All research-based writing begins with a few simple questions or an opinion about something you come across in your everyday life. Your question might occur while browsing social media, watching television, or debating with a friend. Frustrations can also inspire research questions. Imagine if a company changed something about a product or service you counted on, and you didn’t like the change. You could begin looking online to see why they made that particular change, how other people have reacted, and if that change feeds into some larger issue.
Don’t worry if you freeze up when you first start searching for ideas. Many writers keep idea journals for this very reason. Some of us even use phone apps like Google Keep so we can record ideas when we’re walking to our car, or running an errand. Ideas strike at some of the strangest times.
People who read widely usually don’t have problems on the idea front. They read several articles a day on various topics, and they nurture interests in a range of areas including politics, pop culture, health and fitness, or education. When an idea begins to grow, they often consult prominent newspapers and magazines to learn more about the topic. Doing this will give you a basic orientation to you issue before more formal research and outlining. Here’s a list of common sources. It would be a good idea to visit these sites every week to see what’s going on in the world:
- The Huffington Post
- Wall Street Journal
- Christian Science Monitor
- The Washington Post
- New York Times
- The Atlantic
- Salon.com
- Slate
- Mother Jones
- The American Spectator
- The New Yorker
- The Weekly Standard
- Forbes
- Harvard Business Review
- The Economist
- The Nation
- The National Review
- Adbusters
It also doesn’t hurt to listen to National Public Radio, or to subscribe to YouTube channels devoted to your interest. You can also craft your social media feeds in order to keep in touch with current events. Many news outlets and fact-checking websites have Twitter accounts you can follow.
Research-based writing calls for linking your own ideas to bigger conversations. Writers who stay plugged into the world can generate ideas without too much trouble. On the other hand, people who don’t read much or pay attention to the outside world experience writers’ block often. You’ll always have trouble getting your ideas off the ground if you live in an information bubble. Having a great idea or question is one thing. Connecting it to a wider conversation is another.
Daily reading builds a solid foundation for research writing. Once a topic catches your interest, use a social book-marking tool like Zotero to keep track of helpful sources from the Internet. From there, you can begin more formal searches using your library’s databases.
You might get stuck after a few rounds of research. It’s important not to carve your research question into stone. You need some flexibility, to adapt your question and topic to the kinds of sources you’re able to find.
Here’s an example: Imagine a first-year student named Megan who thinks martial arts training, specifically Krav Maga, would help college students feel safer on campus at night. The idea comes from a daily part of her routine, walking back to her dorm after a night class. Some of her friends have mentioned feeling unsafe at times. The subject has also come up in class discussions a few times. That sounds like an interesting topic, but she may encounter difficulty finding sources on that exact question in library databases. After several days, she simply can’t find any articles on Krav Maga and campus safety. Should she give up?
Not necessarily. It would work better to zoom out, and read more broadly on campus safety and self defense on college campuses. She begins her search on Google and finds some recent articles, including one by Meg Stone in The Huffington Post and another on the website, Her Campus. Both seem like reputable sources with some preliminary information. Here, she learns the key term R.A.D. — Rape Aggression Defense. This term could be useful in more formal searches. Here are the sources she finds:
During a follow-up Internet search on R.A.D., Megan comes across an article on Jezebel that criticizes the RAD method.
Megan has only come across Jezebel in passing. This is the first time she’s read a full article on their site. A careful evaluation of the website using the CRAAP method shows that the site isn’t exactly an academic source, but it does have a wide readership and offers a number of reasonable opinions, supported by evidence. Megan learns about the author, Susan Schorn, and finds that she’s a professional writer who writers for other large publications, and has a book with a well-known publisher. She decides to include this as one of our sources. The article helps orient her to the current debate on effective strategies of teaching women how to defend themselves against sexual assault and other forms of aggression.
After collecting a number of articles like this one, Megan decides she’s ready to begin more formal searches using library databases. She tries combinations of these key words: self defense, campus safety, college, martial arts, and students. After a few minutes, she finds one potentially useful article titles “Sexual Assault Resistance Program Lowers Rape Rate in University Women” in The American Journal of Nursing.”
Even better, the online listing for the article includes Subject Terms the article was found under that include “Sex Crimes — Prevention.” This sounds exactly like the focus of her topic. Within the subject, she uses the keyword “self defense” and finds six articles. Not bad, but out of curiosity she tries a broader search using “college” and “self defense” as separate terms. This returns more results that she can sift through by skimming titles and abstracts.
Halfway through her process, Megan also wonders if she should include some research on rape and sexual assault in general. After some discussion and peer review, she decides it’s important to include some basic statistics on the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. Although she’s specifically writing about self defense, it becomes clear that some people simply don’t know how big a problem it’s become, or why the discussion matters. So she finds 2–3 sources that give clear and compelling statistics on the larger issue, and writes a paragraph after her introduction that answers the “so what?” question for people new to the conversation.