Today’s Plan:
- Extra-credit reminder
- How goes SuperBetter? Questions?
- Research Proposal Assignment
- Research Article Discussion
Research Proposal Assignment
Today I want to do a quick writing exercise that should help you develop a research question. First, I want to share the proposal assignment. We will be working on this all week. It is due this Friday at midnight.
Booth Exercise
I’m going to ask you to read a selection from Wayne Booth’s The Craft of Research. This reading should help prepare you to develop a research question for the final paper. Anticipating Booth’s strategy, I would specify that we want a meaningful and practical question. Booth’s strategy hinges on answering three questions as a way of identifying and narrowing a topic.
- I am researching…
- Because I want to find out… [who/what/where/when/whether/why/how]
- In order to help my reader understand how…
Before I ask you to answer those questions, let’s do a bit of reading:
- Pages 20-22, your relationship to your reader
- Page 30, dealing with inexperience (Burke’s Parlor)
- Pages 14-15, finding a topic in four parts
- Page 41, 3.1, from an interest to a topic
- Page 43, 3.2, from a broad topic to a focused one with four key terms: conflict, description, contribution, development
- Page 45, Page 49: make sure you ask a question worth answering
A series of examples:
- How does X’s description of Y differ from A, B, and C?
- How could X contribute to our understanding of Y?
- How has understanding of X developed over time?
- How does X’s understanding of Y differ from Z’s understanding?
- What are 3 different ways of fixing X problem?
Homework
In order to prepare you to draft a proposal, begin your second research annotation.
In Wednesday’s class we will examine proposals from the last time I taught ENG 123.
