English 1010 Week 8 Online Learning: Selecting a Current Event to Research

Readings

FOW chapter 4 (pp. 235-238)

Lesson Material

When you read or hear the word, “research,” I’m sure you’re filled with a myriad of emotions: Nervousness, anxiety, dread, boredom, and maybe even excitement. If you’re staring down the cliff of research, looking into the never ending abyss of sources, citations, facts, data, and feel apprehensive, know you’re not alone. Beginning research can feel daunting, especially if you’ve never conducted research on an academic level.

Everyday VS Academic Research

You might gain some solace knowing that whether or not you knew it, you have participated in research. Perhaps not on an academic, peer reviewed level, but in your everyday life. Consider different ways your Discourse Community engages in research. Maybe you’re part of a running club. You would have to research which shoes promote most arch support, how to incorporate rest days, and what to eat before a run. Or, perhaps your community is more informal, like a group of friends or your family. How do you choose which activities to occupy your leisure time? Say you want to go to the movies, where do you start? Perhaps by researching showtimes in your local area. Afterward, you might research reviews from both critics and audiences. Maybe even pull research from multiple members of your group until everyone has conflicting data and you settle on a movie you have already seen just to get on with the night. But not before someone researches good food options close to the theater.

You might be saying, “sure, I research movie reviews, but who’s going to win an award in most thoroughly researched movies? How does my casual research relate to actual academic research?” True, there are multiple differences between your informal research and formal academic research, but their processes are similar.

In her book Focus on Writing, Laurie McMillan argues there are five basic similarities between formal and informal writing. Both types or research are:

Inquiry based
Guided by either focused or exploratory questions
Purpose driven
Guided by primary or secondary research
Evaluative

Still nervous about academic research? That’s okay, no one is expecting you to compose a twenty page seminar paper. Instead, your academic journey will begin with Investigating the Conversation assignment.

Investigating the Conversation

This assignment will provide you with the opportunity to discuss and analyze published information of a current event to hone your skill in evaluating and writing about research and in contextualizing and analyzing the “ongoing conversation.”

That might sound like a lot, especially for your first encounter with research, but we’ll take the next couple of weeks to get comfortable. Research is a thorough and intricate process, you will do several preparatory assignments before completing the first draft. These assignments are:

A Research Organizer
An Annotated Bibliography
The Investigating the Conversation first draft
A Peer review
The final draft

Assignment Table.jpg

Got that? Now stop and take a deep breath. Or two. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Consider this essay your elephant. One step at a time. What’s step one? Choosing a current event to research.

Choosing a Current Event

You can’t write about a current event unless you’re familiar with events currently taking place in the world. Where do you start? What are you passionate about? Think about topics that interest you: Business, sports, public health, entertainment, the environment, education, religion, etc. Start there. Start with a topic you’re excited to research.

Odds are if you google something like “entertainment,” you’re going to get more information than you can analyze. Narrow it down to say, musicians. Now narrow it down even more. How about concerts? How can we make that topic relevant to current affairs? What is happening now that pertains to concerts? How about virtual concerts taking the place of in-person concerts during the coronavirus pandemic.

Great! What is it you want to know about concerts? Before we head for the web, you want to identify a research question, or a question you would like to answer through your research. Think about what you want to know about your topic. For this example, we’ll use “Are bands making a profit through virtual concerts?”

Now that we have a question we’d like to answer, we’re ready to research.

When researching online, always be aware of the website’s ethos. For example, if you want to research the impact coronavirus has on the environment, consider how an article from National Geographic might be more credible than an article from Buzzfeed.

On the other hand, if you want to research how Coronavirus is impacting working mothers, you might want to find more individualized sources.

You need to find six sources for your first preparatory assignment, The Research Organizer. Try finding information from a variety of sources; Don’t be afraid of sources contradicting one another, it’s important to know multiple stories. In the era of instant information, it is important to critically analyze what a source is saying and whether or not it’s accurate. When finding sources, review this “How to Spot Fake News” image.

How to Spot Fake News-1.jpg

Your first interaction with research can be intimidating, but remember to take things one step at a time and I promise you’ll make it through this. When in doubt, ask the experts. The librarians here at USU are more than happy to help with your research. Make sure to complete the library module Beginning Research. It will go more in depth about the concepts introduced today.

Assignments

1-2 sources to their Research Organizer
FOW chapter 4 (pp. 242-251)
Complete library module