ideas would be to read about spring in Wikipedia, looking for things that seem interesting and relevant to your class, and then letting one thing lead to another as you keep reading and thinking about likely possibilities that are more narrow than the enormous “spring” topic. (Be sure to pay attention to the references at the bottom of most Wikipedia pages and pursue any that look interesting. Your instructor is not likely to let you cite Wikipedia, but those references may be citable scholarly sources that you could eventually decide to use.)

Or, instead, if it is spring at the time you could start by just looking around, admire the blooming trees on campus, and decide you’d like your poster to be about bud development on your favorites, the crabapple trees.

Anna Narrows Her Topic and Works on a Research Question

The Situation: Anna, an undergraduate, has been assigned a research paper on Antarctica. Her professor expects students to (1) narrow the topic on something more specific about Antarctica because they won’t have time to cover that whole topic. Then they are to (2) come up with a research question that their paper will answer.

The professor explained that the research question should be something they are interested in answering and that it must be more complicated than what they could answer with a quick Google search. He also said that research questions often start with either the word “how” or “why.”

What you should do:

• Read what Anna is thinking below as she tries to do the assignment.
• After the reading, answer the questions at the end of the monologue in your own mind.
• Check your answers with ours at the end of Anna’s interior monologue.
• Keep this demonstration in mind the next time you are in Anna’s spot, and you can mimic her actions and thinking about your own topic.

Anna’s Interior Monologue

Okay, I am going to have to write something—a research paper—about Antarctica. I don’t know anything about that place—I think it’s a continent. I can’t think of a single thing I’ve ever wanted to know about Antarctica. How will I come up with a research question about that place? Calls for Wikipedia, I guess.

At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica . Just skimming. Pretty boring stuff. Oh, look– Antarctica’s a desert! I guess “desert” doesn’t have to do with heat. That’s interesting. What else could it have to do with? Maybe lack of precipitation? But there’s lots of snow and ice there. Have to think about that—what makes a desert a desert.

It says one to five thousand people live there in research stations. Year round. Definitely the last thing I’d ever do. “…there is no evidence that it was seen by humans until the 19th century.” I never thought about whether anybody lived in Antarctica first, before the scientists and stuff.

Lots of names—explorer, explorer… boring. It says Amundson reached the South pole first. Who’s Amundson? But wait. It says, “One month later, the doomed Scott Expedition reached the pole.” Doomed? Doomed is always interesting. Where’s more about the Scott Expedition? I’m going to use that Control-F technique and type in Scott to see if I can find more about him on this page. Nothing beyond that one sentence shows up. Why would they have just that one sentence? I’ll have to click on the Scott Expedition link.

But it gives me a page called Terra Nova Expedition. What does that have to do with Scott? And just who was Scott? And why was his expedition doomed? There he is in a photo before going to Antarctica. Guess he was English. Other photos show him and his team in the snow. Oh, the expedition was named Terra Nova after the ship they sailed this time—in 1911. Scott had been there earlier on another ship.

Lots of stuff about preparing for the trip. Then stuff about expedition journeys once they were in Antarctica. Not very exciting—nothing about being doomed. I don’t want to write about this stuff.

Wait. The last paragraph of the first section says “For many years after his death, Scott’s status as tragic hero was unchallenged,” but then it says that in the 20th century people looked closer at the expedition’s management and at whether Scott and some of his team could be personally blamed for the catastrophe. That “remains controversial,” it says. Catastrophe? Personally blamed? Hmm.

Back to skimming. It all seems horrible to me. They actually planned to kill their ponies for meat, so when they actually did it, it was no surprise. Everything was extremely difficult. And then when they arrived at the South Pole, they found that the explorer Amundsen had beaten them. Must have been a big disappointment.

The homeward march was even worse. The weather got worse. The dog sleds that were supposed to meet them periodically with supplies didn’t show up. Or maybe the Scott group was lost and didn’t go to the right meeting places. Maybe that’s what that earlier statement meant about whether the decisions that were made were good ones. Scott’s diary said the crystallized snow made it seem like they were pushing and pulling the sledges through dry sand .

It says that before things turned really bad ( really bad? You’ve already had to eat your horses !), Scott allowed his men to put 30 pounds of rocks with fossils on the sledges they were pushing and dragging. Now was that sensible? The men had to push or pull those sledges themselves. What if it was those rocks that actually doomed those men?

But here it says that those rocks are the proof of continental drift. So how did they know those rocks were so important? Was that knowledge worth their lives? Could they have known?

Wow–there is drama on this page! Scott’s diary is quoted about their troubles on the expedition—the relentless cold, frostbite, and the deaths of their dogs. One entry tells of a guy on Scott’s team “now with hands as well as feet pretty well useless” voluntarily leaving the tent and walking to his death. The diary says that the team member’s last words were ”I am just going outside and may be some time.” Ha!

They all seem lost and desperate but still have those sledges. Why would you keep pulling and pushing those sledges containing an extra 30 pounds of rock when you are so desperate and every step is life or death?

Then there’s Scott’s last diary entry, on March 29, 1912. “… It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more.” Well.

That diary apparently gave lots of locations of where he thought they were but maybe they were lost. It says they ended up only 11 miles from one of their supply stations. I wonder if anybody knows how close they were to where Scott thought they were.

I’d love to see that diary. Wouldn’t that be cool? Online? I’ll Google it.

Yes! At the British museum. Look at that! I can see Scott’s last entry IN HIS OWN HANDWRITING!

Actually, if I decide to write about something that requires reading the diary, it would be easier to not have to decipher his handwriting. Wonder whether there is a typed version of it online somewhere?

Maybe I should pay attention to the early paragraph on the Terra Nova Expedition page in Wikipedia—about it being controversial whether Scott and his team made bad decisions so that they brought most of their troubles on themselves. Can I narrow my topic to just the controversy over whether bad decisions of Scott and his crew doomed them? Maybe it’s too big a topic if I consider the decisions of all team members. Maybe I should just consider Scott’s decisions.

So what research question could come from that? Maybe: how did Scott’s decisions contribute to his team’s deaths in Antarctica? But am I talking about his decisions before or after they left for Antarctica? Or the whole time they were a team? Probably too many decisions involved. More focused: How did Scott’s decisions after reaching the South Pole help or hurt the chances of his team getting back safely? That’s not bad—maybe. If people have written about that. There are several of his decisions discussed on the Wikipedia page, and I know there are sources at the bottom of that page.

Let me think—what else did I see that was interesting or puzzling about all this? I remember being surprised that Antarctica is a desert. So maybe I could make Antarctica as a desert my topic. My research question could be something like: Why is Antarctica considered a desert? But there has to be a definition of deserts somewhere online, so that doesn’t sound complicated enough. Once you know the definition of desert, you’d know the answer to the question. Professor Sanders says research questions are more complicated than regular questions.

What’s a topic I could care about? A question I really wonder about? Maybe those rocks with the fossils in them. It’s just so hard to imagine desperate explorers continuing to push those sledges with an extra 30 pounds of rocks on them. Did they somehow know how important they would be? Or were they just curious about them? Why didn’t they ditch them? Or maybe they just didn’t realize how close to death they were. Maybe I could narrow my Antarctica topic to those rocks.

Maybe my topic could be something like: The rocks that Scott and his crew found in Antarctica that prove continental drift. Maybe my research question could be: How did Scott’s explorers choose the rocks they kept?

Well, now all I have is questions about my questions. Like, is my professor going to think the question about the rocks is still about Antarctica? Or is it all about continental drift or geology or even the psychology of desperate people? And what has been written about the finding of those rocks? Will I be able to find enough sources? I’m also wondering whether my question about Scott’s decisions is too big—do I have enough time for it?

I think my professor is the only one who can tell me whether my question about the rocks has enough to do with Antarctica. Since he’s the one who will be grading my paper. But a librarian can help me figure out the other things.

So Dr. Sanders and a librarian are next.

• Was Anna’s choice to start with Wikipedia a good choice? Why or why not?
• Have you ever used that Control-F technique?
• At what points does Anna think about where to look for information?
• At the end of this session, Anna hasn’t yet settled on a research question. So what did she accomplish? What good was all this searching and thinking?

Here are our answers below.

Our Answers:

• Was Anna’s choice to start with Wikipedia a good choice? Why or why not? Wikipedia is a great place to start a research project. Just make sure you move on from there, because it’s a not a good place to end up with your project. One place to move on to is the sources at the bottom of most Wikipedia pages.
• Have you ever used that Control-F technique? If you haven’t used the Control-F technique, we hope you will. It can save you a lot of time and effort reading online material.
• At what points does Anna think about where to look for information ? When she began; when she wanted to know more about the Scott expedition; when she wonders whether she could read Scott’s diary online; when she thinks about what people could answer her questions.
• At the end of this session, Anna hasn’t yet settled on a research question. So what did she accomplish? What good was all this reading and thinking? There are probably many answers to this question. Ours includes that Anna learned more about Antarctica, the subject of her research project. She focused her thinking (even if she doesn’t end up using the possible research questions she’s considering) and practiced critical thinking skills, such as when she thought about what she could be interested in, when she worked to make her potential research questions more specific, and when she figured out what questions still needed answering at the end. She also practiced her skills at making meaning from what she read, investigating a story that she didn’t expect to be there and didn’t know had the potential of being one that she is interested in. She also now knows what questions she needs answered and whom to ask. These thinking skills are what college is all about. Anna is way beyond where she was when she started.

Background Reading

It’s wise to do some more reading about that narrower topic once you have it. For one reason, you probably don’t know much about it yet. For another, such reading will help you learn the terms used by professionals and scholars who have studied your narrower topic. Those terms are certain to be helpful when you’re looking for sources later, so jot them down or otherwise remember them.

For instance, if you were going to do research about the treatment for humans with bird flu, this background reading would teach you that professionals and scholars usually use the term avian influenza instead of bird flu when they write about it. (Often, they also use H1N1 or H1N9 to identify the strain.) If you didn’t learn that, you would miss the kinds of sources you’ll eventually need for your assignment.

Most sources other than journal articles are good sources for this initial reading, including the New York Times or other mainline American news outlets, Wikipedia, encyclopedias for the discipline your topic is in (horticulture for the crabapple bud development topic, for instance), dictionaries for the discipline, and manuals, handbooks, blogs, and web pages that could be relevant.

This initial reading could cause you to narrow your topic further, which is fine because narrower topics lead to greater specificity for what you have to find out.After this upfront work, you’re ready to start developing the research question(s) you will try to answer for your assignment.

While you are in the background reading phase of your research you will come across a lot of sources and won’t know yet if they will prove useful in the long run. A “low tech” option to keep track of your information is to use a Google doc or Word document to save all of your URLs (web addresses) so that you can access the sources easily. Google Scholar and college library databases also allow you to save the sources you find.

A handy type of software to help you keep track of all your findings is called citation management software. It will also be extremely valuable when it comes to using the resources you end up needing. Three of these tools are available for free to OSU students, staff and faculty. Learn more about these tools and how to access them.

Fuel Your Inspiration

Reading, scanning, looking at, and listening to information resources is very useful during any step of the process to develop research questions. Returning to sources can jog our memories, give us details that will help us focus, and help us connect disparate information–all of which will help us come up with research questions that we find interesting.

Regular Questions vs. Research Questions

Most of us look for information to answer questions every day, and we often act on the answers to those questions. Are research questions any different from most of the questions for which we seek information? Yes.

See how they’re different by looking over the examples of both kinds below and answering questions about them in the next activity.

Examples: Regular vs. Research Questions

Regular Question: What time is my movie showing at Lennox on Friday?

Research Question: How do “sleeper” films end up having outstanding attendance figures?

Regular Question: What can I do about my insomnia?

Research Question: How do flights more than 16 hours long affect the reflexes of commercial jet pilots?

Regular Question: How many children in the U.S. have allergies?

Research Question: How does his or her country of birth affect a child’s chances of developing asthma?

Regular Question: What year was metformin approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration?

Research Question: Why are nanomedicines, such as doxorubicin, worth developing?

Regular Question: Could citizens register to vote at branches of the Columbus Public Library in 2016?

Research Question: How do public libraries in the United States support democracy?

Regular Question: What is the Whorfian Hypothesis?

Research Question: Why have linguists cared about the Whorfian hypothesis?

Regular Question: Where is the Apple, Inc. home office?

Research Question: Why are Apple’s marketing efforts so successful?

Regular Question: What is SARS?

Research Question: How could decision making about whether to declare a pandemic be improved?

Regular Question: Does MLA style recommend the use of generic male pronouns intended to refer to both males and females?

Research Question: How do age, gender, IQ, and socioeconomic status affect whether students interpret generic male pronouns as referring to both males and females?

Activity: Which Kind of Question

Influence of a research question.

Whether you’re developing research questions for your personal life, your work for an employer, or for academic purposes, the process always forces you to figure out exactly:

• What you’re interested in finding out.
• What it’s feasible for you to find out (given your time, money, and access to information sources).
• How you can find it out, including what research methods will be necessary and what information sources will be relevant.
• What kind of claims you’ll be able to make or conclusions you’ll be able to draw about what you found out.

For academic purposes, you may have to develop research questions to carry out both large and small assignments. A smaller assignment may be to do research for a class discussion or to, say, write a blog post for a class; larger assignments may have you conduct research and then report it in a lab report, poster, term paper, or article.

For large projects, the research question (or questions) you develop will define or at least heavily influence:

• Your topic , in that research questions effectively narrow the topic you’ve first chosen or been assigned by your instructor.
• What, if any, hypotheses you test.
• Which information sources are relevant to your project.
• Which research methods are appropriate.
• What claims you can make or conclusions you can come to as a result of your research, including what thesis statement you should write for a term paper or what results section you should write about the data you collected in your own science or social science study.

Thesis Statements in Research Writing

Within an essay, poster, or term paper, the thesis is the researcher’s answer to the research question(s). So as you develop research questions, you are effectively specifying what any thesis in your project will be about. While perhaps many research questions could have come from your original topic, your question states exactly which one(s) your thesis will be answering.

For example, a topic that starts out as “desert symbiosis” could eventually lead to a research question that is “how does the diversity of bacteria in the gut of the Sonoran Desert termite contribute to the termite’s survival?” In turn, the researcher’s thesis will answer that particular research question instead of the numerous other questions that could have come from the desert symbiosis topic.

Developing research questions is all part of a process that leads to greater and greater specificity for your project.

Tip: Don’t Make These Mistakes

Sometimes students inexperienced at working with research questions confuse them with the search statements they will type into the search box of a search engine or database when looking for sources for their project. Or they confuse research questions with the thesis statement that they will write when they report their research. The next activity will help you sort things out.

Activity: From Topic to Thesis Statement

Influence on hypothesis.

If you’re doing a study that predicts how variables are related (common in the sciences and social sciences), you’ll have to write at least one hypothesis. The research questions you write will contain the variables that will later appear in your hypothesis(es).

Activity: Guess the Question

You can usually figure out what the researcher’s research questions were by reading the title and some of the report. Take a look at this student essay, “Does Texting Affect Writing?” by Michaela Cullington, and determine what the students’ research question was.

Influence on Resources

You can’t tell whether an information source is relevant to your research until you know exactly what you’re trying to find out. Since the research question defines a source’s usefulness, looking at the research question should help you to divide information sources into two groups: those that are relevant to your research and those that are not—all based on whether each source can help you find out what you want to find out and/or report the answer.

Influence on Research Methods

Not all academic research writing involves primary research. However, primary research can be a powerful way to gain insights and new information about your question. There are three types of research methods:

Qualitative research uses a naturalistic, person centered approach to understand people’s beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behavior, and interactions. This type of research does not generate numerical data.

Quantitative research focuses on numerical data to answer research questions. This data may be collected and analyzed in a variety of ways to find trends, suggest causal relationships, or make generalized predictions about large populations. Most scholars rely on software such as SPSS to analyze quantitative data.

Mixed method research incorporates elements of both qualitative and quantitative research.

Your research question(s) will help you figure out what research methods you should use because the questions reflect what your research is intended to do. For instance, if your research question relates to describing a group, survey methods may work well. But a survey can’t answer cause-and-effect questions. If your research question focuses more on individual experiences, interviews may be a better way to collect information.

Influence on Claims or Conclusions

The research questions you write will reflect whether your research is intended to describe a group or situation, to explain or predict outcomes, or to demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship(s) among variables. It’s those intentions and how well you carry out the study, including whether you used methods appropriate to the intentions, that will determine what claims or conclusions you can make as a result of your research.

Activity: Quick Check

Answer to activity:  guess the question.

The answer to the “Guess the Question” Activity above is:

The research question is the same as the title: “Does texting affect writing?” It’s fine for you to use your research question as the title of your paper. 

Developing Your Research Question

Because of all their influence, you might worry that research questions are very difficult to develop. Sometimes it can seem that way. But we’ll help you get the hang of it and, luckily, none of us has to come up with perfect ones right off. It’s more like doing a rough draft and then improving it. That’s why we talk about developing research questions instead of just writing them.

Steps for Developing a Research Question

The steps for developing a research question, listed below, can help you organize your thoughts.

Step 1: Pick a topic (or consider the one assigned to you).

Step 2: Write a narrower/smaller topic that is related to the first.

Step 3: List some potential questions that could logically be asked in relation to the narrow topic.

Step 4: Pick the question that you are most interested in.

Step 5: Change that question you’re interested in so that it is more focused.

MOVIE: Developing Research Questions

As you view this short video on how to develop research questions, think about the steps. Which step do you think is easiest? Which do you think is hardest? [iframe src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/1oJNO6PYZe4″ width=”560″ height=”315″ allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”]

View Movie | View Text Version

Once you know the steps and their order, only three skills are involved in developing a research question:

• Imagining narrower topics about a larger one,
• Thinking of questions that stem from a narrow topic, and
• Focusing questions to eliminate their vagueness.

Every time you use these skills, it’s important to evaluate what you have produced—that’s just part of the process of turning rough drafts into more finished products.

ACTIVITY:  Developing a Research Question

Maybe you have a topic in mind, but aren’t sure how to form a research question around it. The trick is to think of a question related to your topic, but not answerable with a quick search. Also, try to be specific so that your research question can be fully answered in the final product for your research assignment.

ACTIVITY: Thinking of Questions

For each of the narrow topics below, think of a research question that is logically related to that topic. (Remember that good research questions often, but not always, start with “Why” or “How” because questions that begin that way usually require more analysis.)

• U.S. investors’ attitudes about sustainability
• College students’ use of Snapchat
• The character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
• Nature-inspired nanotechnologies
• Marital therapy

After you think of each research question, evaluate it by asking whether it is:

• Logically related to the topic
• In question form
• Not answerable with a quick Google search
• Specific, not vague

Sometimes the first draft of a research question is still too broad, which can make your search for sources more challenging. Refining your question to remove vagueness or to target a specific aspect of the topic can help.

ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

The first draft research questions below are not focused enough. Read them and identify at least one area of vagueness in each. Check your vagueness with what we identified. It’s great if you found more than we did because that can lead to research questions of greater specificity. See the bottom of the page for our answers.

First Drafts of Research Questions:

• Why have most electric car company start-ups failed?
• How do crabapple trees develop buds?
• How has NASA helped America?
• Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders?
• How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history?

ANSWER TO ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

Some answers to the “Focusing Questions” Activity above are:

Question 1: Why have most electric car company start-ups failed? Vagueness: Which companies are we talking about? Worldwide or in a particular country?

Question 2: How do crabapple trees develop buds? Vagueness: There are several kinds of crabapples. Should we talk only about one kind? Does it matter where the crabapple tree lives?

Question 3: How has NASA helped America? Vagueness: NASA has had many projects. Should we should focus on one project they completed? Or projects during a particular time period?

Question 4: Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders? Vagueness: What time period are we talking about? Many dictators have been overthrown and many countries have been involved. Perhaps we should focus on one country or one dictator or one time period.

Question 5: How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history? Vagueness: What kinds of music? Any particular performers and composers? When?

The Inquiry Process in Academic Research Writing Copyright © 2020 by Teaching & Learning and University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Inquiry and the Research Process

Tips for ensuring that your students’ research fosters genuine inquiry.

Over the summer, I had a fascinating conversation with a group of educators. After spending several days discussing ways to encourage student inquiry, a technology specialist raised a pointed question: “What if the librarians already have a district-approved research process? Does what we’re doing conflict?” As I pondered her question, I realized a fundamental problem: inquiry and research had somehow morphed into synonyms.

Instead of answering her question, I posed another one: “Can students do research without inquiry, or inquiry without a formal research process?”

The Research Process and Active Learning

Over 10 years ago, our school librarian introduced me to the Kentucky Virtual Library research process . Using a gameboard as an interface, the process presents students with concrete steps to support their planning, searching, note taking, and writing. The clearly articulated steps, logical progression, and embedded strategies supported our students as they located, identified, and evaluated information. Though intended for elementary students, it provided a concrete pathway for our middle schoolers as well. We even printed out the main page of the website and gave the students stickers to mark off each task they completed.

While this research process helps students locate and evaluate information about any topic, it does not ensure that they have an opportunity to ask questions, investigate problems, or make connections to their own personal experience. By definition, inquiry requires students to engage in active learning by generating their own driving questions, seeking out answers, and exploring complex problems. Research, though often a component of inquiry, addresses the process of finding answers.

A teacher and I recently discussed this dichotomy. She explained that in her upcoming animal adaptation unit, the students would research a specific animal. They would locate facts about the animal’s appearance, habitat, etc., to fill in a provided outline.

Though the teacher provided excellent scaffolding of the research process so that her students could look up information from multiple sources, articulate their findings, and document their learning, inquiry would imply that the students asked the questions. We brainstormed what might happen if we asked students a driving question such as: “Why do some animals from around the world look the same and others look very different?” The students would still work through the research process, but they would also have to define same and then apply their definition.

When we asked our fourth graders this question during their study of animals in Africa, they drove the question around the world. Though they began their investigation by examining the similarities in physical characteristics between different animals in the same habitats, they quickly started asking questions on a global level. Besides physical characteristics, what traits do animals in the same habitat share? Do animals in the the same biome, but on a different continent, have similar traits? Why are some animals found on multiple continents while others are unique to just one location?

Another great example of scaffolded inquiry that I’ve seen recently comes from educators Anthony Egbers and Kerryn White of South Africa. They used Book Creator to make a workbook to guide their students in exploring the concept of the Cradle of Humankind . Unlike the Kentucky Virtual Library research process, theirs focuses as much on the questions that students ask as on the information that they find and evaluate.

Three Strategies to Encourage Inquiry

In the workshop that sparked this debate, we considered three strategies for encouraging student inquiry. First, we examined the use of visible thinking routines. These question sets—such as See Think Wonder and Think Puzzle Explore —scaffold students’ questioning and reflection so that they deeply consider both content and context. Sometimes, students need structure to begin asking questions.

Next, instead of focusing a research project on a topic or concept, we considered the power of an essential question. According to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, essential questions do not lead to a single answer but instead serve as a catalyst for discussion, require higher-order thinking skills such as inference and evaluation, and spark more questions (that lead to even more inquiry).

Finally, inquiry should tap into student curiosity and wonder. In his book The Falconer , Grant Lichtman discusses the importance of “what if?” questions. As an example, he poses this question: “What if the sun rose in the West and set in the East?” While the immediate reaction may be to just state that it doesn’t, what if it did? What would that imply? What else might have to happen? By asking such questions, teachers remove all limitations to how students may respond. Similarly, world-renowned innovator Min Basadur suggests framing questions with “How might we _____?” He argues that question stems such as this spark more imaginative thinking and remove judgment from perceived answers.

This brings us back to that original question: Can there be research without inquiry and inquiry without research? Consider the power of a science lab. Students generate questions, formulate a hypothesis, investigate their theory, and then use their observations to develop an understanding of their discovery. Apps such as Desmos and Geogebra allow students to engage in inquiry with math. They can ask questions about mathematical concepts, explore simulations and scenarios, and manipulate formulas, as they explore complex phenomena that previously could not be addressed through active, hands-on learning.

While research can certainly exist as a stand-alone process, inquiry should ultimately drive students to view research as a means through which they can seek out new ideas, answer new questions, and wrestle with complex problems.

How To Write A Research Paper

Step-By-Step Tutorial With Examples + FREE Template

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewer: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | March 2024

For many students, crafting a strong research paper from scratch can feel like a daunting task – and rightly so! In this post, we’ll unpack what a research paper is, what it needs to do , and how to write one – in three easy steps. 🙂 

Overview: Writing A Research Paper

What (exactly) is a research paper.

• How to write a research paper
• Stage 1 : Topic & literature search
• Stage 2 : Structure & outline
• Stage 3 : Iterative writing
• Key takeaways

Let’s start by asking the most important question, “ What is a research paper? ”.

Simply put, a research paper is a scholarly written work where the writer (that’s you!) answers a specific question (this is called a research question ) through evidence-based arguments . Evidence-based is the keyword here. In other words, a research paper is different from an essay or other writing assignments that draw from the writer’s personal opinions or experiences. With a research paper, it’s all about building your arguments based on evidence (we’ll talk more about that evidence a little later).

Now, it’s worth noting that there are many different types of research papers , including analytical papers (the type I just described), argumentative papers, and interpretative papers. Here, we’ll focus on analytical papers , as these are some of the most common – but if you’re keen to learn about other types of research papers, be sure to check out the rest of the blog .

With that basic foundation laid, let’s get down to business and look at how to write a research paper .

Overview: The 3-Stage Process

While there are, of course, many potential approaches you can take to write a research paper, there are typically three stages to the writing process. So, in this tutorial, we’ll present a straightforward three-step process that we use when working with students at Grad Coach.

These three steps are:

• Finding a research topic and reviewing the existing literature
• Developing a provisional structure and outline for your paper, and
• Writing up your initial draft and then refining it iteratively

Let’s dig into each of these.

Need a helping hand?

Step 1: Find a topic and review the literature

As we mentioned earlier, in a research paper, you, as the researcher, will try to answer a question . More specifically, that’s called a research question , and it sets the direction of your entire paper. What’s important to understand though is that you’ll need to answer that research question with the help of high-quality sources – for example, journal articles, government reports, case studies, and so on. We’ll circle back to this in a minute.

The first stage of the research process is deciding on what your research question will be and then reviewing the existing literature (in other words, past studies and papers) to see what they say about that specific research question. In some cases, your professor may provide you with a predetermined research question (or set of questions). However, in many cases, you’ll need to find your own research question within a certain topic area.

Finding a strong research question hinges on identifying a meaningful research gap – in other words, an area that’s lacking in existing research. There’s a lot to unpack here, so if you wanna learn more, check out the plain-language explainer video below.

Once you’ve figured out which question (or questions) you’ll attempt to answer in your research paper, you’ll need to do a deep dive into the existing literature – this is called a “ literature search ”. Again, there are many ways to go about this, but your most likely starting point will be Google Scholar .

If you’re new to Google Scholar, think of it as Google for the academic world. You can start by simply entering a few different keywords that are relevant to your research question and it will then present a host of articles for you to review. What you want to pay close attention to here is the number of citations for each paper – the more citations a paper has, the more credible it is (generally speaking – there are some exceptions, of course).

Ideally, what you’re looking for are well-cited papers that are highly relevant to your topic. That said, keep in mind that citations are a cumulative metric , so older papers will often have more citations than newer papers – just because they’ve been around for longer. So, don’t fixate on this metric in isolation – relevance and recency are also very important.

Beyond Google Scholar, you’ll also definitely want to check out academic databases and aggregators such as Science Direct, PubMed, JStor and so on. These will often overlap with the results that you find in Google Scholar, but they can also reveal some hidden gems – so, be sure to check them out.

Once you’ve worked your way through all the literature, you’ll want to catalogue all this information in some sort of spreadsheet so that you can easily recall who said what, when and within what context. If you’d like, we’ve got a free literature spreadsheet that helps you do exactly that.

Step 2: Develop a structure and outline

With your research question pinned down and your literature digested and catalogued, it’s time to move on to planning your actual research paper .

It might sound obvious, but it’s really important to have some sort of rough outline in place before you start writing your paper. So often, we see students eagerly rushing into the writing phase, only to land up with a disjointed research paper that rambles on in multiple

Now, the secret here is to not get caught up in the fine details . Realistically, all you need at this stage is a bullet-point list that describes (in broad strokes) what you’ll discuss and in what order. It’s also useful to remember that you’re not glued to this outline – in all likelihood, you’ll chop and change some sections once you start writing, and that’s perfectly okay. What’s important is that you have some sort of roadmap in place from the start.

At this stage you might be wondering, “ But how should I structure my research paper? ”. Well, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here, but in general, a research paper will consist of a few relatively standardised components:

• Introduction
• Literature review
• Methodology

Let’s take a look at each of these.

First up is the introduction section . As the name suggests, the purpose of the introduction is to set the scene for your research paper. There are usually (at least) four ingredients that go into this section – these are the background to the topic, the research problem and resultant research question , and the justification or rationale. If you’re interested, the video below unpacks the introduction section in more detail. 

The next section of your research paper will typically be your literature review . Remember all that literature you worked through earlier? Well, this is where you’ll present your interpretation of all that content . You’ll do this by writing about recent trends, developments, and arguments within the literature – but more specifically, those that are relevant to your research question . The literature review can oftentimes seem a little daunting, even to seasoned researchers, so be sure to check out our extensive collection of literature review content here .

With the introduction and lit review out of the way, the next section of your paper is the research methodology . In a nutshell, the methodology section should describe to your reader what you did (beyond just reviewing the existing literature) to answer your research question. For example, what data did you collect, how did you collect that data, how did you analyse that data and so on? For each choice, you’ll also need to justify why you chose to do it that way, and what the strengths and weaknesses of your approach were.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that for some research papers, this aspect of the project may be a lot simpler . For example, you may only need to draw on secondary sources (in other words, existing data sets). In some cases, you may just be asked to draw your conclusions from the literature search itself (in other words, there may be no data analysis at all). But, if you are required to collect and analyse data, you’ll need to pay a lot of attention to the methodology section. The video below provides an example of what the methodology section might look like.

By this stage of your paper, you will have explained what your research question is, what the existing literature has to say about that question, and how you analysed additional data to try to answer your question. So, the natural next step is to present your analysis of that data . This section is usually called the “results” or “analysis” section and this is where you’ll showcase your findings.

Depending on your school’s requirements, you may need to present and interpret the data in one section – or you might split the presentation and the interpretation into two sections. In the latter case, your “results” section will just describe the data, and the “discussion” is where you’ll interpret that data and explicitly link your analysis back to your research question. If you’re not sure which approach to take, check in with your professor or take a look at past papers to see what the norms are for your programme.

Alright – once you’ve presented and discussed your results, it’s time to wrap it up . This usually takes the form of the “ conclusion ” section. In the conclusion, you’ll need to highlight the key takeaways from your study and close the loop by explicitly answering your research question. Again, the exact requirements here will vary depending on your programme (and you may not even need a conclusion section at all) – so be sure to check with your professor if you’re unsure.

Step 3: Write and refine

Finally, it’s time to get writing. All too often though, students hit a brick wall right about here… So, how do you avoid this happening to you?

Well, there’s a lot to be said when it comes to writing a research paper (or any sort of academic piece), but we’ll share three practical tips to help you get started.

First and foremost , it’s essential to approach your writing as an iterative process. In other words, you need to start with a really messy first draft and then polish it over multiple rounds of editing. Don’t waste your time trying to write a perfect research paper in one go. Instead, take the pressure off yourself by adopting an iterative approach.

Secondly , it’s important to always lean towards critical writing , rather than descriptive writing. What does this mean? Well, at the simplest level, descriptive writing focuses on the “ what ”, while critical writing digs into the “ so what ” – in other words, the implications . If you’re not familiar with these two types of writing, don’t worry! You can find a plain-language explanation here.

Last but not least, you’ll need to get your referencing right. Specifically, you’ll need to provide credible, correctly formatted citations for the statements you make. We see students making referencing mistakes all the time and it costs them dearly. The good news is that you can easily avoid this by using a simple reference manager . If you don’t have one, check out our video about Mendeley, an easy (and free) reference management tool that you can start using today.

Recap: Key Takeaways

We’ve covered a lot of ground here. To recap, the three steps to writing a high-quality research paper are:

• To choose a research question and review the literature
• To plan your paper structure and draft an outline
• To take an iterative approach to writing, focusing on critical writing and strong referencing

Remember, this is just a b ig-picture overview of the research paper development process and there’s a lot more nuance to unpack. So, be sure to grab a copy of our free research paper template to learn more about how to write a research paper.

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ENG 111 - Writing and Inquiry: Find a Topic for College Papers

• Find eBooks
• Find Articles & Video
• Persuasive Essay
• Fox and Service Dogs
• Profile/Evaluation Paper
• Career Essay Assignment
• Find a Topic for College Papers
• Find a Persuasive Topic
• Plagiarism/Integrate Sources
• Evaluate Sources
• Documentation Style - The Basics
• MLA Citation Help
• APA7 Citation Help
• APA - The Basics
• Format in a Flash
• Research Process

New All-in-One Search

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A-to-Z List | Remote Access

A-to-Z List | By Subject | By Type

Being Part of the Conversation

It's very important you spend time choosing your topic. Choose a topic that is academic enough to meet your instructor's criteria but isn't too big or small to discuss well. Look for topics where you can make several points to inform or persuade your reader. 

Personal Issue vs. Social Problem

Personal Issue  - I like dogs.

Social Issue - Owning dogs can have many health benefits.

Social Issue with Supporting points  - Dog ownership benefits include lower stress and lower blood pressure. Dog owners are also more active than non-dog owners (Zorthian, J. "More Evidence That Owning a Dog Is Really Good for You").

Zorthia, Julia. "More Evidence That Owning a Dog Is Really Good for You." Time.com, 24 July 2017 .  Retrieved from time.com/4870796/dog-owners-benefits/. Accessed 3 July 2018.

Personal: I like Snapchat.

Social Issue:  Snapchat is used mostly by teenagers.

Social Issue with Supporting Points:  Snapchat, used mostly by teenagers, has a dangerous side which includes bullying, stalking, and the risk of social media addiction.

Your Turn. What are you interested in?

Examples of research questions:

• Education: What impact has education had on society? How are girls educated in third world countries? What is the history of your school?
• Race: My essay will discuss how racism affects a person financially, socially, emotionally, and psychologically. What kinds of training do teachers have for understanding a diverse student body? What is the history of race in your county?
• Health: Is exercise necessary to maintain a healthy body? What is the effect of obesity on the armed forces? How does good health practices affect diabetes?
• Technology: How has the Internet changed education? How can drones be used by the military? What are positives and negatives of social media?
• Animals: How do animals grieve? What is the process to domesticate wild animals? What is being done about elephant poaching?
• Weather: How is global warming affecting the military? What is the history of hurricane tracking? 
• History: What are the Opium Wars? Who was Stalin? How did printing affect the Protestant Reformation?
• Other categories include Globalization ,  Business ,  Security ,  Literature  and  Women's Issues

List of Databases (A to Z)

Ask-a-librarian, rowan-cabarrus student or faculty need help  click the chat now icon.

This service is only for Rowan-Cabarrus Community College faculty, staff, and students.

Academic Searching vs. Personal Research

We all have our interests and do some sort of research, whether it be Google Searching or just discussing interests with friends, but how do we take it to the academic standard that your instructors expect in college?

Personal Searching: Social media, Wikis, Quora, eHow, Reddit, friends/peers

Academic Searching: Library Databases, .gov, .org, Any source with authority, experts/authorities, no Wikipedia, no Social Media unless you can trace the origins of the story to a reputable souce

Some questions to help determine if a research question is appropriate for academic research:

• Can the question be answered yes or no?

• Can the question be answered in one sentence or a single paragraph?

• Have entire books been written to answer this question?

• Would answering this question help someone else who has an interest in this topic?

The 5Ws to Help Narrow Your Topic

Narrow topic by asking:

           who  – a person, organization, demographic group

          what  – an event, theory, discovery

          where  – a country, region, defined geographic space

          when  – a time span, century, period of time (Victorian era)

          why  – describe what is significant about this topic

Use the CRAP Test

It is challenging to determine whether information from the Web is credible and can be trusted. Is it factual? Biased? Relevant to your topic?

Here is a handy acronym to help you determine if a source may be CRAP.

• CURRENCY :  How recently was this information published/posted? Can you find a publication date?
• RELIABILITY :  Is the information supported by evidence? Can it be confirmed by other sources?
• AUTHORITY :  Who wrote the information - are they an expert or knowledgeable in their field? (i.e. For health information, did a doctor or nurse write it?)
• PURPOSE / POINT OF VIEW :  Why was it written? To sell something? To sway opinion? Is it biased toward a particular point of view?

Find a Database by Subject

Elibrary - starting point for research needs.

Chair Analogy

How a great topic is like a great chair. .

• Functional yet enjoyable.
• Has standard features but is also special to the owner.
• Has strong legs or foundations.
• Large enough to be comfortable but not so big that you feel "lost"
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18 Inquiry-Based Learning Examples (Benefits & criticisms)

Inquiry-based learning is a learning and teaching strategy where students construct knowledge through a process of observation, investigation, and discovery.

Examples of inquiry-based learning include observational field trips, science experiments, and hypothesis-based research projects.

This learning strategy is believed to increase students’ level of engagement in the learning process. It is considered an active learning strategy that is in contrast to traditional approaches in education where teachers present information to passive learners.

Inquiry-Based Learning Definition

In inquiry-based classrooms, students engage in activities that provoke their curiosity as they go on a journey of discovery. Through the process, they construct knowledge rather than having it delivered by the teacher.

The students learn by exploring a subject, experimenting with concepts or objects, and conducting searches for information on their own.

Some scholarly definitions include:

• Pedaste et al: “It can be defined as a process of discovering new causal relations, with the learner formulating hypotheses and testing them by conducting experiments and/or making observations” (Pedaste et al, 2015, p. 47)
• Lee et al: “[Inquiry-based learning is] an array of classroom practices that promote student learning through guided and, increasingly, independent investigation of complex questions and problems, often for which there is no single answer” (Lee et al, 2004, p. 9).

Although John Dewey is often mentioned as a forerunner of inquiry-based learning, its roots can actually be traced as far back as Socrates (470-399 BC), the Greek philosophy that taught his students using the Socratic Method, which involved him asking his students questions repeatedly instead of imparting his wisdom onto them.

Inquiry-Based Learning Examples

• Self-directed curriculum: Instead of giving students set questions to answer, the teacher gives the students a general topic to inquire about and find an area of interest to explore within the overarching topic.
• Field trips: Students go on a field trip to collect data by taking photographs. The students return to the class and use the photographs to compile information about the topic under study.
• Science experiments: Students conduct an experiment on what plants need by growing seeds in different conditions and tracking each plants progress.
• College Dissertations: Students at university often need to do a research study where they come up with a hypothesis and conduct a scientific study to confirm or falsify their hypothesis.
• Community-based projects: When students identify a problem in the community and work to solve it, they are often engaging in the phases of inquiry-based learning.
• Inquiring about a mystery by using clues: Students in a kindergarten class see before and after photos of destroyed habitats as the teacher asks questions about what they think happened and how do they feel.  
• Construction activities: A kindergarten teacher supplies his students with paper-towel tubes, tape, cardboard boxes and other materials so they can construct their own unique marble-runs.
• Investigating the local environment: Students in a science class investigate the water quality of a nearby creek and answer the key question: is the water safe to go tubing?
• Deconstructing facts: Students are given a list of “facts” about different planets. Some of those facts are actually wrong. The students work in small groups and try to identify the different planets and which facts are false.
• Gathering resources to solve a problem: A social studies class tell the class that they have been asked by NASA to make a time-capsule for aliens. The students work in small groups and gather items or create material to be put in the spaceship.
• Coming up with methodologies for solving problems: A math teacher uses 3-dimensional objects and asks student teams to choose their own methods to calculate its properties and then take turns presenting their strategy to the class.
• Divergent thinking : Divergent thinking involves coming up with multiple possible solutions to a single problem. For example, students in third-grade are told they can have any 3 powers they want to become a superhero. Then they decide on which powers they want, design their costume, and describe the kinds of situations they would help in.
• Concept mapping: Anotherdivergent thinking task would involve a concept map. A high school history teacher has the students make individual concept maps regarding the causes of the Boston Tea Party and checks their work as they go.
• Brainstorming solutions: Mr. Jennings writes a “Big Idea” question on a piece of paper and places it in the center of a bulletin board. Students then use post-it notes to surround the big idea with various thoughts and factors related to the question.
• Archaeological digs: A mock archaeological dig can be considered an inquiry-based learning situation. Students can dig for artifacts then figure out who lived there (and in what era) based on the artifacts.
• Frog dissections: Students who dissect frogs in labs are conducting inquiry-based projects. They may need to draw and diagram what they saw then use the results to report on the animal’s physiology.
• Project-based learning: Project-based learning is a unique and separate type of learning, but they have many overlaps. A teacher can set up a project so that it has all five phases of inquiry (see below).
• Escape rooms: The recent trend of escape rooms, where people have to go into a room and work in a team to solve clues and escape, are often based on an inquiry-based approach. Learners need to uncover answers through using observational skills and clues in their environment.

Phases of Inquiry

Pedaste et al. (2015) propose five phases of inquiry that can underpin the design of an inquiry-based project:

• Orientation: The teacher stimulates curiosity by presenting information about the topic, posing questions, and offering problem statements.
• Conceptualization: Students generate research questions and hypotheses about the project.
• Investigation: Students plan a study, collect data, and analyze it.
• Conclusion: Students construct their own knowledge based upon their inquiry, rather than having teachers give the answers to the students.
• Discussion: Students present their findings to peers, a teacher, or family members, and engage in reflective activity to reinforce knowledge.

Benefits of Inquiry-Based Learning

The benefits of inquiry-based learning are numerous:

• Enhanced critical-thinking skills: when students are asked to inquire rather than simply rote learn information, they have to engage higher-order thinking skills.
• Greater enthusiasm and interest in learning: Learning through active inquiry is believed to enhance intrinsic motivation in the classroom.
• Connecting learning to the real world: Through inquiry, students don’t just learn theories, but also how to solve real-life problems.
• Encouraging independent learning: When students inquire, they make up the research questions and learning outcomes themselves, allowing them to engage in self-directed learning .
• Helping students learn to work with others in a team: Very often, inquiry-based lessons take place in groups.

Case Studies of Inquiry Learning

1. what’s in the box.

The hallmark of any good inquiry-based lesson starts with an opening question. The teacher might not even announce the topic for that day’s lesson.

This is a simple but highly effective way to get the attention of the students right off the bat. When someone is asked a question, they can’t help but to start trying to answer it. That’s just the way the human mind is built.

Since getting the attention of a class full of 1 st graders can be a challenge in and of itself, teachers need to make use of every tool in the box. Hence, the game “what’s in the box?”

If the lesson is about animal habitats, then the teacher can place different items that are in that habitat in a box. As the kids begin to guess what’s in the box, the teacher can pull out one item at a time.

Once a few items are on the table, then the kids can start to guess the name of the habitat and the animals that live in it. It’s a lot of fun for the kids and is a great way to exercise their cognitive processes.

2. Let the Kids do the Work

We often underestimate the ability of very young learners. They are actually a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. Of course, this is understandable; how smart can a child be when they have trouble putting on their own shoes?

But don’t be fooled. Inside their small little heads is a small little brain that is a lot stronger than its size would indicate.

We can see this demonstrated by giving them a chance to do things we didn’t think they could do. For example, when receiving a new set of obstacle course pieces for the playground, let the kids have a go at putting the equipment together.

The set might include some balance-beam pieces, standing hoops, jumping bars, and large plastic screws. Just spread the pieces out on the playground and let the kids try to figure out how they all fit together. You might be surprised at how quickly they do…and all without ever looking at the instructions.

3. The Bakery and the Marketer

At the heart of inquiry-based learning is the idea that students should do most of the thinking. Instead of the teacher distributing knowledge to the brains of students, the leg-work of a course from the minds of the students themselves.

This premise can be seen in a marketing course where the instructor announces the problem, and then the student must create the solution.

For example, students can be given the task of creating a unique marketing campaign for a failing bakery (or any other type of business).

While the instructor could apply some guidelines, such as the campaign should be digital or involve on-site experiences, it is best to provide as little guidance as possible.

Instructors often discover that students can be incredibly imaginative, and insightful. The less restrictive the instructions, the more creative the campaigns. 

4. Cultural Artifacts

Cultural artifacts are objects that remain from a given culture. They can include tools, pieces of garments or kitchenware, even items involved in various types of ceremonies.

In an older, more traditional type of anthropology course, the professor would present a lecture about a particular tribe or ancient culture. To supplement the lecture, the prof might bring along various objects that have been unearthed by archeologists or anthropologists during excavations.

However, in an inquiry-based lesson, the sequence of events in this lesson would be reversed. The professor would first present the artifacts to the students and say as little as possible.

The students would then engage in an analysis (slightly speculative) regarding what the object is and what purpose it served in that particular culture.

This somewhat “backwards” approach to teaching is exactly more engaging for the students. They become more immersed in the lesson. Their interest is piqued and if EEG sensors were attached to their scalps, a lot more cerebral activity would be detected than if they were just sitting in their seats listening.

5. Physics Experimentation

Students in a physics course can spend a lot of time going through formulas. The one for calculating force looks simple enough (F=ma), but that it can get a lot more complicated if you start adding variables for inclines and wind resistance.

To help students understand these concepts on a deeper, more holistic level, some physics teachers will designate a class completely devoted to experimentation.

The students are provided with all the necessary materials, including toy trucks, plastic ramps, objects of various weights, paper and assorted items that could be used to form structures to reduce wind resistance.

The students experiment with altering the various parameters and will form an understanding of the concepts in the formula in a way that could never be accomplished by calculations alone.

Theoretical Basis

The theoretical basis of inquiry-based learning is constructivism. This is a learning theory that emphasizes the importance of constructing knowledge rather than having information told to you by an authority figure.

It is based on the idea that humans learn through developing coherent ideas – called schema – in their minds. We don’t learn well when we’re just told information. Instead, we need to learn through trial and error, which helps us to formulate these cognitive schema.

In the process of actively learning, we don’t only come to know facts, but the underlying how and why of a fact. This context helps cognitive recall and ensures you have deep knowledge of the topic.

Inquiry-based learning embraces this idea of constructing knowledge rather than being told facts .

Through an inquiry situation, students aren’t just learning from a teacher – they’re learning from experience. They gather information, try our different sets of facts, and find the answers that make most sense.

Criticisms of Inquiry-based Learning

While an inquiry-based approach to learning is widely accepted as a strong pedagogical strategy, it does have some weaknesses.

Primarily, it doesn’t achieve standardization of curriculum for all student. It necessarily requires differentiation and allows student-led study, leading to different learning experiences for different students. This undermines the goal of ensuring all students have the same strong educational foundations by the end of compulsory schooling.

Similarly, it is difficult to achieve standardization of assessment during an inquiry-based approach. With build-in student-led learning, students aren’t all completing the exact same task in the exact same way. As a result, subjective assessment methods like performance-based assessment tend to be used, which don’t lead to normative and standardized grading standards.

Inquiry-based learning is a step away from traditional educational practices that disseminated information to passive students. Traditional pedagogy created learners that were ill-equipped to function at a high level in an increasingly complex society.

By creating learning environments that allow students to be more fully engaged and inquisitive, it creates learners that are skilled at critical-thinking and problem-solving.

Teachers can implement a wide range of activities and techniques that foster creativity , communication, and teamwork . The wonderful thing about inquiry-based learning is that it can be applied to nearly any subject at all grade levels, from preschool to graduate school.

Beyrow, M., Godau, M., Heidmann, F., Langer, C., Wettach, R., & Mieg, H. (2019). Inquiry-Based Learning in Design. Inquiry-Based Learning – Undergraduate Research (pp. 239-247). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14223-0_22

Ernst, Dana & Hodge, Angie & Yoshinobu, Stan. (2017). What Is Inquiry-Based Learning? Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 64 . 570-574. https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1536

Lee, V. S., Greene, D. B., Odom, J., Schechter, E., & Slatta, R. W. (2004). What is inquiry guided learning. In V. S. Lee (Ed.), Teaching and learning through inquiry: A guidebook for institutions and instructors (pp. 3-15). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Pedaste, M., Mäeots, M., Siiman, L. A., De Jong, T., Van Riesen, S. A., Kamp, E. T., … & Tsourlidaki, E. (2015). Phases of inquiry-based learning: Definitions and the inquiry cycle.  Educational research review ,  14 , 47-61. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.02.003

Seltzer, E. (1977). A comparison between John Dewey’s theory of inquiry and Jean Piaget’s genetic analysis of intelligence. The Journal of Genetic Psychology , 130 (2d Half), 323–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.1977.10533264

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

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One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

• Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
• Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
• How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
• How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
• How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
• How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

• What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
• How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
• How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
• Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
• How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
• How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
• What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
• What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
• Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies  (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
• Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
• Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
• Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
• Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
• Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
• What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
• Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
• Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
• Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
• How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
• Should graduate students be able to form unions?

• What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
• How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
• Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
• How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
• How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
• Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
• Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
• Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
• Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
• Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
• Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
• Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
• Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
• Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
• How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
• Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
• What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
• What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
• Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
• Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
• Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
• What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
• How does stress affect the body?
• Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
• What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
• How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
• What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
• What were the causes of the Civil War?
• How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
• Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?
• Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
• What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
• How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
• What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

• Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
• Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
• How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
• How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
• What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
• What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
• How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

• How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
• How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
• Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
• Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
• How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
• How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
• What are the pros and cons of fracking?
• What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
• What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
• How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
• Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
• Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
• What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
• What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
• How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
• Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
• How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Has social media made people more or less connected?
• What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
• Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
• When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
• Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

What's Next?

Are you also learning about dynamic equilibrium in your science class? We break this sometimes tricky concept down so it's easy to understand in our complete guide to dynamic equilibrium .

Thinking about becoming a nurse practitioner? Nurse practitioners have one of the fastest growing careers in the country, and we have all the information you need to know about what to expect from nurse practitioner school .

Want to know the fastest and easiest ways to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius? We've got you covered! Check out our guide to the best ways to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (or vice versa).

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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• Featured / Inquiry Skills / Starting with Inquiry Learning

Understanding the Difference Between Inquiry and Research

It is common to hear the question “what’s the difference between inquiry and research?” While it’s true that there are some similarities, inquiry and research are fundamentally different in many ways.

Inquiry-based learning is an approach to learning that emphasizes the exploration of questions and focuses on the process of discovery. On the other hand, research is a process that focuses on the establishment of facts and making conclusions based on a systematic study.

Below is a deeper dive into how inquiry and research differ, and how they are similar.

Why does this distinction matter?

Understanding the difference between inquiry and research is important for a few reasons:

1. Inquiry is a broad process that may involve different paths or procedures. Research is a more formal process with the goal of establishing facts. Inquiry focuses more on asking questions, whereas research focuses more on finding answers. The process of asking questions is one that requires a set of skills that needs to be practiced often.

2. The skills required for inquiry are far more broad and can be applied in a variety of contexts. For example, in an inquiry, students ask broad questions with multiple paths for learning. If students are simply conducting research, their questions will likely be more specific. We’ve put together a PDF of question prompts for inquiry learning to demonstrate the openness that inquiry questions should have.

3.  Inquiry typically involves different procedures (depending on the discipline). On the other hand, research is more formal and systematic, meaning it is the same no matter what is being researched.

Related : Creating Strong Driving Questions for Inquiry Learning  

Scope and depth.

Both inquiry learning and the research process begin with questions. In an inquiry, students show curiosity towards a subject by asking high-quality inquiry questions . However, the point of asking questions isn’t to find an answer quickly. Since questions should come from a place of genuine curiosity, students should take their time exploring their questions in depth.

On the other hand, research focuses on finding an effective way of expediting the answer-finding process, which is the opposite of inquiry. It is a more formal process. It does not ensure that students are taking opportunities to explore new pathways or make connections to their own lives. Research can be scaffolded into simple, manageable steps to help students research more effectively.

Learning how to research is not a bad skill to learn; in fact, it is incredibly useful in many situations as learners. The difference is that, with inquiry learning, the scope of learning is broadened. Students are encouraged to think deeper about the content and ask questions they are genuinely curious about, as opposed to following a scaffolded process.

Different Focus

Most classrooms frame the process of learning in a linear way: “topic → research → present → assess”. Students are probably used to being given a topic and told to research it, collect facts, and present their learning. However, inquiry is different. While both inquiry and research aim to seek and uncover information, they go about it in a different way. In addition, research and inquiry teach a different set of skills to students.

With research, there is a more systematic approach used. Typically, teachers will spend a few lessons beforehand teaching students things such as:

• Typing in relevant search terms
• Judging whether a website is safe, reliable, and current
• Skimming and scanning skills
• Reading snippets
• Checking for bias

The goal with research is to find answers, explain concepts, and generally increase knowledge. The focus is on confirming facts and expanding knowledge.

On the other hand, inquiry is much broader. The focus is not on finding the “right” answer. The focus is on the process of exploration, solving a problem or query, and understanding something new. It is far more multifaceted and fluid than research, which is often more formal by nature. Inquiry can involve more than one search query, and might change as a result of new information. It is fluid, progressive, and flexible.

Related : 5 Simple and Effective Strategies for Managing Conflict in Inquiry Learning

Active learning.

By definition, active learning refers to any kind of work students do other than listening, watching, and note-taking. Many educators agree that student learning is enhanced when they are actively involved in their learning. With active learning, students are required to think more deeply and critically. Not only does this kind of learning develop students’ thinking skills, but also helps them to better retain their learning.

While the act of researching can be considered active learning, there isn’t as much creative thinking involved. This is partly due to the nature of research as being a systematic procedure for obtaining information. On the contrary, inquiry-based learning focuses more on the process of learning and involves things like group discussion, problem-solving, small activities, and teacher facilitation when needed. Furthermore, active learning can’t be reduced to formulaic methods like research can.

Skills Gained

Because research is more formal and focused on finding answers, students can expect to improve specific skills. These include time management, search skills, analysis, organization, and general technology skills. Furthermore, their research methodology (the process by which you conduct research, including the tools you use and steps you take) will likely improve too. Students who research need to focus on specific keywords, analytical skills, and organizational skills in order to work with the facts they find. In addition, a heightened attention to detail means that students will likely improve their ability to cite or make references accurately. This is important since references and organizing your sources is a critical component of research.

The specific skills gained while conducting an inquiry are endless. What I’ve noticed is that the skills gained during inquiry learning tend to be more soft skills. For example, students demonstrate more attentive listening, self-reflection, collaboration, and responsibility.

In an inquiry, skills can be taught as mini activities. For example, students may need a short activity on how to analyze a map, or they may need some role-playing on how to communicate effectively. If you are teaching inquiry skills as mini activities, make sure to provide opportunities to use active learning and group work. Using scenario-based learning can be a great way to do this – not only does it challenge students to problem-solve, but it encourages them to work on their teamwork and communication skills.

Related : Using Inquiry to Teach Social Justice in the Classroom

Key takeaways:.

(1) Inquiry-based learning focuses on the process of discovery, while research is a process that focuses on the establishment of facts and making conclusions based on a systematic study

(2) Inquiry is more broad and unstructured, whereas research is more formulaic and narrow in scope, with the intent of finding specific answers

(3) Research values the expeditious discovery of facts and information, but inquiry learning usually happens at a slower and more organic pace

(4) Inquiry is far more multifaceted, flexible, and fluid than research, and often changes as a result of new information

(5) The skills gained by research are very specific and cannot always be transferred to every subject or situation; soft skills gained through inquiry learning tend to be more transferrable

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