WRITING THE RESEARCH PAPER:
A Series in Four PartsWRITING THE RESEARCH PAPER: GETTING STARTED
Writing the Research Paper, Step 2: Choosing the Topicby Susan Wise Bauer
When is the high school student ready to write the first research paper? She has studied systematic grammar, and regularly puts its principles into practice; she has learned the basic rules of argumentation, either from formal logic or from reviewing a text such as Anthony Weston's Rulebook for Arguments; she's accustomed to writing short compositions and argumentative essays, aided by a program such as Writing Strands; and she knows how to outline. (For fuller information on developing these skills, see the first article in this series, "Before You Write the Research Paper.")
Now it's time to tackle the research paper itself. Classical rhetoric divides the process of writing into three stages: inventio, disputio, and elocutio. Inventio, formulating an argument, involves picking the subject, deciding on a specific topic and writing a thesis statement. (Disputio is the development of the argument; elocutio has to do with the style in which the argument is presented. We'll discuss these stages in the next two articles.)
Think of inventio as a three1step process:
1) Pre-reading. The student shouldn't begin by trying to write a thesis statement. Nor should he start making notecards immediately. If, for example, the ninth grader decides to write about the Greek empire after the death of Alexander the Great, he shouldn't try to come up with an exact subject for his paper right away. If he does, he'll more than likely end up with an unworkable subject -- one that's too broad or too vague. Rather, he should begin by spending time simply reading about the general topic he's decided to write on.
Choose a general topic that's broad, but not so huge that the student ends up facing a library shelf full of hundreds of books; he'll get bogged down and never start writing. A topic should allow plenty of room for exploration, but shouldn't demand that the student become a comprehensive expert on his subject. A good rule of thumb in choosing general topics: Generally, a broad subject should be modified either by a place, a time, or a name. "The Civil War" is too broad, but "The Civil War in Virginia" or "The Last Year of the Civil War" is manageable. "English Poets" is impossible, but "John Donne" is possible. "Space flight" is huge, but "The space race in the 1960s" allows the student to choose particular books out of the card catalog in order to find out more, to read only particular chapters rather than huge tomes.
Once a general topic has been selected, the student should spend three or four weeks just reading about it. If he'll be writing the paper itself in the spring, begin this process sometime in January. He should skim through lots of books, choosing only those titles (or only those chapters within larger works) which deal with his topic. He shouldn't make notes yet; if he does, he'll spend a lot of time writing down little quotes which may or may not prove useful. Instead, he should put bookmarks on any pages he finds particularly interesting or informative. I suggest ripping up lots of sheets of notebook paper and putting the strips into the books. By the time he's done, the student should have stacks of books, bristling with strips of notebook paper, all around.
As he reads, he should also brainstorm -- jotting down thoughts that come to mind, questions that his reading brings up, and comments on what he's finding out on a pad of paper. These jottings don't need to be connected in any way. The student is simply exploring all the branches of his topic. He should end up with lots of unrelated questions and observations on a sheet of paper.
Don't forget that the research paper is a history, science, or literature assignment, not an "English assignment." While reading, the student is doing in-depth study in one of these subject areas. Take the student's normal time for science (or history, or literature, or whatever topic he's chosen to research) and use it instead for all this reading. Don't make him "keep up" with a curriculum while he's reading. (But you might consider asking him to keep a log of all time spent reading, so that you're sure he's putting in a proper amount of time. 6-9 hours per week is reasonable.)
2) Settling on an exact subject. When the student has done plenty of pre-reading -- covering ten books or more -- he should gather together all his jottings and look for a particular theme that keeps popping up. If he finds, for example, that he has continually written: "The Seleucids came after Alexander in Syria. Syria was important because of the trade routes. Antiochus the Great ruled Syria. Antiochus thought he was the sun god. The Seleucids took over Israel," this suggests that he should narrow his topic from "Greece after Alexander the Great" to "The rulers of Syria [a segment of the Greek empire] after Alexander the Great." Or if he's been reading about the space race in the 1960s and has jotted down "Cost too much. Mission changed because of cost. Congress wouldn't give money. Safety compromised because of cost," he should narrow his topic to: "The cost of the space race to America in the 1960s."
Once the narrower topic has been selected, the student should put away the jottings and notes that don't apply to the narrower subject. This is painful. If she's written one beautiful observation about Egyptian Greek empire, but lots of observations about the Syrian Greek empire, the Egyptian Greeks have to go. Put all the jottings that don't apply to the Syrian Greeks in a folder and save them for another time.
Now the student has a narrower and more manageable topic, but she still isn't ready to start taking notes. First, she needs to settle on a thesis statement.
3) A thesis statement. Writing a thesis statement is tricky. Both Writing Strands and the A Beka Book grammar books will help the student in developing the thesis statement, but the parent/teacher should also remember this simple definition: A thesis is a statement that requires proof. A thesis statement is a proposition that must be defended, a statement that can be either proved or disproved, or an assertion that has to be supported by evidence.
"The cost of the space mission in the 1960s" and "Jane Austen's miserable home life" are not thesis statements; they're just phrases. "The cost of the space mission in the 1960s hampered the development of the space program" and "The cost of the space mission in the 1960s put the lives of astronauts in danger" are thesis statements. Both have to be proved. How do we know that the space program was hampered by cost? Did Congress fuss about appropriations? Did countries that spent more go faster? Did NASA complain about lack of funds?
In the same way, "Jane Austen's miserable home life" is not a thesis statement. (Jane Austen had a wretched family ?? her mother was a hypochondriac who lived into her eighties and wouldn't yield the bed to Jane even when she was dying, and her brother refused to support them, throwing them into poverty. These are plain facts.) "Jane Austen's miserable home life is reflected in her characters" and "Jane Austen's miserable home life drove her to write her great novels as a means of escape" serve as thesis statements; they force the writer to defend the effect of this (undisputable) horrible existence on Austen's fiction.
Bad thesis statements tend to have two problems: either they're not specific enough, or they're so obvious that they don't require support. The nonspecific thesis can be proposed for any number of subjects. "Antiochus the Great was a bad ruler" is a bad thesis because it isn't specific -- you could say this about any number of ancient potentates ("Nero was a bad ruler." "Akhenaton was a bad ruler."). "John Donne was a great English poet" is another bad, nonspecific statement because you can also write, "Wordsworth was a great English poet" or "Shelley was a great English poet" (and so on). Try your thesis statement on a number of different subjects and see if it applies equally well to all of them. ("The space mission was expensive." "The Vietnam War was expensive." "Welfare was expensive.") If so, the thesis statement isn't finished yet.
The obvious thesis doesn't leave anything left to say. "Alexander's empire was divided among his generals" is a mere statement of fact -- it doesn't need to be proved. "The space shuttle mission was expensive" is equally obvious; so is "Many pivotal Civil War battles took place in Virginia." A good thesis statement goes beyond the obvious: "Antiochus' religious obsessions ruined his hold on his empire" is a good thesis statement, because it leaves the student something to prove. He's suggesting a specific cause for the decline of the Seleucid empire. Now he has to defend this conclusion, using historical evidence. "The expense of the space shuttle mission led to the Challenger explosion" is another good thesis. What proof suggests this conclusion?
Once the student has chosen a general topic, done her pre-reading and brainstorming, and formulated a thesis statement, then she's ready to start taking notes and arranging her argument. We'll cover this in the next article of this series.
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