Chapter 44 The Literary Research Paper
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
A close reading of a primary source such as a short story, poem, or play can give insights into a work’s themes and effects, but sometimes you will want to know more. A published commentary by a critic who knows the work well and is familiar with the author’s life and times or other contexts for interpretation can provide insights that otherwise may not be available. Such writings — known as secondary sources — are, of course, not a substitute for the work itself, but they often can explore interpretations that you might not have considered if you had not encountered them. The way to encounter these published commentaries is through research.
Students sometimes tense up when they are asked to write a research paper. It might seem like research just adds another demand to this challenging business of interpreting literature, but if you regard research as exploration, or as “poking and prying with a purpose” as Zora Neale Hurston says, it might become less daunting and more exciting. The literary criticism you will discover is really just an advanced version of what you’ve been learning to do in this course. These published essays are models as well as sources. They will allow you to ponder interpretations you had not considered, or they might provide a perspective that you resist as you become more convinced of the validity of your own interpretation. Another way to think about these sources is as a conversation, and you have the opportunity to raise your hand and offer your own opinion, just as you do during class discussion. A research paper is really just a more formal, more sophisticated version of these discussions. It’s an even better version because you are more in control of the conversation: you can “call on” the critics who help articulate what you want to say.
There is no question that a research paper requires more time than a paper that only requires you to interpret a literary text. It is important to budget your time wisely so that you aren’t spending too much of it on one stage of the process at the expense of another. For most writers at your level of development, the phase of locating and assessing the value of sources takes more time than anticipated. That’s because it’s an unfamiliar process. As you become more used to it, this phase of the process will go more quickly, but it’s still important to reserve plenty of time so that you can experience the pleasures of discovery. You will get better results if you approach your research by wondering “What can I learn?” rather than focusing on the research simply as a requirement. After you have adjusted to the challenges of locating and assessing the value of sources, perhaps the next most important quality for writing a research paper is the ability to organize material. A bit of planning should help, just as prewriting strategies pave the way for smoother writing and revising. You already know the challenges of writing an interpretive essay. The research essay just adds three basic components to that process: locating valuable secondary sources, positioning those sources comfortably within your essay, and documenting those sources.
The following list should give you a sense of what goes into creating a research paper. Although some steps on the list can be folded into one another, they offer an overview of the work that will involve you:
- Choosing a topic
- Finding sources
- Evaluating sources
- Taking notes
- Developing a working thesis
- Prewriting
- Writing drafts
- Revising
- Documenting sources
- Preparing the final draft and proofreading
Even if you have never written a research paper, you most likely have already had experience choosing a topic, developing a thesis, organizing an outline, and writing a draft that you then revised, proofread, and handed in. Those skills — detailed in Chapter 43 — represent six of the ten items on the list. This chapter briefly reviews some of these steps and focuses on the remaining tasks, unique to research paper assignments.