Joining the Conversation: Writing and Research>Research is Listening
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Find a topic
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Find out what the conversations about that topic are
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Decide who to listen to (determine credibility)
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Make sure you’re listening to everyone, including those you might decide you disagree with (recognize counterargument)
How to Listen
Find a topic
Whether you are assigned a topic, tasked to find information about something, or decide on your own to investigate something you’ve heard about, It can be difficult to narrow your focus, when locating a topic. Sometimes the directions you’re given are so general (“find information about the water crisis in California”) that it’s hard to know where to start. Sometimes your own ideas or questions about a topic are so vague that you don’t really know where to go to start answering them substantively (“how do I write a blog?”).
The key to starting a research project right is to narrow your focus as soon as you can. Start asking more questions that come from the first one: “who says it’s a water crisis?” “what kind of blog”? Write them down as they come and you will begin to see a “logic” to your topic, even if you later reorganize it.
Where do I go to find a topic?
Find out what the conversations about that topic are
Once you’ve narrowed your field of investigation, you need to start researching the history and kind of conversations that people have been having about the topic. This is central to your project: the knowledge that you are not the first person to think of this topic, and that many many people before you have been discussing it, trying to solve problems associated with it, and reflecting upon it since well before it popped into your head. Research the conversation itself: LISTEN to it.
Where do I go to listen?
Decide who to listen to (determine credibility)
Once you are really listening, you will begin to realize that, like many conversations, some contributions are better than others. Ignorance of a topic has never stopped people from sharing their opinion of it, and part of your project as a careful researcher is to distinguish uniformed opinions from sound arguments.
How do I know if I should listen?
Make sure you’re listening to everyone, including those you might decide you disagree with (recognize counterargument)
While you do work to distinguish good from bad argument, it is also important that you distinguish “good argument you agree with” from “good argument you don’t agree with.” That is, you might find sources on your topic that make very well-structured, well-supported arguments, but they don’t square with the position you favor. You MUST include those arguments in your research, and in your presentation of that research.
How do I make sure I am listening to the whole conversation?
See also: